Wagner Group chief impassive as Russian casualties soar in Ukraine

The Kremlin-linked tycoon was videoed watching his fallen fighters be stacked up in black body bags in a gloomy makeshift mortuary in eastern Ukraine.

Mourners gather with priests to lay flowers in memory of more than 60 Russian soldiers that Russia says were killed in a Ukrainian strike in Samara on January 3. Picture: Arden Arkman / AFP

The head of the Wagner Group of mercenaries watched impassively as his fallen fighters were stacked up in black body bags in a gloomy makeshift mortuary in eastern Ukraine.

“Their contracts have finished. They will go home next week. They died heroically at the front,” Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Kremlin-linked tycoon who controls the private paramilitary group, said.

Prigozhin talks about exciting new opportunities for wounded and injuried members of Wagner group - if they lost a leg, they can become sappers, then they would just need one more "iron thing" if they lose another leg.

📹 Gulagu. Net pic.twitter.com/eno70MHRTM

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) January 3, 2023

Prigozhin could then be seen observing as more bodies were loaded off a truck on to stretchers. “So long, guys, happy new year!” he said, according to a video published by his own media outlet.

Prigozhin was visiting front lines in Bakhmut, a town in eastern Ukraine that has witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting. “That’s how Prigozhin sends off his Wagner members,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, wrote on Twitter. “They are just thrown on top of each other in black bags, like garbage.”

Ukrainian servicemen of an artillery unit fire towards Russian positions on the outskirts of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine on December 30. Picture: Sameer Al-Doumy / AFP

Although Bakhmut is of little military importance Russia has sacrificed vast numbers of troops in a so far unsuccessful attempt to take the town.

“Everyone wants to know when we will capture [Bakhmut],” Prigozhin told state media. “[But] every house has become a fortress. Our guys sometimes fight for more than a day over one house. Sometimes they fight for weeks over one house. Every 10m there is a defensive line.”

The British Ministry of Defence said on Tuesday that Ukraine had sent significant reinforcements to the region and that Russia was unlikely to make any real breakthroughs in Bakhmut over the next few weeks.

“Both sides have suffered high casualties,” the MoD said.

Bakhmut has been devastated by the fighting and fewer than 10,000 people out of a pre-war population of 70,000 remain amid the ruined town, once known for its sparkling wines. It is believed that Prigozhin, who served nine years in a Soviet prison for robbery, wants to capture it to boost his influence in Moscow.

Yevgeny Prigozhin and Vladimir Putin. Picture: Alexei Druzhinin/AP/The Times

Some analysts have said that the Wagner chief may have ambitions to succeed President Putin.

Prigozhin has openly recruited inmates from Russian prisons for the war in Ukraine, offering them their freedom in return for a six-month tour of duty. Up to 35,000 convicts are thought to have taken up his offer. Russian law does not allow for prisoners to be given amnesty in return for military service.

In a separate video, Prigozhin could be seen telling a group of injured fighters that they were expected to stay at the front even if they lost limbs. “The fact that they have been left without legs, without arms, without their eyesight doesn’t mean they [can] go home,” Prigozhin said. “They can carry out duties that don’t require both legs. They can work as sappers. If another mine explodes, their metal leg will be blown off and we’ll weld another one on.”

Moscow said 63 of its troops died when US-supplied Himars missiles hit a building where Russian troops were based in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian army said that almost 400 Russian conscripts died in the attack.

Pro-Kremlin figures are renewing efforts to convince an increasingly sceptical Russian public that the war is necessary. Only one in four Russians now want the fighting to continue in Ukraine, according to a leaked Kremlin poll.

The Times