Prigozhin’s Recruiting and Casualty Claims Are Completely Ridiculous

Here’s why Evgeny Prigozhin’s claims about Wagner Group’s recruiting numbers and losses are completely ridiculous.

From RT:

The head of Russia’s Wagner Group, Evgeny Prigozhin, has revealed that the private military company lost around 20,000 servicemen during the liberation of the strategic Donbass city of Artyomovsk, also known as Bakhmut, from Ukrainian forces.

In an interview published by Wagner’s press service on Tuesday, Prigozhin said that during the long-running battle he had boosted the company’s ranks with 50,000 inmates from Russian prisons, who were offered the chance to fight instead of completing their sentences.

“Around 20% of them have died,” Prigozhin said. “The casualties among them were the same as among those who enlisted by contract with us.” 

This suggests that Wagner’s losses in Artyomovsk, which is a key settlement in Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), amounted to some 10,000 former prisoners and 10,000 military professionals.

I suppose anything is at least theoretically possible, but these numbers sound a lot like nonsense to me, and I will explain my reasoning.

When addressing the claim that Wagner recruited 50,000 convicts, the first logical step is to determine what Russia’s total prison population was in 2022. Was it 10 million? 5 million? 1 million? No. It was 349,000 (which incidentally, is a huge accomplishment from a humanitarian perspective. In 2000, the prison population was more than 1 million). Also understand that 8-9% of these prisoners were women, so automatically disqualified from the Wagner recruiting drive and bringing the number of theoretically eligible candidates down to around 322,000. So I am expected to believe Prigozhin was able to enlist more than 15% of Russia’s entire male prison population? Even pro-NATO propaganda outlets like The Moscow Times and Meduza, who were trying to attribute every hiccup in Russia’s prison reporting to the Wagner recruiting drive, weren’t able to substantiate numbers anywhere close to that high:

Records from Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service indicate that Russian prisons contained a total of almost 349,000 people at the start of August. By September, that number had decreased by about 1,000 — a change consistent with a years-long trend of the number of prisoners gradually decreasing. Over the two months that followed, however, the prison population declined by more than 23,000, reaching 338,000 by early October and 325,000 by early November…

According to estimates by Russia Behind Bars founder Olga Romanova, as of the end of October, the number of prisoners who had been recruited by the Wagner Group exceeded 20,000, while by mid-November, the total number exceeded 30,000.

As I mentioned already, Russia’s prison population has been consistently declining dramatically over the past 20 years, consider this graph from Statista:

Also note that “prison population” includes people in pre-trial confinement, and is dependent on reporting from prisons and jails all over the country. Sudden month-to-month dips could be explained by administrators being lazy, inefficient, or otherwise untimely with their reporting. But even the most specious mental gymnastics and data torture by anti-Russian outlets couldn’t come up with a figure as high as 50,000. Out of those 322,000 male prisoners, was it even possible to find 50,000 recruits the appropriate age, not retarded or criminally insane, and not medically disqualified? Or are Russian prisons such excellent, top-notch facilities, 100% of the men are fit for combat?

The average Russian convict in a Siberian prison

To further prove how ridiculous the 50,000 figure is, let’s compare it to the US Army’s “morality waivers” during the height of the Iraq war. According to a 2007 New York Times article,

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has grown about 65 percent in the last three years, increasing to 8,129 in 2006 from 4,918 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.

During that time, the Army has employed a variety of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.

It has also increased the number of so-called “moral waivers” to recruits with criminal pasts, even as the total number of recruits dropped slightly. The sharpest increase was in waivers for serious misdemeanors, which make up the bulk of all the Army’s moral waivers. These include aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide.

The number of waivers for felony convictions also increased, to 11 percent of the 8,129 moral waivers granted in 2006, from 8 percent.

Waivers for less serious crimes like traffic offenses and drug use have dropped or remained stable.

So in a 12 month period, the entire US Army, despite facing the worst recruiting crisis in history up to that point, only issued 8,129 waivers in 2006. 78 million(!) American adults have a criminal record – that’s one third of the entire working adult population. Furthermore, that “8,129” figure isn’t comparable to the prisoners Wagner was recruiting. The vast majority of the US Army’s “morality waiver” recruits had misdemeanors, convictions for petty crimes like vandalism or smoking marijuana. Misdemeanors typically don’t result in a jail sentence. Consider this graph from the NYT article I quoted above:

Even in 2006, at the height of the morality waiver program, the US Army recruited less than 1,000 felons. And mind you, granting morality waivers wasn’t their only desperate recruiting measure. They also offered other perks for prospective recruits, like huge signing bonuses and faster promotion rates. So I’m expected to believe a Russian restaurant owner toured some prisons and, in a few months, easily recruited, trained, and deployed more than 50 times more convict soldiers than the entire US Army? It’s absurd and I don’t believe it.

And the problems don’t end with recruitment. Wagner was capable of training, arming, supplying, and commanding 50,000 soldiers? How?

Prigozhin’s story breaks down even more when considering casualty claims about Artemovsk. If 10,000 convict soldiers were killed, that implies at least several times more than that were wounded. That’s 80 or even close to 100% casualties, and yet the convict soldiers were such an elite unit, they were still able to continue fighting and win the day? On top of all this, Prigozhin claimed his contract soldiers suffered an equivalent 10,000 killed. This means that he was either losing contract soldiers at a much higher rate than convicts, or that he had an equivalent number of them. That implies the existence of 50,000 contract soldiers. So Wagner deployed 100,000 men to Artemovsk? Sorry if I have a hard time believing that.

Here’s what I said about Wagner Group back in March:

I do personally believe the role of Wagner in Ukraine is highly exaggerated. Officers and spokesmen from official military units and organizations are heavily restricted in what they’re allowed to say, while PMCs like Wagner are not. That likely is the reason we hear so much about Wagner, giving the misleading and overstated impression of the size and scale of their operations. Consider an incident in WWI, the Battle of Belleau wood. American Marines were allowed to publicly announce their exploits in the newspapers while Army and French units were not, giving the public the (completely wrong) impression that the entire battle had been fought and won by the Marines and the Marines alone. That I think is what is also going on in Ukraine. After all, Wagner is a PMC, not a whole army like Cobra or Hydra. It’s essentially a light infantry outfit that’s still dependent on regular military forces for tanks, logistics, air support, and probably almost everything else.

Here’s what everyone gets wrong about Wagner Group

Regarding his claims of Ukrainian casualties: 50,000 dead and 70,000 wounded. Okay, well, it might be plausible, if the initially stated numbers he gave were true, but I don’t think they are. Consider my article about Ukrainian and Russian casualties I wrote recently:

An Update About Casualties In Ukraine

Long story short, guy is a troll and basically everything he says should be assumed to be trolling unless proven otherwise. Like when he appointed two Wagner troops to stay behind in Artemovsk, “Bieber and Dolik.”

It’s actually really funny to watch western reporters and social media users try to cope with contradictory Russian stereotypes. On one hand, Russians are supposed to be stupid and incompetent, constantly running out of ammo, fuel, and food. But on the other hand, they’re able to assemble a huge army of convict soldiers capable of defeating NATO-trained and armed forces in a protracted urban battle. Check out this NAFO moron on Twitter.

Ian Kummer

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