Bakhmut ‘meat grinder’ — the staggering toll of Russia’s bloodiest battle since WW2

Wagner Group mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin leaves the headquarters of the Southern Military District amid the group's pullout from the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, 24 June 2023. (Photo: Reuters / Alexander Ermochenko)

By Peter Fabricius

12 Jun 2024

A new report says mercenary group Wagner sacrificed more than 19,500 fighters — 17,000 of them convicts pardoned by Putin — in the ‘meat grinder’ of Bakhmut.

More than 19,500 fighters of the Russian mercenary/private army Wagner Group died in 2022/23 in the “Bakhmut meat grinder” — the bloody battle for the eastern Ukrainian city of that name. About 17,000 of those who died were convicts recruited by Wagner and pardoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin because they had agreed to join his war against Ukraine.

These are the conclusions of comprehensive research published this week, done jointly by the Russian independent media outlet Mediazona and the BBC.

bakhmut toll prigozhin The late Russian billionaire and Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin. (Photo: Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images)

The investigative journalists calculated what they call this “staggering toll of Russia’s bloodiest battle since World War Two” mainly by gaining access to documentation of the large amounts of money — about 108 billion roubles or $1.2-billion — which Wagner paid out to the families of the dead fighters.

For each fighter killed, Wagner paid out $55,000 for death in combat as stipulated in their contracts plus $3,300 for their funerals, unless Wagner buried them.

Their report, The Price of Bakhmut, says the records they reviewed showed that more than 20,000 Wagner fighters were killed in the war in Ukraine between January 2022 and August 2023. The Bakhmut toll represented a high proportion of the total.

In the 327 days of the Bakhmut battle, from 15 July 2022 to 6 June 2023, Wagner lost 19,547 personnel killed, 17,175 of whom were convicts and 2,372 “free” mercenaries, the report says. At the height of the battle, it was losing more than 200 men per day, with a maximum of 213 on one day.

Source documents ‘genuine’

The investigators said they were confident their source documents were genuine because “we cross-referenced them with our list of the deceased, the Probate Registry containing inheritance cases, messages by Wagner fighters’ relatives online, and leaked police databases”.

Wagner was founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin — once known as “Putin’s chef” because he owned a catering company which won contracts with the Kremlin and other government agencies. Its fighters surfaced when Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and infiltrated its eastern Donbas region in 2014.

After that, Wagner won several contracts in African countries, mostly propping up authoritarian leaders in exchange for mining and other contracts.

In June, Prigozhin launched a mutiny against the Russian military authorities, in part because he felt they had not provided Wagner with the necessary support in Bakhmut. His march to Moscow fizzled out after a few days and Prigozhin insisted his rebellion had not been directed at Putin. He appeared to believe Putin accepted this explanation, but in August he and his top Wagner command were killed in a mysterious aircraft crash near Moscow which most observers believe was arranged by Putin.

Wagner has now been replaced by the “Africa Corps” under more direct Moscow control.

In 2022, a video surfaced of Prigozhin recruiting mercenary fighters from a Russian prison. The Price of Bakhmut calculates that he eventually recruited at least 48,366 convicts from at least 501 different prisons, contracted to fight for six months. Of these, 17,251 were killed in action.

bakhmut toll wagner Wagner Group servicemen prepare to leave central Rostov-on-Don, southern Russia, on 24 June 2023 during the mutiny of their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Arkady Budnitsky)

Prigozhin explicitly prioritised the worst offenders, murderers, robbers and the like, ”and no petty criminals” for recruitment, the report says.

The first recruitment took place on 1 July 2022 at Yablonevka IK7 in Leningrad region and the last known recruitment was on 7 February 2023, the month Wagner announced that what it called “Project 42174” had been terminated.

The report says Prigozhin seriously exaggerated the prisoners’ chances of returning from the front, suggesting in an interview that their chances were about the same as those of “free” contracted mercenaries and that only about 5,000 prisoners had died in the battle for Bakhmut.

One in three prisoners died

But the report says the 17,175 convicts who died in the battle represented 35.5% of the convicts who fought there and this represented about 88% of the Wagner soldiers killed.

In other words, one in three prisoners died.

The implication of course is that Wagner was basically throwing the convicts in front of the Ukrainian guns. They were the most expendable cannon fodder.

bakhmut toll prigozhin Wagner Group mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin leaves the headquarters of the Southern Military District amid the group's pullout from the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, 24 June 2023. (Photo: Reuters / Alexander Ermochenko)

“Yevgeny Prigozhin and his political strategists have spared no effort or expense to create an image of Wagner PMC as an effective and ruthless organisation that accomplishes its objectives at any cost. Behind this facade lie thousands killed in ‘meat assaults’ and their grief-stricken relatives. Their slogan aptly describes their attitude: ‘Our business is death, and business is good’,” the report says.

It also disputes Prigozhin’s claim that Wagner had killed 50,000 Ukrainian soldiers in the battle for Bakhmut. It says that according to the reliable UA Losses project, 4,871 Ukrainian soldiers died in that battle.

The Price of Bakhmut also researched social media to try to discover how the convicts who survived the war had managed their lives afterwards. Many, it seems, were traumatised, some returned to crime and others were abusive to their families. DM

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Source documents ‘genuine’

One in three prisoners died