It has now been nearly a year since Russia launched its attack on neighboring Ukraine. While Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin cronies led the Russian president to believe it would only be a matter of weeks until they could overpower their neighbors to the west, nothing has quite worked out the way Russia planned.
In recent weeks, intercepted calls to home to Russia have suggested that many of Russia’s soldier fatalities have been the result of friendly fire and/or drunken commanders. And Putin himself has admitted that Russia’s military leaders are not doing a great job of providing soldiers with their most basic necessities. Just last week, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky even suggested that Putin might not even be running the show anymore, as some people suspect that he is dead.
Whatever the case, it’s an embarrassing situation for Russia all around, as the country has long touted itself as a global tough guy you wouldn’t want to mess with. And now, as The Daily Beast reports, even the country’s plan to gain the upper hand by bringing in a private corps of 50,000 mercenary fighters has gone totally sideways. Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization, has reportedly brought in approximately 50,000 Russian soldiers to fight in Ukraine — several of them coming from Russia’s prisons. But it’s estimated that only 10,000 of those recruits are still alive and/or fighting.
The Moscow Times reported that Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, said: “According to our data, 42,000 to 43,000 [prisoners] were recruited by the end of December. Now they are, most likely, already over 50,000. Of these, 10,000 are fighting at the front, because all the rest are either killed… or missing, or deserted, or surrendered.”
While the Russian soldiers who claimed the town of Soledar in recent weeks are reportedly mostly Wagner soldiers, that victory was said to have come “at an extraordinary cost,” according to White House officials.
Zelensky, too, confirmed this when he remarked that, “The area near Soledar is covered with corpses of the invaders. This is what madness looks like.”
(Via The Daily Beast)