More than 30,000 members of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit, have been injured or killed in Ukraine, the White House estimates. Of those, about 9,000 were killed in action, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday at a briefing.
Wagner -- which was founded by tycoon Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin -- has been in the spotlight in recent months for its gains in the town of Soledar and its efforts in the pitched battle for the town of Bakhmut in Ukraine's east. The group was designated a transnational criminal organization by the United States in January.
Of the 9,000 or so mercenaries killed, half lost their lives in the two months since mid-December, Kirby said.
Russian activists and U.S. officials have said that Wagner has boosted its ranks by recruiting prisoners, many of whom are poorly trained and ill-equipped to fight. A video that circulated last year appeared to show Prigozhin promising inmates a pardon after six months of fighting.
The United States assessed in December that Wagner had recently recruited 40,000 prisoners from across Russia to join its forces. The group treats its recruits like "cannon fodder," Kirby said Friday, "throwing them into a literal meat grinder here ... without a second thought."
Russia and affiliates such as Wagner have faced a shortage of personnel to send to the front lines of a conflict that Putin originally believed would only last days. While Putin ordered a partial mobilization of reserves last year, many Russian men of military age fled the country, forcing the Kremlin and Wagner to turn to prisons for recruits.
Prigozhin wrote in a Feb. 9 Telegram post that Wagner had "completely stopped" signing up prison inmates to fight in Ukraine, without specifying a reason -- but Western officials and analysts are skeptical.
"We believe that Wagner continues to rely heavily on these convicts in the Bakhmut fighting, and that doesn't show any signs of abating," Kirby told reporters.
Experts at the Institute for the Study of War said such recruitment is likely to continue, though in a more limited capacity. The Washington-based think tank said its analysis of Russian prison population data between November 2022 and January showed that a drop in prison numbers had stabilized, suggesting that the Kremlin is moving away from using inmates.
Prigozhin has been a loud critic of how Russian military brass has conducted the war in recent months.
A Wagner fighter recently posted a video on Telegram of dead bodies in a room; the person claims the group is losing hundreds of men daily as the Kremlin is not providing them with sufficient materiel, according to an translation by the Institute for the Study of War.