"Wagner PMC" recruited 48 thousand prisoners in the colonies, of which at least 17 thousand died during the battle for Bakhmut

The Wagner PMC, founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, recruited at least 48,366 prisoners to fight in Ukraine, according to calculations by Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service based on internal PMC documents on payments to the families of deceased mercenaries.

Representatives of the Wagner PMC, including Prigozhin personally, began traveling to the colonies to recruit in the summer of 2022. Convicts who agreed to fight were released after Putin's secret decrees on pardon. A few months later, the Ministry of Defense began doing the same, and by 2023, the Wagnerites stopped recruiting prisoners.

Internal documents provided the numbers of the Wagnerites' tokens. As the analysis by Mediazona and the BBC showed, they were constructed according to the same principle for prisoners: they were assigned a separate series "K", to which the colony's serial number and the prisoner's number were added.

Most of the Wagnerites died in the battles for Bakhmut. There, the Wagner PMC lost 19.5 thousand people, 17.1 thousand of whom were prisoners, and 2.4 thousand were "free" mercenaries. During this time, the Wagner PMC spent about 108 billion rubles on payments to the families of the deceased mercenaries, of which 92.5 billion rubles were sent to the relatives of the recruited prisoners.

"Mediazona" and "BBC" identified 341 colonies out of 501 mentioned in the tokens of the recruited prisoners. Of these, 227 colonies visited by recruiters were strict regime. From there, 33 thousand prisoners were taken to war. Of these, 21 thousand survived Bakhmut and returned back to Russia.

Prigozhin's units also visited at least 75 general regime colonies and 28 special regime colonies. Towards the end, prisoners began to be recruited in penal colonies and medical institutions.

In May 2023, shortly before the mutiny, Prigozhin himself, in an interview with Z-blogger Konstantin Dolgov, admitted the real number of losses of his PMC - 20 thousand people. At the same time, he lied that "exactly the same number" of prisoners died as ordinary contract soldiers.