Russia Lost More Men in Bakhmut Than in Its Afghan War

BBC Russia and Mediazona reported on Monday, June 10 that they had obtained a document detailing the “coffin payments” made to the families of Wagner fighters who had died during the 10-month battle for Bakhmut. It provided a complete list of the personal information of the 19,547 mercenaries who died.

Wagner’s troops bore the brunt of the attacks on the Ukrainian city with very few regular Russian army troops taking part in the assault. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war in Ukraine, much of the high death toll was a result of Russian commanders sending wave after wave into “meat grinder assaults.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Wagner, recruited convicts from Russia’s prisons into Wagner’s ranks in late 2022, offering pardons for those who served in the war in Ukraine. Commanded by contracted experienced and professional fighters, the prisoners proved to be highly effective but seem to have been viewed as expendable.

In a May 2023 interview with pro-Kremlin political commentator Konstantin Dolgov, Prigozhin said: “I selected 50,000 prisoners during the operation and about 20 percent of them died. The same number of men who joined under contract, rather than from jails, also perished.”

The BBC/Mediazona investigation used the call signs, dog tags and dates of death of the Wagner fighters who were killed, arriving at a total of at least 48,000 prisoners who fought for Wagner during this time. Monday’s report revealed that 17,175 former convicts represented 88 percent of those that were killed, not half, as Prigozhin claimed.

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The figure of those Russian troops killed in the battle for Bakhmut contrasts shockingly with the official data released by Soviet Forces of those who died during its 10-year Afghanistan campaign. These show that a total of 14,453 were killed – 9,500 died in combat, 4,000 from wounds, 1,000 died from disease and accidents and 53,753 were wounded.

BBC Russia says that the figures undermine Russia’s boasts about its “victory” in Bakhmut, with even the most ardently pro-Kremlin milbloggers blaming the catastrophic losses on those commanders who were awarded medals for the city’s capture.

At the time, Prigozhin’s claim was that heavy losses among his mercenaries during the attacks on Bakhmut were the fault of the corruption and inefficiency of Russia’s Defense Ministry, most notably in the famous video where, against a backdrop of corpses, he yells at Russia’s defense minister and chief of staff: “Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where is the f*****g ammunition?!”

That was the start of his descent from Putin’s good graces, brought to a head with his aborted June 2023 coup, and culminating in his death two months later when his business jet “fell from the sky.”

The “coffin payment” documents show that the Wagner Group paid out around 108 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) to relatives of its men killed in the fight for Bakhmut. Each family received 5 million rubles ($61,000) in compensation and 300,000 rubles ($3,700) for funeral arrangements. There was no information on injury payouts.