Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has unveiled Kyiv’s estimate of the losses endured by the Wagner Group of mercenaries.
Zelensky reported that the team, headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, was divided into two categories—professional mercenaries and people who had been drafted from prisons which he described as “their cannon fodder.”
The Wagner Group has been crucial to Russia’s war work in the Donetsk city of Bakhmut, through which equally sides are reported to have experienced heavy losses.
“Our troops killed 21,000 and wounded 80,000 of them,” Zelensky told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in an job interview which coincided with a pay a visit to to Kyiv by Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sanchez as Madrid requires charge of the rotating European Union presidency.
Getty Illustrations or photos/SERGEI CHUZAVKOV
Prigozhin staged a rise up on June 24 in which he claimed to have seized the army services of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
The Wagner group’s march on Moscow to obstacle the Russian armed forces establishment was halted soon after a deal that will reportedly see Prigozhin exiled to Belarus.
“The good news is that we have wrecked the most determined element of the Russian exertion,” said Zelensky, according to a translation. “Now is the time to shift on. As for Wagner, we now know that they are likely to Belarus and can generate threats.”
“The relaxation of the Russian military has no drive and is weaker than us,” he stated.
Newsweek cannot independently verify the losses and has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.
Zelensky claimed that the most powerful device of the Wagner Team was stationed in japanese Ukraine and that they had no way out but to attack. “It was unattainable for them to return without acquiring accomplished the mission,” he explained, “They killed many of their own comrades.”
Following the mutiny against the Russian chief, Zelensky stated that “Putin is now additional threatened than me” and that “there are more individuals who want to destroy him.”
The phrases of the deal Prigozhin struck with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko are unclear, but they incorporate Russia’s security expert services, the FSB, dropping fees against the mercenary chief and his fighters not struggling with legal motion either.
Nevertheless, armed forces blogger, Igor Girkin, explained in a movie on his Telegram channel that Putin “are not able to go away this form of mutiny unpunished.”
Girkin, a former Russian FSB agent and commander, who has been crucial of Putin and the army establishment all through the war, claimed that the Russian leader had shown his “complete powerlessness,” by allowing Prigozhin to go away the region.
The head of Ukraine’s defense intelligence, Important Basic Kyrylo Budano explained to The War Zone in an interview earlier that Kyiv was “aware that the FSB was charged with a job to assassinate” Prigozhin.
