Wagner Group chief impassive as Russian casualties soar in Ukraine

The head of the Wagner Group of
mercenaries watched impassively as his fallen fighters were stacked up in black
body bags in a gloomy makeshift morgue in eastern Ukraine.
“Their contracts have finished.
They will go home next week. They died heroically at the front,” said Yevgeny
Prigozhin, the Kremlin-linked tycoon who controls the private paramilitary
group.
Prigozhin could then be seen
looking on as more bodies were loaded from a lorry on to stretchers. “So long,
guys. Happy new year!” he said, according to a video published by his own media
outlet.
Prigozhin was visiting the front
line in Bakhmut, a town in eastern Ukraine that has witnessed some of the
bloodiest fighting. “That’s how Prigozhin sends off his Wagner members,” Anton
Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, wrote on Twitter.
“They are just thrown on top of each other in black bags, like garbage.”
Although Bakhmut is of little
strategic importance, Russia has sacrificed vast numbers of troops in an as yet
unsuccessful attempt to take the town. “Everyone wants to know when we will
capture [Bakhmut],” Prigozhin told state media. “[But] every house has become a
fortress. Our guys sometimes fight for more than a day over one house.
Sometimes they fight for weeks over one house. Every ten metres there is a
defensive line.”
The British Ministry of Defence
said yesterday that Ukraine had sent reinforcements to the region and Russia
was unlikely to make any breakthrough in Bakhmut soon. “Both sides have
suffered high casualties,” the MoD said.
Bakhmut has been devastated by
the fighting, and fewer than 10,000 people out of a prewar population of 70,000
remain in the ruined town, once known for its sparkling wines. It is believed
that Prigozhin, who served nine years in a Soviet prison for robbery, wants to
capture it to boost his influence in Moscow. Some analysts have said that the
Wagner chief may have ambitions to succeed President Putin.
Prigozhin has openly recruited
inmates from Russian prisons for the war in Ukraine, offering them their
freedom in return for a six-month tour of duty. Up to 35,000 convicts are thought
to have taken up his offer. Russian law does not allow prisoners to be given
amnesty in return for military service.
In a separate video Prigozhin
could be seen telling a group of injured fighters that they were expected to
stay at the front even if they had lost limbs. “The fact that they have been
left without legs, without arms, without their eyesight doesn’t mean they [can]
go home,” Prigozhin said. “They can carry out duties that don’t require both
legs. They can work as sappers. If another mine explodes, their metal leg will
be blown off and we’ll weld another one on.”
Moscow said yesterday that 89 of
its troops died when US-supplied Himars missiles hit a building housing Russian
soldiers in eastern Ukraine. The Russian defence ministry said the main reason
for the carnage, in which according to Ukraine 400 lives were lost, was the
unauthorised use of mobile phones by the troops, giving away their location.
The ministry added that a commission was investigating the circumstances of the
attack and the culprits would be brought to justice.
Body of third Russian found in
India
A shipping engineer from Murmansk
has been found dead in India, the third Russian to die in the country in
suspicious circumstances in the past two weeks. The body of Sergei Milyakov,
51, was found early yesterday morning in his cabin aboard the ship MB Aldnah
anchored at Paradip port in Jagatsinghpur, in the eastern state of Odisha. The
ship was said to be en route from Bangladesh to Mumbai.
Paradip port’s chairman said an
investigation into the death had been launched.
It comes after two wealthy
Russians died in a hotel in Odisha last month. Pavel Antov, 65, who was a
member of the ruling United Russia party and founder of Vladimir Standard, a
Russian sausage company, was discovered lying in a pool of blood at the Hotel
Sai International in Rayagada on December 24.
Antov had been travelling with a
group of friends to celebrate his birthday, one of whom was Vladimir Bidenov, a
61-year-old businessman. He was also found dead at the same hotel two days
earlier.
Reports suggested that Bidenov
had either died from a heart attack or a stroke, and his body was found
surrounded by bottles.