The White House said on Thursday that 10 months after his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly turning to Wagner, a Russian mercenary group, for military support.
The White House estimates that Wagner currently employs 50,000 people in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts from Russian prisons. This is according to downgraded information released by national security spokesperson John Kirby.
Wagner’s owner, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and other company officials have recruited convicts from prisons to fight on the front line because they are struggling to recruit other Russians, Kirby said. Some of these prisoners had “serious illnesses,” he added.
In addition, Prigozhin is spending more than $100 million a month to finance Wagner’s operations in Ukraine, with his private army fighting alongside the Russian armed forces.
“It’s pretty obvious to us that Wagner is becoming a rival power center for the Russian military and other Russian ministries,” said Kirby.
Kirby also said North Korea had completed an initial shipment of weapons to Wagner and that Wagner had paid for the equipment. This shipment follows another delivery from North Korea last month, which included infantry rockets and rockets that were sent to Russia so Wagner could use them.
“North Korean officials have publicly stated that they would not support Russia’s war in Ukraine — and yet they are delivering weapons to Wagner here, in direct violation of UN Security Council resolutions,” Kirby said.
Kirby said the US plans to raise violations from North Korea with the Security Council.
The Department of Commerce also plans to name Wagner as a military end user to ensure that he cannot access devices anywhere in the world. He said that further sanctions against Wagner would be announced “in the coming weeks.”
Kirby said Wagner was playing an “important role” in Bakhmut, the city in eastern Ukraine that President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the day before his trip to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. The city has been witnessing intense Russian shelling for weeks.
According to Kirby, around 1,000 Wagner soldiers were killed in the fighting in Bakhmut, and 90 percent of them were convicts.
“Wagner is on the ground and plays an important role where, frankly, his poorly equipped and poorly trained armed forces suffer heavy losses. It appears that Mr. Prigozhin is ready to simply throw Russian bodies into the meat mill in Bakhmut,” he said.
Kirby said Prigozhin was motivated by his desire for influence and his relationship with Putin.
“For him, it’s primarily about how good he looks for Mr. Putin and how well he is regarded in the Kremlin, and we would even say that his influence is increasing,” Kirby said. “Wagner’s independence from the Russian Ministry of Defense has only increased over the ten months of this war.”
The new information about Wagner comes a day after Zelensky visited Washington on a historic visit. He addressed Congress and met with President Biden at the White House. In that speech, Biden promised to help Ukraine “for as long as necessary.”