The Russian mercenary company Wagner Group has suffered more than 30,000 casualties since Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, with about 9,000 of those fighters killed in action, the White House said on Friday.
The United States estimates that 90% of Wagner group soldiers killed in Ukraine since December were convicts, White House National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a regular briefing.
Half of the overall deaths occurred since mid-December, as fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut intensified, an NSC spokesperson said, citing newly downgraded intelligence.Kirby said mercenary group had made incremental gains in Bakhmut in and around Bakhmut over the last few days, but those had taken many months to achieve and came at a "devastating cost that is not sustainable."
"It is possible that they may end up being successful in Bakhmut, but it will prove of no real worth to them because it is of no real strategic value," he said, adding that Ukrainian forces would maintain strong defensive lines across the Donbas region.
Kirby told reporters that Wagner continued to rely heavily on convicts, who were sent to war with no training or equipment, despite recent comments from Wagner's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin that he had stopped recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, writing by Paul Grant; Editing by Kanishka Singh and Alistair Bell)
