Prigozhin wants to recruit 30,000 fighters to "Wagner" in 2 months
The founder of the "Wagner" PMC, Yevhen Prigozhin, plans to recruit 30,000 fighters to participate in the war against Ukraine by mid-May. Instead of prisoners, free citizens are now taken to the PVC.
This was reported by Censor.NET with reference to Reuters.
Prigozhin claims that the "Wagner" recruiting centers, which he said opened last week in 42 cities in Russia, recruit an average of 500-800 people a day. He did not provide any evidence to support these figures.
Prigozhin's men suffered heavy losses during the Russians' attempts to capture the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which had endured the longest and bloodiest battle of the year of the war since the summer of last year.
In January, the United States estimated that "Wagner" had about 50,000 militants in Ukraine, including 40,000 convicts whom Prigozhin recruited from Russian prisons with the promise of pardon if they lived for six months.
Ukrainian officials said that about 30,000 Wagner fighters deserted, were killed or wounded.
Prigozhin said that recruitment was going better than he had expected and that the volunteers were in better physical shape than the prisoners he had recruited before.
"By mid-May, we plan to increase the number of fighters in our units by approximately 30,000 people," he said.
For several months, Prigozhin waged a vigorous PR campaign extolling Wagner's role in the Russian offensive, often complaining that the senior military leadership was not paying due attention to his group, and even claiming that it lacked ammunition.
