The Russian Wagner Group is expected to release the last of its convict-recruits soon, which the UK claims will mark “one of the bloodiest episodes in modern military history”.
Hiring fighters from prisons was known as the Project K recruitment scheme, and it started last summer with convicted criminals being offered a complete pardon if they survived six months in Ukraine.
By December, Reuters news agency reported that the US believed convicts made up most of the group’s personnel.
The programme peaked at the start of this year and saw 40,000 men become Wagner fighters in mandated service.
But, as the UK’s ministry of defence pointed out in its daily update on Friday, this only resulted in “one of the bloodiest episodes in modern military history”.
It explained: “Up to 20,000 convict-recruits were killed within a few months.”
Most of these casualties are likely to have happened at the battle of Bakhmut, the highly-sought after Ukrainian town which became a symbol of resistance for the beleaguered nation. The Wagner Group claimed victory there in May, after heavy losses.
These prison recruits also brought intense violence, according to reports in The Guardian in February.
A prisoners’ rights activist based in Russia told the newspaper: “It’s often people who have the most years left on their sentences who are willing to go into Wagner. And that means, usually, it’s people who have committed the most serious crimes.”
The Wagner Group has undergone significant reform since its leader, oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, tried – and failed – to lead an armed rebellion against the Russian ministry of defence in June.
Prigozhin was exiled to Belarus, although some reports claim he has since been seen in Russia. The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko invited other Wagner fighters to re-locate to his country too, and they appear to already be training Belarusian troops.
However, now Project K is winding down, according to the MoD, as the group is “likely to release the last of its convict-recruits from their mandated service”.
The British intelligence claimed: “The end of the scheme marks a waypoint in the history of Wagner and of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“The soldiers provided by Project K enabled Russia to seize Bakhmut: one of its few recent claims to success.”
However, that does not mean those who were enlisted will now be excused from fighting.
“A significant number of the now pardoned convicts are likely to take up the offer to continue with Wagner as professional contractors,” the intelligence officers predicted.
The Russian MoD has also assumed control of Wagner’s prison recruitment pipeline.
“These Russian criminals and thugs are now set to train the Belarusian army and settle in locations that have been prepared for them,” according to Poland’s deputy minister coordinator of special services Stanislaw Zaryn.
He estimated in a tweet that the number of Wagner mercenaries in Belarus was at “several hundred”.