Russia's Wagner Group Has Lost 21,000 Soldiers in Ukraine: Zelensky

Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky has revealed Kyiv's estimate of the losses suffered by the Wagner Group of mercenaries.

Zelensky said that the group, headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, was divided into two categories—professional mercenaries and those who had been drafted from prisons which he described as "their cannon fodder."

The Wagner Group has been key to Russia's war effort in the Donetsk city of Bakhmut, during which both sides are reported to have suffered heavy losses.

"Our troops killed 21,000 and wounded 80,000 of them," Zelensky told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in an interview which coincided with a visit to Kyiv by Spain's prime minister Pedro Sanchez as Madrid takes charge of the rotating European Union presidency.

Prigozhin staged a rebellion on June 24 in which he claimed to have seized the military facilities of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

The Wagner group's march on Moscow to challenge the Russian military establishment was halted after a deal that will reportedly see Prigozhin exiled to Belarus.

"The good news is that we have destroyed the most motivated part of the Russian effort," said Zelensky, according to a translation. "Now is the time to move on. As for Wagner, we now know that they are going to Belarus and can create threats."

"The rest of the Russian army has no motivation and is weaker than us," he said.

Newsweek cannot independently verify the losses and has contacted the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.

Zelensky said that the most powerful unit of the Wagner Group was stationed in eastern Ukraine and that they had no way out but to attack. "It was impossible for them to return without having accomplished the mission," he said, "They killed many of their own comrades."

Following the mutiny against the Russian leader, Zelensky said that "Putin is now more threatened than me" and that "there are more people who want to kill him."

The terms of the deal Prigozhin struck with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko are unclear, but they include Russia's security services, the FSB, dropping charges against the mercenary chief and his fighters not facing legal action either.

However, military blogger, Igor Girkin, said in a video on his Telegram channel that Putin "cannot leave this kind of mutiny unpunished."

Girkin, a former Russian FSB agent and commander, who has been critical of Putin and the military establishment during the war, said that the Russian leader had displayed his "total powerlessness," by allowing Prigozhin to leave the country.

The head of Ukraine's defense intelligence, Major General Kyrylo Budano told The War Zone in an interview earlier that Kyiv was "aware that the FSB was charged with a task to assassinate" Prigozhin.