Wagner Group leadership shattered, fighters dispersed to new roles

Over the past year, the Russian Wagner Group underwent reorganization. As reported by the British Ministry of Defence, citing intelligence findings, the Wagner Group's numbers have decreased by about 90 percent due to numerous departures of key commanders.

It has been a year since the accident in which the Wagner Group leaders were killed, including Yevgeny Prigozhin and founder Dmitry "Wagner" Utkin.

Since then, many members of the Wagner Group have chosen to leave its ranks. Former chief of staff, Andrey "Sedoy" Troshev, moved to the Russian Ministry of Defence, where he likely joined a private military unit created by the department, Redut.

Troshev was tasked with creating the Volunteer Corps, which is to fight in Ukraine. Alexander "Ratibor" Kuznetsov, former commander of the 1st Assault Unit, became a member of the Chechen special forces unit Akhmat. Boris "Zombie" Nizhevenok, former commander of the 3rd Assault Unit, took command of the volunteer unit Vostok-W in May of this year.

After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Russian army's initial failures, Yevgeny Prigozhin significantly transformed the Wagner Group. The organization, formerly an elite mercenary unit, became a massive military formation of thousands of individuals.

In the new structure, a dominant role was played by prisoners, mass-recruited from Russian penal colonies. This transformation aimed to strengthen Russian forces on the front, but also sparked numerous controversies, both in Russia and abroad, regarding the recruitment methods and the brutal actions of this group.

However, the number of Wagner fighters has now decreased. "Many veterans of the Wagner Group followed these and other former commanders, leaving the group," notes the British Ministry of Defence. Compared to the peak personnel, which in 2023 numbered about 50,000 individuals, the Wagner Group probably currently has only about 5,000 fighters, mainly deployed in Belarus and Africa.