The Wagner group of Kremlin affiliated mercenaries announced today that it won’t be recruiting anymore Russian prisoners. The group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, didn’t explain why.

“The recruitment of prisoners by the Wagner private military company has completely stopped,” Prigozhin said in a response to a request for comment from a Russian media outlet published on social media.

“We are fulfiling all our obligations to those who work for us now,” he said.

Wagner began recruiting prisoners in Russia’s sprawling penal system in summer 2022, with Prigozhin, a catering entrepreneur who served nine years in prison during the Soviet Union, offering convicts a pardon if they survived six months in Ukraine…

In December, Reuters reported that the U.S. intelligence community believes that Wagner had 40,000 convict fighters deployed in Ukraine, making up the vast majority of the group’s personnel in the country.

CNN spoke to a couple of Wagner fighters who had been captured by Ukraine on the battlefield after being recruited from prisons in Russia. They described a big sales pitch last year in which Prigozhin arrived in a helicopter and promised them wages and that they would have their convictions expunged if they agreed to serve. They said that lots of men joined, even some who only had weeks left on their sentence. And while it’s not entirely clear why the recruitment surge stopped, CNN notes it could be that word has spread about the conditions Wagner forces will face.

…the experiences of prisoners who completed their six-month Wagner contracts may have deterred others from joining up. Prigozhin was seen last month with some of the demobilized fighters, many of whom had clearly been wounded.

It’s quite possible that some who have now returned home have relayed accounts of the appalling casualties suffered among Wagner ranks – as wave after wave of fighters were sent into the path of Ukrainian artillery and tank fire.

The two Wagner prisoners interviewed this week by CNN spoke of huge losses as they were sent to storm Ukrainian positions, with fighters refusing to go forward instantly executed by commanders, they said.

One of the lawyers who spoke to Agentstvo said the decline of volunteers from among the prison population was in part due to information about Wagner’s high casualties becoming known.

There are other possibilities as well. Remember those reports last month suggesting that Prigozhin was making disloyal noises with regard to Putin. He also took the unusual step of brushing aside pro-Kremlin propaganda and praising the honorable behavior of Ukrainian fighters. So who knows what is going on behind the scenes. Maybe Prigozhin is out of favor. Maybe Putin decided that having the only real win attributable to an outside group with its own powerful leader wasn’t smart. An unidentified senior official told the Financial Times that his story would end badly:

“The army has to do something about Prigozhin eventually,” a former senior official said. “It’ll end badly for him. The points he scored are all about to expire, and nobody likes him.”…

Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the apparent end to the prison recruitment drive suggested Russia’s military leaders had regained the upper hand. This followed a command reshuffle in January that put Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff, in charge of the invasion.

Lee said Wagner’s power stemmed from its huge pool of convicts that can be deployed at will. “They don’t really care if they’re getting killed,” he said. “If Gerasimov is trying to reassert his position on the war and reduce Prigozhin’s clout, it makes sense [to stop the programme], because now it’s harder for [Wagner] to recruit.”

Just because Wagner group won’t be recruiting any more prisoners doesn’t mean the Russian military won’t step in and do it. At some point Putin is going to need more bodies for the front lines and a second mobilization won’t be popular.

Update: Newsweek has a story on Prigozhin’s declining fortunes.

The relationship between Prigozhin and the Kremlin began to disintegrate when the businessman began presenting himself as both a military solution for the conflict and a political solution.

There has been a “crescendo” of publicity since he announced himself to be the founder of the Wagner Group, she said.

“He sees himself as a defense minister or someone with a high profile inside the Kremlin, at least visible and respectful enough to be rewarded for what he has been doing for the country.”…

“He is not satisfied anymore with just being a shadowy private sector contractor. He looks like he wants something more, a more serious official public kind of job,” Mykhnenko told Newsweek.

The Wagner Group is now losing its power “because the Kremlin wants also to show that they are the ones in charge,” said de Deus Pereira from RUSI.

So it sounds like Putin is sending a message. That’s fine but meanwhile his own soldiers haven’t accomplished anything but a series of strategic retreats.