A new book based on testimony from a former fighter with Russia’s Wagner Group details the human losses, prisoner recruitment and combat methods used by the group in Ukraine, including sending small groups into exposed positions to face superior forces and tanks.
Medvedev’s account of the battles for Bakhmut
The testimony follows Andrey Medvedev’s experience from his rise within Wagner to his escape and asylum claim in Norway. The book The Trade of War, by Norwegian journalist and author Åsne Seierstad, recounts Medvedev’s experience during Wagner’s battles, particularly in the Bakhmut area, where daily losses became an inherent part of the units’ operations.
His account portrays a military force that presented itself as an elite formation before increasingly relying on prisoners and poorly trained recruits alongside experienced fighters. In one battle, Medvedev was ordered to send his men across an exposed field watched by Ukrainian forces. He was told to divide them into small groups, with each group running at full speed to cross the area.
As soon as the men began moving, they came under shell, rocket and machine-gun fire, falling one after another as they tried to advance. One man was wounded in the shoulder, another lost his fingers, while a third staggered from the force of the shock. Medvedev tried to treat the wounded, placing dressings inside a deep wound in one of his men, who was bleeding heavily, while blood covered his face and clothes.
The field medic moved among the wounded, injecting the most serious cases with a powerful painkiller. The survivors were given no time to rest or recover from the attack before Medvedev received a call ordering him to seize another position. He told the command that no more than 4 of his 30 men were still able to continue the mission, but received a firm reply: “Forward!
That’s an order.” He knew that moving would expose those remaining with him to further danger. After advancing, Medvedev and his men reached a point just tens of metres from the Ukrainian forces. Men were killed on both sides, then the Russian group ran out of ammunition, while it appeared that the Ukrainian side faced the same problem.
Prisoner recruitment and Wagner’s mounting losses
The two sides remained in position, watching each other, while the survivors suffered from exhaustion, shock and the effects of the explosions. According to Medvedev’s account, the incident was one of a series of battles that revealed the scale of attrition within Wagner. In August 2022, he was wounded by shrapnel and taken to a field hospital, where he heard discussions about rising losses and the need for more men.
At the same time, the group’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had begun a major campaign to recruit Russian prisoners. During the autumn of 2022, Wagner recruited tens of thousands of prisoners, most of them convicted of violent crimes, including murder and rape.
Poor training and equipment shortages
Not all recruits received the same level of preparation. Some underwent training lasting a few weeks, while others were sent quickly to the front. Most headed to the Bakhmut area, where fierce fighting was under way. Medvedev found that his unit might number 30 men, but no more than 10 were actually capable of fighting.
Some recruits froze under fire, while others hid behind trees; some could not aim properly or knew how to use weapons. Turnover within the unit became so high that Medvedev sometimes did not learn the men’s names before they were killed. Problems also affected the weapons and equipment used by the group.
Some grenades were rusty, while some shells failed to explode, and the unit had to halt mine-laying operations after several of its men stepped on mines they had planted. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, were improving their use of drones and deploying equipment capable of locating Russian rocket-launcher platforms ahead of their destruction. In another operation, Medvedev was sent with 6 men to confront 3 tanks.
He saw the mission as an example of the transformation that had affected Wagner. The group, which had once boasted of being an elite force, had come to rely on large numbers of men lacking training and experience, while its more experienced fighters bore the consequences of military decisions he described as reckless. While at a Wagner base, Medvedev was trained to use modern European weapons systems that the group had seized.
Medvedev’s dispute with the group’s leadership and its consequences
There he met Prigozhin, who spoke confidently about the imminent capture of Bakhmut and said that completing the mission required only the elimination of the remaining resistance. Medvedev, however, saw the situation on the ground differently, because Ukrainian forces were entrenched underground and in the city’s buildings.
When Medvedev dared to question the cost of the battle, Prigozhin summoned and beat him. The incident deepened his aversion to the group’s leadership, but he remained in its ranks at the time because his combat experience made him difficult to replace, despite his growing objections to the way operations were being managed and the increasing losses among the men under his command.
The book also recounts the story of a recruit known by the nickname “The Piece”, who had been recruited from prison before defecting to the Ukrainian side. The man later appeared in a video recording before being killed, after his capture, with heavy hammer blows. The hammer subsequently became one of the most prominent symbols associated with Wagner’s methods of intimidation and punishment.
As the battles continued, Medvedev saw his men killed in large numbers, while the leadership continued sending small groups into extremely dangerous positions. Anger, fear and the desire to escape built within him until he concluded that leaving Wagner might be his only path to survival, while recognising that a failed escape attempt could end with his death.
Through this experience, the book presents Wagner as a force that brought together prisoners, poorly trained recruits and experienced fighters, sending them all to a front where human losses became part of the method of combat. The deployment of 6 men against 3 tanks remains one of the key incidents in Medvedev’s testimony illustrating the level of risk the group’s fighters were asked to endure.
