Leader of Wagner Group says Ukrainian army is “highly trained and organized”

Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, said on Tuesday that his men were the strongest fighters, but acknowledged that the Ukrainian army also fought fiercely, particularly in the eastern city of Bakhmut.

In an interview with pro-Moscow blogger Konstantin Dolgov, Prigozhin said the Ukrainians are “highly organised, highly trained and their intelligence is at the highest level, they can operate any military system with equal success, Soviet or NATO”.

“Now I can judge according to my own experience, I know how different countries struggle [..] today Wagner is the best army in the world, and after that of course I must say that it should be the Russian army to be politically correct, but I believe that the Ukrainians today are one of the strongest armies in the world,” said Prigozhin.

Over the weekend, Wagner said he had taken all planned territories and would leave the frontline in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, leaving the fight to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Prigozhin has criticized Russia’s military leadership several times in the past, including earlier this month when he blamed Russian defense chiefs for “tens of thousands” of Wagner casualties because they didn’t have enough ammunition.

In the interview, Prigozhin said that more than 10,000 of Wagner’s soldiers died in the battle for Bakhmut and admitted that Russia has not been very successful in its goal of “demilitarizing Ukraine”.

“At the beginning of the special military operation, they (Ukrainians) had, say, 500 tanks, and now they have 5 thousand tanks, and if only 20 thousand people knew how to fight, now there are 400 thousand people who know how to fight. So how do we demilitarize (Ukraine)? We seem to have done the opposite, militarized,” he told Dolgov.