Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has admitted that his mercenary group is facing difficulties in Ukraine and will soon “shrink” in size amid mounting evidence that its political influence in the Kremlin is waning, The Guardian reports.

“The number of units of the Wagner PMC will decrease, and we will also not be able to perform the amount of tasks that we would like,” Prigozhin told a group of pro-war bloggers and state journalists gathered at an army barracks in eastern Ukraine on Wednesday. .

“You have all heard that the recruitment of prisoners to our ranks has stopped,” Prigozhin said.

The businessman did not explain why he stopped recruiting, but observers say the move is part of a growing backlash against him by Russian intelligence services.

Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said on February 9 that the Russian mercenary group had stopped recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine, Reuters reports.

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

Wagner began recruiting prisoners from Russian colonies in the summer of 2022, while Prigozhin, a restaurant owner who served nine years in prison under the Soviet Union, offered a pardon to convicts if they lived in Ukraine for six months.

Wagner did not provide information on how many convicts joined his ranks, but data from Russia’s penitentiary service released in November showed the country’s prison population fell by more than 20,000 between August and November, the biggest drop yet for more than ten years.

According to data released in January, the decline has largely stopped.

Reuters reported in December that the US intelligence community believed Wagner had 40,000 convicted militants stationed in Ukraine, the vast majority of the group’s personnel in the country.