A huge advertisement for the recruitment of Wagner’s Russian mercenary group appeared on the facade of an office building near the highway in the north-east of Moscow, according to Reuters.

The ad, which spans 17 floors, features the band’s logo and slogans such as “Join the winning team!” and “Together We Will Win” along with an image of a masked man with a gun.

Wagner, which is fighting alongside Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, is trying to increase its strength ahead of a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The group is believed to have suffered heavy casualties fighting for control of the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut in what has become the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.

Its leader, 61-year-old Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose company made its fortune catering events and contracts with the Kremlin and government ministries, said in early March that he intended to recruit 30,000 new fighters by mid-May.

According to the Constitution, private military companies are prohibited from operating in Russia, but they can be stationed abroad.

Moscow has supported Wagner’s company with equipment and weapons and used it extensively during its military campaign in Ukraine, but the Kremlin appears to have scaled back its support for the group recently.

Prigozhin admitted that his troops lacked personnel

In January, the United States estimated that Wagner had about 50,000 militants in Ukraine, including 40,000 convicts Prigozhin had recruited from Russian prisons with the promise of a pardon if they survived six months.

Ukrainian officials stated that about 30,000 fighters of the “Wagner” PMK deserted, were killed or wounded, this figure cannot be independently verified.

Wagner PMC boss Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted in February that his mercenary group was facing difficulties in Ukraine and would soon “shrink” in size amid mounting evidence that its political influence in the Kremlin is waning.

“The number of the Wagner PMC will decrease, and we will also not be able to perform the amount of tasks we would like,” Prigozhin told a group of pro-war bloggers and state journalists.

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

• VIDEO What the Wagner cemetery would have looked like just a few months after the first grave

Prigozhin, sentenced to 13 years in prison

One March evening in 1980, during the final years of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s reign, 18-year-old Prigozhin and three friends left a St. Petersburg bar around midnight and noticed a woman walking alone down a dark street.

One of Prigozhin’s friends turned the woman away by asking her for a cigarette. While she was about to open her purse, Prigozhin crept up behind her and grabbed her by the neck, squeezing her until she lost consciousness. Then his friend took the shoes, and Prigozhin deftly took off the gold earrings and put them in his pocket. The four then disappeared, running away, leaving the woman lying in the street.

The court found that this was only one of many robberies that Prigozhin and his friends committed in St. Petersburg over several months.

He was sentenced to 13 years in prison and spent the rest of the decade behind bars, missing Brezhnev’s death and Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. It was released in 1990, when the Soviet Union was in its throes.

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