Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group private military company, announced that it has ceased recruiting inmates from Russian prisons and penal colonies to fight in Ukraine on the Kremlin’s behalf.
“To those who work for us now, all obligations are fulfilled,” Prigozhin’s press service quoted him as saying in a February 9 .
group is notorious for brutal executions of recruits it deems traitors or disobedient. Less than 10 percent of the felons recruited by Wagner to fight as mercenaries in Ukraine survive, according to . A Wagner defector confirmed that reputation in an account describing deception and violence.
longtime confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, toured prisons and penal colonies across Russia last summer and recruited some 40,000 inmates, promising clemency after six months of frontline service in Ukraine, in January.
Olga Romanova, head of the Russia Behind Bars human rights group, as saying:
Telegram channels published a video of the brutal execution of a mercenary for “treason.” The video showed the victim, Yevgeny Nuzhin, a former inmate who had been serving life in prison, being killed with a sledgehammer blow to his head after confessing that he had surrendered to Ukrainian forces and then returned to Wagner as part of a POW exchange. has been branded as the Wagner Group’s signature punishment for its stray mercenaries.
a Wagner defector, that Prigozhin used prisoners as “cannon fodder” and had lost control of those under his command: “They were in constant circulation. Dead bodies, more prisoners, more dead bodies, more prisoners.”
buried “right in the trenches that were dug by the trainees,” Medvedev said.
United States citing the war crimes its mercenaries allegedly committed in Ukraine, Syria, Central African Republic, Mali and Libya.
Department said in the statement.