Captured Russian inmates who have been sent to the front lines in Ukraine as part of the Wagner Group, an infamous mercenary organization with ties to the Kremlin, say they’ve witnessed public executions of deserters and disobedient troops, according to a Tuesday report from Polygon Media and the independent Mozhem Obyasnit news outlet.
“Those who disobey are eliminated — and it’s done publicly,” Yevgeny Novikov, a former inmate who the report said was recruited by the mercenary group, said, according to a translation of the report from The Daily Beast.
Novikov said there were “squadrons of liquidators” that dealt with troops considered problematic.
In one instance, according to The Beast’s translation, Novikov said: “Shelling began, one of the prisoners laid down and didn’t cover his own [men]. The shelling stopped, he went back, and the higher-up shouted to him: ‘Why didn’t you go forward?’ And they killed him. The higher-up is killed if his team deserts.”
Alexander Drozdov, another former inmate cited in the report, said many of the Russian prisoners sent to the front lines in Ukraine by Wagner had drug addiction and were “completely insane.” While some recruited prisoners may desert or disobey orders, others “are just fucked up and bulldoze their way through,” Drozdov said, adding that these fighters “are very different from ordinary mercenaries.”
The first batch of prisoners to survive six months of fighting in Ukraine was recently released back into Russia, with the head of the mercenary group celebrating them as heroes deserving of great respect, while advising them not to drink too much, do drugs, rape women, or kill.
The Russian military has suffered staggering losses since Moscow launched an invasion of Ukraine in February last year. In an effort to address issues around dwindling personnel, the Wagner Group has fought alongside the Russian military and has recruited Russian prisoners in the process.
Last month, a top Ukrainian military advisor said Russian prisoners fighting with Wagner were being shoved to the front lines and “killed in big quantities.”
A senior US military official told reporters Monday that prisoners and other recently mobilized troops were being used by Russia to “take the brunt” of Ukrainian fire on the front lines to clear a path for “better-trained forces” amid heavy fighting in Ukraine’s east.
Russian forces have been pushing hard to take the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region and have managed to make some advances in recent days into the nearby town of Soledar, according to assessments from the US military and British Defense Ministry.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Tuesday there were “heavy bloody battles” being fought over Soledar, The Moscow Times reported.
“On the western outskirts of Soledar there are heavy bloody battles. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are honorably defending the territory of Soledar,” Prigozhin said.
In his nightly address Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy painted a grim picture of the situation in the town.
“Everything is completely destroyed. There is almost no life left,” Zelenskyy said of the situation in Soledar. “And thousands of their people were lost: The whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like.”
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