The defector spoke about brutality in Ukrainian society

The Wagner Group and the Ukrainian War on Crime: How the Russian Army has fought and its mercenaries have fought in Ukraine

The bodies of the Ukrainians lay side-by-side on the grass, their earth splayed open by a crater. Dragged to the spot by Russian mercenaries, the victims’ arms pointed to where they had died.

The Ukrainian soldiers who will collect the bodies will just bash them in, and there is no need for a grenade. The mercenaries realize they have run out of bullets.

But inside Russia, Proghzin’s notoriety is tied primarily to the Wagner Group — a private military contractor linked to various Kremlin covert operations over the past decade but now openly central to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

The group has been helped to cloud analysis of its exact capabilities and activities by the limited official information about its existence and ties to the Russian state.

It’s been one year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Tens of thousands of mercenaries have joined the fight in the war as the Russian military has struggled.

“They have more weighty, more meaningful experience than the army. The army are young soldiers who have not been in the army before.

There is an obfuscation about a strong Russian army, according to Gabidullin, who said that the Russian army cannot handle the war without mercenaries.

The two prisoners who were interviewed by CNN said that they were sent to storm Ukrainian positions with huge losses, and that the fighters refused to fight in order to be killed by their commanders.

A senior Ukrainian defense source said that since the beginning of the war, Wagner fighters have been offered incentives to destroy Ukrainian tanks and units, all paid in US dollars.

Yusov said that the Russian front line are getting more patched with the help of Wagner. A senior defense official in the US said that Chechen fighters were focused around the Russian offensive towards Bakhmut, whereasWagner was used across different front lines.

With the need to supply the troops with supplies and food, as well as for extended operations, the logistical challenges have been more than you can imagine.

Wagner’s invitations to contact recruiters have also spread via social media and online. CNN spoke to a recruitment company that offered a salary of at least 240,000 rubles (about $4,000) per month, with the length of a business trip of at least four months. Much of the recruiter’s message listed medical conditions that excluded applicants from joining: from cancer to hepatitis C and substance abuse.

It’s a move that would have been unthinkable months ago for the private military company once considered one of the most professional units in the Kremlin’s arsenal.

“The Kremlin is sort of looking for ways to disguise the fact that its troops are active in Ukraine [and] Prigozhin steps in,” Walker says. He offers to create a military company that will be able to do the Kremlin’s work, but not lose the deniability that comes with it. The beginning of the Prigozhin is what I think we have today as a kind of warlord.

Working on Ukrainian investigations into possible Russian war crimes, Belousov fears that this lax recruiting will see the scale of war crimes increase.

On Thursday, Prigozhin announced that Wagner had stopped recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine, saying “those who work for us now are fulfilling all their obligations.” No reason was given for the decision and CNN cannot independently confirm the claims.

In fact, it may now be impossible to extricate Prigozhin’s fate and the status of the Wagner Group from the future trajectory of the war and stability in Europe. No matter Prigozhin’s position, he can hold sway among a group of ultranationalists because they all have the same power.

From intercepted phone calls, Ukrainian intelligence services in August noted a “general decline in morale and the psychological state” of Wagner troops, Ukrainian defense intelligence spokesman Yusov said. He has also seen this trend in Russian troops.

The reduction in Wagner recruitment requirements point to demoralization too, he said, and the number of “truly professional soldiers who are willing to volunteer to fight with Wagner” is also decreasing.

The ex-commander explained that they were unhappy with the overall organization of the fighting and this caused the demoralization. The Russian leadership has an inability to make competent decisions.

One mercenary was too lazy to contact Gabidullin for advice. “He called me and said: ‘That’s it, I won’t be there anymore. Gabidullin told CNN that he is not participating in this anymore.

In a video of a fallen mercenary as the battle rages on the Black Hole: Prigozhin’s alleged mistreatment

In a video, a fallen mercenary is lying in death with his left hand touching the black earth. Around him, the battlefield smolders alongside dead bodies and the flaming wreckage of their armored vehicles. Occasional shots crackle through the smoke.

A soldier stripped of his shirt to apologize to his friend, who died in the battle. “Let’s get out of here, if they shoot us, we’ll lie next to him.”

“They would round up those who did not want to fight and shoot them in front of newcomers,” he alleges. They brought two prisoners who did not want to fight. They shot them in front of the whole group and then buried them in the trenches.

According to Prigozhin, he should have been prosecuted for trying to mistreat prisoners while he was in his company.

The War of the Ostravich-Kolmogorov-Intl-Rosen During the First World War II: Bergen Norway and Reinvedev

There weren’t any real tactics. We just got orders about the position of the adversary…There were no definite orders about how we should behave. We planned how we would do it step by step. Who would open fire, what kind of shifts we would have…How it how it how it would turn out that was our problem,” he said.

He escaped arrest at least 10 times and dodged bullets from Russian forces after crossing his border in a daring defection. He crossed into Norway over an icy lake using white camouflage to blend in, he said.

He told CNN that he didn’t want to return for another tour after he saw the troops being turned into cannon fodder.

He started off with 10 men under his command, a number that grew once prisoners were allowed to join, he said. “There were more dead bodies, and more, and more, people coming in. He said that he had a lot of people under his command. I didn’t know how many. They were always in circulation. More corpses, more corpses, more corpses, more corpses, more corpses.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/europe/wagner-norway-andrei-medvedev-ukraine-intl/index.html

The fate of the Ukrainian defector killed by a sledgehammer: The story of Vladimir Medvedev and the search for new fighters

But in reality “nobody wanted to pay that kind of money,” Medvedev said. He alleged that many Russians who died fighting in Ukraine were “just declared missing.”

Soon or later propaganda in Russia will stop and the people will rise up, and all of our leaders will be up for grabs, as a new leader will emerge.

When asked if he feared the fate could be met on another defector such as Yevgeny Nuzhin, who was murdered on camera with a sledgehammer, he said that the death of this defector inspired him to leave.

Private military contractor Wagner will have to look for new fighters beyond Russia’s prison system, a fertile recruiting ground for the past nine months, according to its boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.

On his Telegram channel, Prigozhin stated that he had stopped the recruitment of prisoners. All the people who work for us now are complying with their obligations.

The Russian oligarch did not give any reason for the decision, but there are several plausible explanations for the change of tack. The pool of recruits might have dwindled, the Ministry of Defense may have been involved, or the operation might have stretched Prigozhin’s finances. Alternatively, Prigozhin may have been told that his way of war no longer fits Russian priorities on the battlefield.

After signing up between 40,000 and 50,000 prisoners from jails across Russia, the number of volunteers from prison may have shrunk so far that the campaign is no longer delivering.

Figures just released by the Russian Penitentiary Service may support that. They show that the population of the prison decreased by 6,000 between November and January, compared to a drop of 23,000 between September and October last year.

Some prisoners who had just weeks left of their sentence signed up for the program after being visits from PrigoZHin, they said. They said that he arrived in a helicopter at their prisons and made promises regarding wages and other benefits as well as his criminal record being expunged.

Additionally, the experiences of prisoners who completed their six-month Wagner contracts may have deterred others from joining up. Many of the fighters who were demobilized had clearly been wounded and Prigozhin was seen with them last month.

One of the lawyers who spoke to Agentstvo said the decline of volunteers from among the prison population was in part due to information about Wagner’s high casualties becoming known.

The finances of Wagner’s parent company – Concord Management – have always been very opaque, with dozens of subsidiaries involved. It is extremely difficult to determine the source of cash to sustain such a huge increase in ranks.

In response to CNN’s request for comment on Wagner’s decision to end recruitment from Russian prisons, Prigozhin issued a sarcasm-laced reply through the Wagner Group’s VKontakte page, and joked that millions of US citizens had applied to join the mercenary group.

However, Sevalnev and several prisoners CNN has spoken to seem to indicate a disturbing new strategy. They say they were directly employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

It is the last message that Sevalnev would send. A convict, who had been in jail for armed robbery and assault, he was sent from prison to fight for Russia in Ukraine. Sevalnev died after he and many of his colleagues died in an assault on a factory outside Soledar.

In a last message to his wife, he said he feared officials from the Russian Ministry of Defense would soon take him from his hospital bed, where he recorded the audio message, and execute him. Days later, his body was returned to his wife in Moscow, in a closed coffin.

Several prisoners working for a unit called “08807” told CNN that they were employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Some of them held documents that suggested they were eventually deployed to the part of the Luhansk independence army that was under control of the Russian defense ministry. The unit 08807 was deployed in October to the frontlines around Soledar, known as a “Shtrum” brigade – for storming Ukrainian lines – and suffered catastrophic casualties.

Usov said the development was a consequence of internal squabbling among Russian military leadership, as well as the creation of a convict resource they could directly control through the ministry. Usov said the ministry had fewer convicts for now but they “will be used in the same way … as cannon fodder,” as Wagner does.

Grainy footage shows Sevalnev and his unit celebrating at a camp inside of Luhansk. They ate and joked behind the front lines the night before they embarked on their attack on the factory, which would prove to be fatal for most of Sevalnev’s unit.

The survivors spoke to CNN from the hospital. One, also a prisoner, said Sevalnev had been wounded once but sent back to fight on the frontline, where he was then wounded again.

“No one is being operated on here, no surgeries performed on anyone,” he said. CNN will not give his name or that of the other surviving convicts for their safety. “People walk around [the hospital] with bullet wounds, with shrapnel stuck in their legs.”

A former soldier before his imprisonment, he also described catastrophic losses. He said that there were many different groups of prisoners added to the unit over time, and that the total number of people left was probably up to 40. He said the unit had only 15 survivors and that it was now known as the Storm unit. He said the meat grinder is what it is. He told CNN that his injuries were healed but he had been sent back to the frontline.

I don’t have a single complaint about war. Some come here, hear the machine gun, and run. It’s not good. They set everyone else up, as no one has my back,” he said. The soldier that was wounded in the leg in October felt no fear after completing 25 days on the front. A shell lands close by, but I don’t feel very worried at the moment. I don’t know why it happens like this with me.”

The fate of convicts employed by Wagner and a student convicted under a Kremlin law: the case of Tarimo

The fate of convicts employed by Wagner appears no better, according to relatives of three convicts over the summer who appeared in an August CNN report.

One had disappeared without trace for four months, according to his brother. Another was silent, but was sending his brother’s salary, which was collected from a rented office in a sealed plastic bag. A third had appeared in a video with Prigozhin, portrayed as a lucky returnee. Yet a friend described his “zombie-like” appearance, heavy drinking and urgent desire to return to the front.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also elaborated on the legality of the pardons that Wagner has insisted convicts are given, telling reporters last month any presidential decrees pardoning prisoners were likely classified. There are various types of decrees with different classifications of secrecy, he said. “That is precisely why I cannot say anything about these decrees. I can confirm that the whole procedure for pardoning prisoners is carried out in accordance with Russian law.

Wagner’s recruitment has also snared prisoners who are not Russian, and may not have been convicted of a crime. Tanzanian student Nemes Tarimo was on an exchange in Moscow when he was apparently arrested on drugs charges and held on remand. He was convicted in March last year to seven years in jail, according to the Tanzanian foreign ministry, citing information from their Russian counterparts.

Tarimo’s death was announced in a video by the man who released it, at a memorial ceremony in western Russia. His body was returned to Tanzania last month, according to state TV, with the foreign ministry saying in a statement that Tarimo had accepted an offer to fight in return for money and his freedom.

His cousin Rehema Makrene Kigoga told CNN: “Since his childhood, Nemes was a very obedient boy. He was a very religious person and wasn’t a scamp. She also said they had heard nothing about his recruitment until after his death. We were never told he was arrested for drug related offenses, but now that he is dead, we are told he was. As a family, it gives a lot of sadness. He never even had a dream of becoming a soldier.”

A Russian narcissist in prison — the Putin’s Chef,” he told a group of convicted criminals

Prigozhin earned the nickname of “Putin’s Chef” after building a restaurant and empire favored by the Kremlin at the start of his career.

“The basic pitch is six months: It’s going to be horrible. It’s going to be very difficult. If you try to run away, we’ll shoot you. We will shoot you if you don’t give us what we want. “But you go to the front, you put in your service … after six months, you’re free to go.”

This ex-con is going to fly around prisons in a helicopter, offering people salvation for fighting for him at the front, and then lead battalions of prisoners to their deaths. It’s so dystopian that it’s really hard to believe. Yet, it has happened.

He’s a big guy. He’s got a shaved head. He uses a coarse language. It’s obvious that this is not a polished guy. This isn’t a particularly well educated guy. Me and my colleague, when we were researching this article, we managed to get hold of a few prisoners who are still in prison and speak with them either by text message or in other ways, and ask them how they saw this guy, why people agreed to go, why, in that case, they didn’t agree to go. And they all said to us, “We could see from this guy that he was one of us. He’d been in prison and we respected him. They all said that he talked like an ex-inmate and gave his word that if they fought for him, he would give them their freedom. All of these people said, “We wouldn’t trust a normal Russian official, but this guy had something about him that made us think he was one of us.” …

He’s not sugar coating this. This is not pretending that this is going to be pleasant or that this will be a holiday. He’s basically saying, look, you’re probably going to die. The thing is going to be horrible. The fighting is incredibly intense. We’re going to throw you right in at the front line. I have your back if you survive this.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/23/1158944377/russia-ukraine-war-mercenaries-prisoners-yevgeny-prigozhin-putin

When Vladimir Petrovich Prigozhin was killed in 2015 and 2016: What we’ve learned in the last five years of his investigations

It could be a couple of weeks. Of training. According to the reports that we’ve read, the convicts are not used on difficult operations or anything that is targeted and careful. They’re being used as cannon fodder. Talking to Ukrainians who have been on the other side of the lines and kind of watched the Wagner troops approach them, they’ve said the same thing: that it’s really strength in numbers. It’s a little too disregard for human life. We’ve had credible reports that there’s been executions of their own people as punishment for disobeying orders and to keep everybody else in line and forcing, which is why they have not fancied it.

People who look into Prigozhin’s activities tend to have worrying things happen to them. Soon after, one of the journalists [from Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper] who did one of the biggest investigations into Prigozhin had a severed ram’s head delivered to his newsroom and a funeral wreath delivered to his home address. It’s kind of like a Mafia touch.

In 2015 and 2016 Alexei Navalny’s team did a series of investigations into Prigozhin and how he was winning these government contracts. One of Navalny’s top aides was the main investigator on these. After one of these investigations came out, a person stabbed her husband in the leg with a piece of needle and then ran off, he collapsed and the person who stabbed him was not found. I was talking to an old friend, Lyubov, about this recently. She thinks that the attack was connected to her investigation, and she and her husband were rushed to the hospital. He was taken to the hospital for quick medical attention. She said that the doctors told her that if it had been a bit longer, he may not have survived. It was a very strong animal tranquilizer that had been injected into his leg. … If you cross YevgenyPrigozhin, some pretty sinister things can happen to you.

These are also questions that the team of researchers that I lead at New America and Arizona State University have been researching for the better part of the last five years. What we’ve learned while uncovering the Wagner Group’s covert operations and Prigozhin’s shadowy business enterprises is that Prigozhin needs Putin as much as Putin needs him – at least for now.

Russia has a top ranked military and nuclear arsenal and how did they get to rely on the personal army of billionaires with no battlefield experience?

Are Prigozhin and Putin really interested in the Russian-Ukrainian relationship? The story of Putin and the Wagner Group during Putin’s 1991 campaign in St. Petersburg

Is it possible that Prigozhin could take over from Putin in a government position or even replace him? It is important that future negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are stable for global stability.

The trajectory of Putin’s war and the relationship between Russia, the United States and NATO will be affected by the answers to these questions.

That same year, Putin, still then an active reservist with the KGB, began working in St. Petersburg politics. Putin was given the job of overseeing the municipal gambling industry in 1991 by the city’s late mayor, Anatoly Sobchak.

By then, Prigozhin had started a successful hot dog stand business and with the help of an old school chum, Boris Spektor, had started to dip his toe in the city’s mobbed up casino business too.

We don’t know if Putin really thinks about Prigozhin. An Independent analyst who writes frequently on Russian government policymaking says that Prigozyn knows that no one knows.

Congress and its legislative counterparts in the United Kingdom and Europe should be moving more swiftly to ensure that relevant government agencies issue an authoritative public accounting of efforts to disrupt and expose the cartel that sustains the Wagner Group.

There is skepticism the US is facing from African nations who have made common cause with Russia and the Wagner Group.

Then there is the problem of ostensible US allies like the United Arab Emirates, which has quietly backed Russia’s encroachments in places like Libya and Sudan. The Pentagon pointed out the possible financial backing of theWagner Group in a 2020 inspector general report.

Often these deals call for the sale of weapons and military services that cash-strapped countries in the Global South agree to buy from Russia in exchange for mining rights or oil and gas production shares.

The Denis Korotkov “Wagner Center”, a former soldier in Russia’s military academy, speaks out against the “fighting for power”

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — In a gritty industrial district of St. Petersburg, a 23-story glass office tower rises — the words “Wagner Center” emblazoned across its rooftop and entrance.

The space is still under renovation and a spokesperson explains that they are interested in people who are patriotic.

There will be a free 24-hour media lab, and snacks, for patriotic bloggers, she explains. Russian tech startups with military applications should be given seed money. There are board rooms with a view on the upper floors.

In a leaked video that showed him addressing convicts in a prison colony, Prigozhin said “God and Allah can remove you from here in a casket.” “I can get you out of here alive. But I can’t promise to bring you back that way.”

Prigozhin has since emerged as a regular presence near the front lines, handing out medals to soldiers, and often in the headlines: crowing about Wagner’s victories when they come.

“They’re probably the most experienced army in the entire world today,” he boasted of Wagner soldiers following their seizure of the town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine last January.

“It’s what we call a classic struggle for power,” says Denis Korotkov, a Russian investigative journalist who broke several of the early stories on Wagner’s activities, beginning in 2014.

The cottage industry of conspiracy theories has arisen out of the public embrace of violence by Prigozhin and the infighting with top generals.

Fast forward to today and Korotkov has fled Russia amid a crackdown on independent media that threatens journalists with lengthy jail sentences for reporting “false information” about Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1160851615/russia-putin-chef-yevgeny-prigozhin-wagner-group

Better in Hell : The Musician’s Role in Ukraine’s War for the Prigozhin Military Force

The pay-for-play army, which has grown into a force of over 50,000 men, is important to efforts to save Russia’s military campaign.

The group is called “the musicians” and is better-trained, equipped and paid compared to regular Russian military troops.

“We have a contract. A contract with a company. A contract with the motherland and our conscience,” concludes Better in Hell — a stiff action thriller that celebrates Wagner’s role in the war in Ukraine.

The defense ministry’s top brass has been criticized as incompetent and out of touch because of the media holdings of Prigozhin that have also been used as a battering ram.

Despite the fact that the mercenary force was involved in the war effort, it’s still an outlawed militia at home according to a military analyst.

Yet Korotkov, the journalist, says Prigozhin’s continued public role, perhaps even survival given the powerful enemies he has made, depends on his mercenaries constantly proving themselves on the battlefield — whatever the cost in lives.