Nikita Kasatkin died in Ukraine at the age of 23. He came from a small town in eastern Russia, Zhireken, where he was not very popular. In 2020 he was convicted of murder after hitting a pastor in the head with nine knives and six blows with an iron pipe. His future was a decade in prison and the rejection of many of his neighbors, but the Wagner mercenary company, with Moscow’s permission, offered him a pardon if he fought on the Ukrainian front for a few months. Like many other cellmates, he did not survive, and his people opted for a discreet burial. This has upset the Russian authorities: for them he deserves a hero’s funeral.
Zhireken is located in the Transbaikal region of Siberia, near the borders with Mongolia and China. The town of around 4,000 people learned of its neighbor’s death on February 8 when an anonymous person posted on local chat rooms that the city council declined to celebrate the funeral at the Casa de la Cultura, a pompous name for an ancient save.
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The district government in which the city is located stepped in and put pressure on the consistory. “For us, they are all the same. People called to mobilize, volunteers and members of private companies. All the deceased are people who gave their lives to defend our interests and the interests of the state,” Viktor Nadeliayev, the head of the Chernyshevsky district, the administration on which Shireken depends, publicly warned.
Kasatkin’s funeral had divided the city and his family had the final say. Eventually, his two sisters and a great-aunt decided that the wake should be held at his home and that a mass should be celebrated at the local church in honor of the deceased. “This situation was very painful,” Zhireken Mayor Aliona Kogodeyeva told the Sibir Reali newspaper. “Sentence [por asesinato] it was only two or three years ago and people still remember. Most neighbors are outraged. Some wonder if we will turn killers into heroes. Others believe so [los reos] they atone for their sins with their blood in the military operation. I can’t take sides. I think that person deserves to be fired without putting on a show,” the First Mayor added.
The consistory and the regional authorities have refused to give this newspaper their version of the facts. Both the use of prisoners as cannon fodder at the front and their release without serving a prison sentence are taboo in Russia. While some public figures insist on treating them as redeemed heroes, others insist on stressing that they were rapists, murderers, or drug dealers. In either case, their dehumanization makes them easy to be deployed with other units of the Russian Armed Forces in unthinkable near-suicidal tactics.
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The clearest example is the Battle of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. Russian prison occupations were reduced by 23,000 people between October and November 2022, just a month before the offensive near that city led by Wagner’s mercenary group. According to Kiev, waves and waves of bare-chested fighters from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s company were sent against their positions until they managed to bring down neighboring Soledar. Thousands of them died trying.
Visitors to the Wagner Center, a project of mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, on November 4 in St. Petersburg. IGOR RUSSAK (Portal)
Between entry and exit, the total number of prisoners fell by 32,900 in 2022, according to the annual balance sheet of the federal prison service. The panel assures that these are similar numbers to the years before the pandemic because “other alternative penalties are now being granted”. However, the NGO Rus Sidiáshchaya (Russia behind bars, declared a foreign agent by the authorities) puts the total number of prisoners recruited by Wagner at around 50,000, of whom, according to their calculations, only around 10,000 would survive.
Activist Vitali Votanovski collects Wagner’s burials in a private cemetery in Krasnodar on his Telegram channel and compares them with court records. Among others, he identified that of Alexander Korjalev, a man who died in the war at the age of 51. He had been sentenced to 12 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter: According to the court order he had stabbed his mother while intoxicated because she refused to give him money from his pension to buy cigarettes and after he left the house, he forgot her.
Kasatkin’s funeral isn’t the first to draw resentment. The city council of Kamyshlov in the Sverdlovsk region in the Urals denied the parents of former prisoner Ivan Savkin a public funeral in January after he had been convicted of robbery. “I didn’t know that in this city council they had decided to behave like animals. We will take care of these scum and drag their children by the nostrils into the military operation,” Prigozhin threatened in a statement from his company Concord.
Prigozhin, known as Putin’s cook, has received the Kremlin’s bull to grant pardons to prisoners in exchange for six months on the front lines, and Moscow even looked the other way when it publicly and without trial executed some of them for alleged failures have Wagner group. However, his position within the armed forces causes friction with the high command. In the face of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, their feuds finally exploded this week, and Prigozhin shook Vladimir Putin’s unwritten rule that his factions must avoid any confrontation in public.
No Russian media publishes violent images, so as not to alert public opinion to the aftermath of the war, but Wagner’s boss dared to share a photo with the bodies of more than fifty of his mercenaries thrown into the open, along with a devastating message to send: “The culprit is the one who does not solve the ammunition supply. at the end of the list [de suministros] Signature should appear [el jefe del Estado Mayor ruso] Valeri Gerasimov or Shoigu”. “They don’t want Wagner to exist,” he declared in an audio released right at the start of the huge war party that Putin was celebrating on Defender of the Fatherland Day on February 23. Hours later, he deleted the photo.
Putin himself, a distant observer of these rivalries, has nothing against sending prisoners to the front lines. Last week, at a meeting with Russia’s ombudsman for minors, Maria Lvova-Belova, the president advocated giving mercenaries the same status as professional soldiers, regardless of their past. “Everyone is fulfilling a sacred duty to his homeland. And that is why everyone is equal before the homeland,” the Russian President reiterated, after pointing out that in this way they can also wash their children’s surnames.
However, in Russia there is debate about the expediency of pardoning criminals. In December, a former Wagner member was arrested in the Rostov border region. The 38-year-old confronted the police with shots from a Kalashnikov. According to Wagner, he was a deserter who had been sentenced to prison for robbery. Prigozhin, who previously told prison inmates that death would pay for escape, called for an investigation into the leak of this incident to the press.
The disclosure of the lurid past of some Wagner members serves propaganda purposes. Unlike members of the armed forces, particularly those mobilized into the ranks, the deaths of former prisoners receive less coverage in the Russian media. Many of them are just common criminals.
Wagner also has one of the most vulnerable groups in prisons in mind, the prisoners from other countries. “The Kyrgyz authorities are urgently trying to repatriate their citizens convicted in Russia,” warns Asel Doolotkeldieva, a professor at the Academy of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Bishkek, the capital of this Central Asian state.
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there are 1,077 Kyrgyz prisoners in Russia. One of them is Amanbol, 30 years old. Three months ago he was hired by Wagner, desperate about his situation. He had served half of his nine-year sentence behind bars for a rape his mother said was committed by someone else weeks before he arrived in Russia. “You’ve already spent too much money on recourse. If I’m destined to die, I will die. If not, I’ll come back, suffer no more,” he told his mother in one of their recent conversations about the NGO Rus Sidiáshchaya.
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