The gist The Wagner paramilitary organization is releasing prisoners who have served their sentences by moving in alongside the Russian army on the Ukrainian front. Among them are assassins released without supervision.
The Wagner mercenary group, an early combatant in Ukraine, fills their ranks with pardoned prisoners after spending time at the front lines. Despite catastrophic casualties, the surviving prisoners are slowly returning to Russia, causing fear and concern.
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The few survivors, often seriously wounded, therefore began to return from the front. This is the case of several men with amputated arms or legs who were present to Evguéni Prigojine (Editor’s note: Wagner’s head) in a video from October. Among them, Olga Pavlova recognized Stanislav Bogdanov.
According to the young Russian woman interviewed by the independent newspaper Thenewtab, Stanislav Bogdanov is her brother’s killer. The 35-year-old was set to serve a 23-year sentence for torturing Olga’s brother with a poker before dropping a dumbbell on his head.
Contacted by Thenewtab, he explains that his case is not an isolated one: “Another prisoner fighting with me killed four people […] He had the whole family except for the kid, who he couldn’t find.”
Captives in the wild
Novaya Gazeta, another independent newspaper, tracked down a criminal who was sentenced to 23 years in prison in 2018. Alexander Tyutin hired a hitman to kill his business partner, wife and two children, shot him with an assault rifle and then finished him off with an axe. Recruited by Wagner in July, he has since been fired and on January 17 left for Antalya in Turkey, a region where hundreds of thousands of Russians have gone into exile.
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These two ex-fighters aren’t the only ones. The Daily Beast reports that Moscow residents are receiving calls from men posing as police officers or under the mysterious alias “Major Solovyov”. The latter explain that after the Wagner group released several former prisoners, it was better to monitor children in the house. Some of the fighters recruited by Prigojine were in prison for pedophile acts. Russian police are reportedly now trying to identify the people behind these calls.
So many facts that don’t keep Prigojine from sleeping. When one such group of prisoners was released in January, Putin’s “cook” issued the following recommendation to ex-combatants: “Don’t drink too much, don’t do drugs, don’t rape women.” , before joking with the group of criminals.
[ ?? RUSSIE | ?? UKRAINE ]
? Yevgeny Prigoyine, head of Wagner, next to a group of Russian prisoners released for agreeing to fight in Ukraine.
? “Don’t drink too much, don’t do drugs, don’t rape women, don’t do anything stupid. » pic.twitter.com/TLVPHv6EdN
— (Small) think tank (@L_ThinkTank) January 6, 2023