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NEW: We spent the last few weeks identifying ~30 Wagner convict fighters who returned from Ukraine and received their pardons. Five agreed to talk to us. What resulted is the most detailed insider account of Wagner’s prisoner army yet published @Reuters https://t.co/8R849i7gIj
— Felix Light (@felix_light) March 16, 2023
Two are missing parts of a leg. A third has lost an arm. They are identified as pardoned former convicts, returned from the front in Ukraine after joining Wagner from prison https://t.co/DKvMIXh9B7 2/2 pic.twitter.com/s1og8uCaqX
— Reuters Investigates (@specialreports) March 16, 2023
Wagner is ultra cyberpunk.
Most of the troops are now convicts, after Putin made the call to allow the PMC to recruit from prisons.
This means that if they die, the state has saved money on housing them. If they don’t die, well then, that is also good. It’s win-win, and basically ensures an unlimited amount of soldiers for this absurd attrition war.
I don’t think there is any evidence that this Reuters interview is real, but it might be. It is interesting either way.
Reuters tracked down and interviewed five Russian prisoners who fought in Ukraine in return for freedom. They gave the most detailed insider account yet of Wagner’s convict army.
In October last year, a Russian news site published a short video of Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary army, sitting with four men on a rooftop terrace in the resort town of Gelendzhik, on Russia’s Black Sea coast. Two are missing parts of a leg. A third has lost an arm. They are identified as pardoned former convicts, returned from the front in Ukraine after joining Wagner from prison.
“You were an offender, now you’re a war hero,” Prigozhin tells one man in the clip. It was the first video to depict the return of some of the thousands of convicts who joined Wagner in return for the promise of a pardon if they survived six months of war.
Reuters used facial recognition software to examine this video and more than a dozen other videos and photographs of homecoming convict fighters, published between October 2022 and February 2023. Reporters were able to identify more than 30 of the men by cross-checking the images with social media and Russian court documents.
That’s terrifying and really a much bigger story than the story in question.
But okay.
In their ranks are murderers, thieves and a self-declared “Satanist.” Several are in hospital recovering from wounds sustained in the fighting. Reuters managed to make contact with 11 of these men. Five agreed to be interviewed by phone and messaging app. What follows is the most detailed insider account yet of Wagner’s convict army: the fighters’ recruitment and training, the combat they saw in Ukraine, and their uncertain future in a Russia turned upside down by war with its neighbour.
Four of the men said they were personally recruited by Yevgeny Prigozhin as he toured Russia’s prison system to bolster his private army. Some of the men were deployed to Ukraine’s eastern Bakhmut region, site of some of the most intense fighting of the one-year-old conflict, where one man described the “utter hell” of the battlefield. Thousands have been killed on both sides. The battle for the city of Bakhmut now hangs in the balance. A former Wagner commander who fled to Norway in January has said he witnessed members of Wagner’s internal security administering brutal treatment to prisoner recruits, including executions for desertion.
That isn’t “brutal treatment.”
You have to execute deserters. The US has always done this. You literally cannot have a military if you don’t execute deserters. But of course, Reuters can just not mention that this is standard practice in every military and pretend it is some new form of “brutal” behavior, because the Americans who read this tripe are too stupid and poorly educated to know that deserter execution is the absolute norm in every military ever in all of history.
Combat training, some conducted by veterans of Russia’s special forces, was short but intensive, according to the men. Ukrainian and Western officials say Wagner is sending poorly prepared fighters to certain death in eastern Ukraine.
…
All five ex-prisoners expressed a fierce loyalty to Prigozhin for giving them a second chance at life. Though Reuters could not independently confirm the men’s accounts of their service, many of the details were consistent with one another. Russia’s Defence Ministry and penal service did not respond to detailed questions for this article, nor did Prigozhin and Wagner. Prigozhin has previously described Wagner as “probably the most experienced army that exists in the world today” and said its casualty rate is comparable with other Russian units.
When Prigozhin began touring Russia’s sprawling penal system in summer 2022 offering pardons to those who agreed to fight in Ukraine, word quickly spread among prisoners.
It’s like that John Carpenter movie “Ghosts of Mars.”
Rustam Borovkov, from the small town of Porkhov, near Russia’s border with Estonia, was one of the four men filmed on the rooftop terrace. Court records show that the 31-year-old was six years into a 13-year term for manslaughter and theft in late July when Prigozhin reached his prison, Penal Colony No. 6 in Russia’s western Pskov region. Borovkov and two friends had broken into a house to steal homebrewed alcohol, according to the court papers. One of them struck the homeowner, who died as a result.
It’s best because it is like, the archetypal Russian crime story.
Borovkov had heard from inmates in St Petersburg that Prigozhin was travelling from prison to prison in search of recruits. “I knew right away that I would go,” he told Reuters, “even before he came to us.”
Rustam Borovkov
Six-time convicted thief Yevgeny Kuzhelev said a sense of patriotic duty drew him to Wagner. The 29-year-old was serving time in Russia’s southwestern Samara region for stealing cognac, beer and instant coffee from supermarkets in the Volga car-making city of Togliatti, according to court papers.
Haha!
They have to have made these up!
They’re too perfect!
“I was sentenced to 3 years and 7 months and I’d already served two years. So I didn’t have long left. But I went anyway. Why? I thought about it, and I am sure that if I had been free at the time, I would have one hundred percent gone to fight. I would have gone as a volunteer,” he said. “I remember how from February, when it all started, I called my aunt from time to time from prison. She kept telling me that this friend of yours went [to Ukraine], then another one, then a third, a fourth … And I knew that I would have done the same.”
…
One of the convict recruits told Reuters he travelled to a Wagner training camp in the Russian-controlled part of eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk region. Borovkov said training was conducted by former members of Russia’s special forces. “Everything was organised at the highest level,” said Borovkov, who previously served with the military force that secures Russia’s railways. “It wasn’t that they gave me a machine gun, showed me how to shoot and that’s it. No, they explained everything, and in great detail. Mining, demining, tactics, shooting, physical training. Everything.”
The men who spoke to Reuters said that most of the inmates who joined Wagner had some kind of military experience. They had previously served as conscripts under Russia’s one-year military draft or as professional soldiers. The convicts with the most military experience were appointed squad commanders, two of the men said.
“When we got to training, we were asked in detail who knew what, who had served, where they served,” said 38-year-old Dmitry Yermakov, who joined Wagner 10 years into a 14-year sentence for kidnapping. He declined to discuss his criminal record. “And then, when we had been divided into units, they let the lads choose their own commanders. By that time I had already earned some kind of authority, so I was chosen.”
Yermakov said the recruits who realised the gravity of the situation and asked instructors to repeat drills were the best prepared for what was to come. “Those were the men who were genuinely ready to go to war,” he said. Others hoped merely to run down the clock on their six-month stints, hoping that they would receive their pardon having seen as little combat as possible. Of these men, Yermakov said: “It was absolutely clear they were going to die.”
Yermakov and Kuzhelev
“It was amazing,” said Andrei Yastrebov, a 22-year-old native of St Petersburg, who was serving time for car theft when he joined Wagner. Yastrebov also goes by the name Andrei Kiriyenko on social media. “So much adrenalin. I wish all real men would join Wagner. You can write that. The Ukies ran and Wagner fucked them up.”
So true.
Real men join wars and destroy Anal Empire fighters.
This is just simply a fact.
Four of the men interviewed by Reuters were seriously injured and invalided out of Ukraine long before completing their stints. They said Wagner had told them that time spent in hospital and rehabilitation would be counted towards their six-month terms and they would receive clemency regardless. Two said they have already got their pardons.
…
“In a war, you’re almost always lying flat on the ground. It’s the only way to survive,” said Kuzhelev, the convicted thief. He told Reuters he spent two months at the front before receiving a shrapnel wound to his arm. “We always wish people ‘Happy Birthday’ after they have been wounded” because they have dodged death. “That’s what they said to me,” he added.
Now free years ahead of schedule, whether at home or facing long periods of treatment and rehabilitation, the surviving fighters are returning to a country where their actions on the frontline are lionised by many. Prigozhin has previously said that he is giving convicts who join Wagner a “second chance” at life, and an opportunity to redeem themselves.
It’s very cool, but it’s also beautiful, is it not?
You’re the most despised in society, and then by bravery alone, you become among the most respected in society.
Few criminals have ever had the chance for this kind of redemption arc.
Earlier this month the State Duma passed a law making it a crime to “discredit” Wagner fighters. The law, which previously applied more narrowly to Russia’s armed forces, was extended at Prigozhin’s request.
…
For Kuzhelev, who as of February had been in a Krasnodar region hospital for four months, Prigozhin had given him a new lease on life. Court documents show he spent almost seven of his 29 years in prison for six separate convictions. “The last time I was sent to prison, I was thinking: ‘Well, here I am again, what’s next?’” he said. “I’ll serve a year, another, a third, and then what? I’ll go out, and what am I going to do on the outside? What am I going to do with myself, given my background?”
“Well, now I’m clean. I have some money. I can think about the future. Think about getting a mortgage to buy an apartment … I have all this thanks to our esteemed Yevgeny Viktorovich,” Kuzhelev added, using Prigozhin’s patronymic as a sign of respect.
All five of the men who spoke to Reuters said either that they would remain with Wagner after their six month service, or were seriously considering doing so.
Russia is awesome.
Everything about Russia is as good as everything about America is satanic and gay.
I love romantic cyberpunk stories of personal redemption. That is really the best thing.
