They are sent to death. Prisoners recruited by the Wagner Group, mercenaries for a private Russian military company, are a tool of the Kremlin’s war tactic, according to Ukrainian army personnel: On the battlefield, they are launched for frontal attacks against Ukrainian lines “well defended”, functioning as decoys, as human objectives, which allow enemy firing points to be detected, which are subsequently damaged by Russian artillery.
“Convicts are thrown against our lines and we have to take them down. In this way, the enemy detects our firing points and tries to damage them with their artillery”, Petro Kuzyk, commander of the battalion of the city of Svoboda, of the Ukrainian army, which is fighting in Bakhmut, one of the cities of Donbass, tells the newspaper El Mundo. where the Russian forces concentrate their attacks and use this tactic.
Wagner group, real shadows with guns. Who is Putin’s paramilitary army?
Losses, says the commander, are “colossal”: “They [os russos] They don’t count the bodies. The fields, the forests in front of the positions, are all covered with corpses. We also saw them drag their people to bury them, but first they take the clothes off the dead and then they are dressed by the living,” he says. “They have entire herds.”
There are already several reports about the actions of the Russian private military company Wagner: on the day the European Parliament was to start proceedings to classify the group as terrorist, a “bloody” gavel was sent to Strasbourg.
The Wagner Group sends a “bloody” gavel to the European Parliament
The reports are infinitely worse in Russia. A complaint from the humanitarian association Gulagu reported that a Russian citizen was taken from the hospital and killed by the Wagner group. Sevalnev fought in the siege of the city of Liman and fled after the death of his son. With multiple shrapnel wounds, he was hospitalized. In November, members of the Wagner group took him out of the room and executed him for disobedience, for having withdrawn from the conflict.
Evgeny Nuzhin, arrested in the 1990s for murder, was another Russian prisoner who, after fleeing the battlefield, was executed. Recruited in prison, he joined the Wagner Group, went to the battlefield and later, in an interview with the Ukrainian press, revealed his intention to surrender to the Ukrainian forces, offering the chance to fight alongside him against Russia. The moment of his death was recorded in a video, shared on the Gray Zone Telegram channel, linked to the Wagner Group. “Punishment of a traitor”, is heard.
“Punishment of a traitor.” Russian soldier executed by the Wagner Group with sledgehammers to the head after surrendering to the Ukrainians
The Wagner Group, a private military company, was founded in 2007 by former Russian army officer Dmitriy Valeryevich Utkin, and gained international notoriety in 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea.
The paramilitary group will have appeared that year for the first time in Ukraine but in a peculiar way: the mercenaries were camouflaged, but without identification marks, being known only as true shadows with weapons. It is believed to be made up of members of the elite forces, secret services or ex-military.
Source: Observadora
