The Russian mercenary group in Ukraine: how it has helped the Ukranian people to survive the war, and what does it tell us?
The bodies of the Ukranian were laid side-by-side on the grass and the earth next to them was open. Dragged to the spot by Russian mercenaries, the victims’ arms pointed to where they had died.
“There is no need for a grenade, we will just bash them in,” another says of the Ukrainian soldiers who will come to collect the bodies. The mercenaries then realize they have run out of ammunition.
The 26-year-old, who says he previously served in the Russian military, joined Wagner as a volunteer. After signing his contract a few months after, he crossed into Ukraine to serve near the frontline city of Bakhmut. The mercenary group has emerged as a key player in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The group has been helped to understand its exact capabilities by the limited official information about its existence and ties to the Russian state.
And as Russia’s prospects of victory in Ukraine – or even claiming a positive outcome – look thin, life as a Russian mercenary doesn’t hold the same appeal it might once have had.
“They have more weighty, more meaningful experience than the army. He said that the army had no experience and were forced to sign a contract.
There is a big obfuscation about a strong Russian army and the Russian army cannot handle the war without mercenaries.
What have Ukrainians told US gendarmes about the invasion of Ukraine and the continued recruitment problems in the Kremlin? A Russian defense source says the information from Wagner’s prison operations has made a lot of progress
A senior US defense source stated in September that “Wagner has been suffering high losses in Ukraine, especially and predictably among young and inexperienced fighters.”
Wagner fighters have even been offered bonuses – all paid in US dollars – for wiping out Ukrainian tanks or units, according to a senior Ukrainian defense source and based on the intelligence gathered on Wagner since the start of the war by Ukrainian authorities.
Yusov also said that Wagner is increasingly being used to patch holes in the Russian front line. This was also confirmed by a US senior defense official, who added that Wagner is being used across different front lines unlike Chechen fighters, for instance, who are focused around the Russian offensive aimed at Bakhmut.
He says the logistical challenges have been made worse by the need to supply the troops with bullets and food as well as by the fact that Ukraine has increased its attacks on Russia.
Social media and online have been used to spread the invitations to contact recruiters. CNN contacted a recruiters office who said that they would be able to get a monthly salary at least 240,000 rubles ($4,000), with a business trip of at least four months. The recruiters message made clear the medical conditions that wouldn’t allow applicants to join.
The private military company once considered itself to be one of the most professional units in the Kremlin’s arsenal.
There were already signs that Wagner’s prison recruitment was flagging before Prigozhin’s announcement. Lawyers and a human rights activist told the independent Russian outlet Agentstvo that recruiters had started to threaten prisoners with new criminal cases if they did not agree to go to the front. CNN reached out to one of the lawyers who was involved in the claim, but could not independently confirm it.
Working on Ukrainian investigations into possible Russian war crimes, Belousov fears that this laissez faire approach to recruiting will lead to an increase in war crimes.
The Russian Army Struggles: Is it a good idea to lose your job, but how is it used to make a difference?
Although direct recruitment from prisons is a new step, Gabidullin said that a criminal record hadn’t been an obstacle to employment with Wagner. He told CNN of his imprisonment for murder and he also told the commanders that they’d served with the group after prison sentences.
discontent in its ranks is a bigger problem than the struggles in Ukraine. That is important for a group that depends on the appeal of its salaries and work.
In August the Ukrainian intelligence services noted a decline in a group of soldiers, according to Yusov. In Russian troops, it is a trend he has also seen.
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.
Ex-commander Gabidullin, who says he talks to his old comrades on an almost daily basis, explained that this demoralization was due to their dissatisfaction “with the overall organization of the fighting: The Russian leadership has a problem making competent decisions.
For one mercenary who contacted Gabidullin for advice, that incompetence was too much. He called me and said he wouldn’t be there anymore. I’m not taking part in this anymore,’” Gabidullin told CNN.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/europe/wagner-ukraine-struggles-marat-gabidullin-cmd-intl/index.html
A battle nickname for a Russian soldier in Mykolaiv, Ukraine: delivering anti-tank missiles to a fallen Wagner mercenary
In one clip, a fallen Wagner mercenary lies, in death, almost peacefully, his left hand gently gripping the black earth. The battlefield is covered in dead bodies and flaming armored vehicles. Occasional shots crackle through the smoke.
The soldier’s comrade apologized lightly and stripped of his shirt by the battle that killed him. “Let’s get out of here, if they shoot us, we’ll lie next to him.”
The Russian armored vehicle was abandoned and the engine was still running when the battalion commander came across it. Inside there was a sniper rifle, rocket propelled grenades, helmets and belongings. The men were gone.
“They dropped everything: personal care, helmets,” said the commander, who uses the code name Swat. “I think it was a special unit, but they were panicking. It was raining and the road was bad.
MYKOLAIV, Ukraine — On the second day of the war with Russia, Anatoliy Nikitin and Stas Volovyk, two Ukrainian army reservists, were ordered to deliver NLAW anti-tank missiles to fellow soldiers in the suburbs north of Kyiv. As they stood exposed on a highway, Nikitin, the battle nickname, says they received new orders.
“A guy on the radio said, ‘There are two Russian tanks coming at you. Try to hit one and livestream it!,” recalls Nikitin, sitting on a park bench in the southern city of Mykolaiv, as artillery rumbles in the distance.
There was one problem: neither soldier had ever fired an NLAW. So, as the tanks approached, they hid amongst some trees and looked up a YouTube video on how to do so. They had prepared the missiles and took their positions.
The commander said, “Oh, it’s ours!” It’s ours! Volovyk is known as the nickname Raptor. “So, we did not fire. It was a close call.
The first month saw the use of missiles and hit-and-run tactics. These days, they are using drones and artillery as part of a high-tech trench war in the farm fields of the country’s’ south.
Both of those people have fought in environments that were described by them as a mix of terror, adventure and black comedy. The two men say the first days of the war were chaotic and unvarnished.
“It was chaotic, I wore a salt-and-pepper beard and I work for a construction company,” says the 40 year old. “It’s lucky for us that the Russians were more chaotic than us.”
Volovyk is a 33-year-old software engineer who learned English by playing video games. He says that Russian tactics and decision-making have improved during the war, but he was troubled by some early actions. Riot police who were dispatched to Kyiv were wiped out by the Russians.
Volovyk, who wears a camouflage cap with a message “Don’t worry, be ready”, was wondering if they were just mocking him.
“It sucks,” says Volovyk. “You dig. You dig. If you don’t dig, you’re dead, that’s the only thing you can do.
After two weeks, the men were offered new jobs doing reconnaissance. It’s dangerous work that involves getting close to enemy lines and trying to evade detection. But the men leapt at the opportunity — anything to get out of the trenches.
Their recon team, known as the “Fireflies,” has its own Instagram account and YouTube channel. They showed them launching a drone in a dry field and setting up in an abandoned farmhouse. Then they help guide a shell that just misses a Russian armored personnel carrier, enveloping it in a cloud of smoke. It’s a reminder that it is still hard to hit a moving target with all the advanced technology.
Drone operators are targets themselves. Once the Russians spot a drone, they try to calculate the general area where the operators might be hiding and methodically hit it with artillery fire.
The soldiers have had some heart-stopping moments. Nikitin recalls traveling with a team of engineers when they came across a Russian soldier in a field.
“He just jumps into the bushes and I looked at him, and he looked at me, I looked at him, he just jumped into the bushes.” He told the engineers to shoot the Russians.
Nikitin and Volovyk joined the army reserve six years ago, after the Russians invaded Crimea. Nikitin says they weren’t prophets, but they knew Russia would try to take the rest of Ukraine. Here down south, their goal is to liberate Kherson, the regional capital.
Videos shot by Ukrainian drones of Russian infantry being struck by shells in poorly-prepared positions has supported the claims of high casualty rates, as have reports about Russian news media telling relatives about high casualty rates. The videos have not been independently verified, and their exact location could not be determined.
Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the Ukrainian military, said in a statement posted on the Telegram messaging app on Thursday that Russian forces had tripled the intensity of attacks along some parts of the front. He did not say what the time frame was or where the attacks were coming from.
“We discussed the situation at the front,” General Zaluzhnyi wrote. Ukrainian forces, he said he had told his U.S. colleague, were beating back the attacks, “thanks to the courage and skills of our warriors.”
An assessment from the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based analytical group, also said that the increase in infantry in the Donbas region in the east had not resulted in Russia’s gaining new ground.
“Russian forces would likely have had more success in such offensive operations if they had waited until enough mobilized personnel had arrived to amass a force large enough to overcome Ukrainian defenses,” the institute said in a statement on Thursday.
In its two counteroffensives in the northeast and south the Ukrainian military has cut supply lines and attacked Russian depots with long-range rockets.
Earlier, Russia claimed that more than 600 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in a Russian strike in Kramatorsk carried out in “retaliation” over the Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Makiivka last week, according to a statement from the Russian Defense Ministry.
With Russian and Ukrainian forces apparently preparing for battle in Kherson, and conflicting signals over what may be coming, the remaining residents of the city have been stocking up on food and fuel to survive combat.
There was a Russian attack last week in eastern Ukraine that left a large number of soldiers from the Ukrainian army dead.
The strike in Makiivka took place just after midnight, on New Year’s Day, targeting a school for Russian conscripts in the east of the country, according to both Ukrainian and pro-Russian accounts.
The attack has led to vocal criticism of the Russian military from pro-Russian military bloggers, who claimed that the troops lacked protection and were reportedly being quartered next to a large cache of ammunition, which is said to have exploded when Ukrainian HIMARS rockets hit the school.
The Russian defense ministry on Monday acknowledged the attack and claimed that 63 Russian servicemen died, which would make it one of the deadliest single episodes of the war for Moscow’s forces.
Russian lawmaker Grigory Karasin believes that those responsible for the killing of Russian servicemen must be found, the state news agency said Monday.
What have we learnt about the Makiivka facility of the Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic? A comment by Boris Rozhin
Video reportedly from the scene of the attack circulated widely on Telegram, including on an official Ukrainian military channel. It shows a pile of smoking rubble, in which almost no part of the building appears to be standing.
The Director of the Strategic Communications of the Chief Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said on Telegram Greetings and congratulations to the Sepoys and conscript who were brought to occupied the Makiivka and crammed into the building of a Vocational School. Santa packed the corpses of the Russian soldiers in bags.
The high command is still not aware of the capabilities of the weapon, according to a former official in the Russia-backed Donetsk administration.
Bezsonov hopes that those who made a decision to use this facility will be reprimanded. There are so many abandoned facilities in the area that personnel can be quarters.
The building was almost completely destroyed when the secondary detonation of the armory took place according to a Russian propagandist who wrote on Telegram.
“Nearly all the military equipment, which stood close to the building without the slightest sign of camouflage, was also destroyed,” Girkin said. There are still no final figures on the number of casualties.
The Russian generals who are said to direct the war effort far from the frontline have been called “unlearned in principle” and unwilling to listen to warnings about putting equipment and personnel so close together. A Dutch court of mass murder sentenced the former minister of defense of the self-proclaimed Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic to life imprisonment for his involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine.
Boris Rozhin, who also blogs about the war effort under the nickname Colonelcassad, said that “incompetence and an inability to grasp the experience of war continue to be a serious problem.”
“As you can see, despite several months of war, some conclusions are not made, hence the unnecessary losses, which, if the elementary precautions relating to the dispersal and concealment of personnel were taken, might have not happened.”
Russian air raid sirens, a new attack on pro-Russian separatists, and a blame game in Donetsk
Donetsk has been held by pro-Russian separatists since 2014 and it is one of four Ukrainian regions that Moscow sought to annex in October in violation of international law.
Russian forces “lost 760 people killed just yesterday, (and) continue to attempt offensive actions on Bakhmut,” the military’s general staff said Sunday.
Russian units have been pressing an offensive towards the city of Bakhmut in Donetsk for months but have suffered heavy losses as Ukrainian forces have targeted them in what is largely open rural territory.
Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine over the weekend as fresh rounds of Russian missile strikes hit several regions. The attacks killed at least six people in the Donetsk, Kharkiv and Chernihiv regions, while a man was injured early Monday.
A CNN team on the ground has not found any large numbers of casualties in the area. The team reported that there is no unusual activity in and around Kramatorsk.
Kramtorsk, where a reporter is from, had no evidence of a big Russian strike on the two college dormitories that it claimed had been housing hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers.
A blame game broke out when Moscow claimed its soldiers had used cell phones, after some pro-Kremlin leaders and military experts blamed the Russian government.
The leader of the DPR in eastern Ukraine contradicted that account by angrily dismissing it as a lie, and also pointed to a discrepancy between the Russian command and the military troops on the ground.
Intl: Theoretical analysis of Medvedev’s deployment to Northern Norway and the fate of his service with the SOV Investigating Agency
He claims that they would round up people who didn’t want to fight and then shoot them in front of newcomers. Two prisoners did not want to fight. They shot them in front of everyone and buried them in the trenches that had been dug by the trainees.
Prigozhin has previously confirmed that Medvedev had served in his company, and said that he “should have been prosecuted for attempting to mistreat prisoners.”
“There were no real tactics at all. There were no clear orders about how we should behave. We had a plan for how we would go about it. How it would turn out was a problem for us, he said.
Medvedev spoke to CNN from Oslo after crossing its border in a daring defection that, he says saw him evade arrest “at least ten times” and dodge bullets from Russian forces. He crossed into Norway over an icy lake using white camouflage to blend in, he said.
He told CNN that on the fifth day of his deployment in Ukraine, he knew he wouldn’t be coming back for another tour.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/europe/wagner-norway-andrei-medvedev-ukraine-intl/index.html
The Battle of Bakhmut, Ukraine: A Search for a Soldier to Rejoin a Long-Baseline Regime in the Presence of a Large Number of Pions
Once prisoners were allowed to join, the number grew and he started with 10 men under his command. There was more dead bodies and more people coming in. In the end I had a lot of people under my command,” he said. “I couldn’t count how many. They were in constant circulation. More dead bodies, more prisoners.
Nobody wanted to pay that kind of money. Many Russians who died in fighting in Ukraine have not been found.
“Sooner or later the propaganda in Russia will stop working, the people will rise up and all our leaders …will be up for grabs and a new leader will emerge.”
The death of Yevgeny Nuzhin, who was murdered on camera with a sledgehammer, motivated him to leave, according to Medvedev.
The Ukrainian soldiers live southwest of the city of Bakhmut in a cold, candle-lit Bunker. Hundreds of fighters belonging to the Russian military contractor have been clashing with the Ukrainians for several weeks.
He says that another group will claim another 30 meters. They lost a lot of people in the meantime but they are trying to move forward.
Only when the first wave is exhausted or cut down do Wagner send in more experienced combatants, often from the flanks, in an effort to overrun Ukrainian positions.
The southwestern city of Odesa is devastated by the death of a Ukrainian engineer in the first wave of Russia’s invasion by Russia
“Our machine gunner was almost getting crazy, because he was shooting at them. And he said, I know I shot him, but he doesn’t fall. And then after some time, when he maybe bleeds out, so he just falls down.”
According to him, it looks like they are getting some drugs before the attack, and that he has not been able to verify.
Even after the first waves were eliminated, the attack continued as the Ukrainian defenders say they ran out of bullets and found themselves surrounded.
He spoke to CNN, and the fields above his bunkers echoed with almost constant shelling. A distant sound is heard, followed by a bang next to a few kilometers away.
The engineer was told that he would die in the battle, according to Andriy. You’re afraid to fight for your freedom in your country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is the country’s leading comedian and was compared to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Andriy, who is from the southwestern city of Odesa and joined up within days of Russia’s invasion, says that no matter how many more fighters are sent to storm their positions, they will resist.
The majority of my guys are volunteers. They had (a) good business, they had (a) good job, they had a good salary, but they came to fight for their homeland. And it makes a great difference,” he says.
The end of Russian prison recruitment: Comment on the conduct of private contractor Yevgeniy Prigozhin, whose military experience with Vladimir Putin, and Russia Behind Bars
Private military contractor Wagner will have to look for new fighters beyond Russia’s prison system according to its boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Prigozhin said on his company’s Telegram channel Thursday: “We have completely discontinued the recruitment of prisoners into Wagner PMC. People who work for us are fulfilling their obligations.
Prigozhin had a catering service that took care of high-profile occasions for the Russian president. The military services were included in the expansion of the catering contracts. In 2014, Walker says, the nature of Prigozhin’s business shifted when Putin decided to annex Crimea and invade Ukraine for the first time.
Volunteers from prison were brought in to help out after signing up between 40,000 and 50,000 prisoners.
Figures just released by the Russian Penitentiary Service may support that. They showed that the prison population decreased by 6,000 between November and January, compared to a drop of 23,000 inmates between September and October last year.
They said that dozens of prisoners were signed up after they had been visited by Prisyhin. He made promise about wages and other benefits after he arrived at their prisons in a helicopter, as well as promising that his criminal records would be erased.
One of the fighters said that a lot of them came from his unit because they had long sentences. “But there were also some who had only 12 days of their sentence remaining, and they went anyway.
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 very hard to know where the cash comes from to sustain a huge increase in ranks.
After CNN asked him for comment on the end of Russian prison recruitment, Prigozhin responded by joking that millions of US citizens had applied to join the mercenary group.
Olga Romanova, who is with the prisoner advocacy group Russia Behind Bars, believes that the Russian Ministry of Defense is now in charge of any further recruitment in Russia’s prisons.
The fighters were captured by the Ukrainians. CNN is not disclosing their identities for their own safety. Both are married with children and were recruited while in prison. One was in jail for 20 years for manslaughter.
The Ukrainians were present in the room where the interview was taking place. CNN told the fighters that they could end the interview at any time they wished. But they spoke in detail for more than an hour.
“There were 90 of us. Sixty people died in the first assault. A handful remained wounded,” said one, recalling his first assault near the village of Bilohorivka. One group is sent away if they are unsuccessful. If the second one is unsuccessful, they send another group.”
The other fighter participated in a five-day assault that took place in the forest near the city of Luskhansk on the Luhansk-Donetsk border.
You can not help the wounded. The Ukrainians were firing heavily on us, so even if their wounds were minor, you’ve got to keep going, otherwise you’re the one getting hit by the fire.
The prisoner said a self-preservation instinct had kicked in for him, but others froze. “Some stop right there in the forest and drop their weapons. To drop your weapons is to die.
The wounded were not evacuated, he said. “If you’re wounded, you roll away on your own at first, any way you can, somewhere neutral where there’s no fire, and if there’s no one around, you administer first aid to yourself,” he said.
The men said that Casualties piled up by the dozen. “When the casualties arrive, you get orders to load them, and you don’t really think who’s dead and who’s wounded,” one of the fighters said.
They became numb to the casualties and the killing of the Ukrainian soldiers they faced. “You’d think you’d feel something You keep going, no, after killing someone.
The other fighter reported that their commander told them that they would have to be eliminated if they got cold feet. And if we failed to eliminate him, we would be eliminated for failing to eliminate him.”
His brother said that he had gone missing for four months. One of them was silent, but he was sending his brother his salary from a rented office in a sealed bag. A third person was depicted as a lucky returnee in a video. Yet a friend described his “zombie-like” appearance, heavy drinking and urgent desire to return to the front.
One prisoner said that older prisoners were required to demonstrate their ability to march a few yards in order to be selected. They took most of the people.
CNN spoke to several prisoners who worked for a unit known by its number “08807” – who all say they were employed directly by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The documents held suggest that they were deployed to a part of the Luhansk separatist army which is currently under 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.
The training was brief and basic, as they would soon have to carry out horrible assaults. The men said it was clear they were prepared for missions they didn’t sign up for.
Viktor Sevalnev, the last message from a prisoner killed in armed robbery, assault on a factory outside Soledar
One said he did not mention anything about danger. “He talked about expunging all convictions, we would serve six months, all convictions would be expunged, an advance payment of 240,000 roubles (around $3,300) and also that our task was to hold the defense on the second line.”
The command ordered me to dig at my position, so I did it. They sent one group of 10, and the sniper eliminated all 10,” he recalled.
I think it was the wrong choice to fight against the AFU because I have never been involved in military operations like that. They brought us here because they thought they were going to kill us. And so we are at war, but I don’t think it’s a just cause,” said one.
It is the last message Viktor 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. After most of his colleagues died in an assault on a factory outside Soledar, the act of survival proved fatal to Sevalnev.
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. His body was returned to his wife in Moscow in a closed coffin.
CNN is the meat grinder: A soldier killed by a Ukrainian warfighter in Luhansk before an assault on a key factory in Soledar
CNN was told by a Ukrainian intelligence official that prisoners recently captured by Ukrainian forces claimed to be employed by the ministry.
Usov said the development had “echoes of internal squabbling among the Russian military leadership,” and that the Russian defense hierarchy, defense minister Sergei Shoigu and the new head of the Ukraine operation, Valery Gerasimov, were creating a convict resource they could directly control through the ministry’s own private companies. 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 obtained by Gulagu.net shows Sevalnev and his unit celebrating pre-deployment by dancing at a camp inside of Luhansk. It also shows them eating and joking just behind the frontlines the night before they began an assault on a key factory in Soledar, which would prove fatal for the majority of Sevalnev’s unit, survivors said.
Three other survivors of the unit spoke to CNN from hospital. He said that Sevalnev was wounded once, but then sent back to the frontline, where he was wounded again.
There are no surgeries on anyone here, he said. CNN is withholding his name and others’ for their own safety. There are people in the hospital with bullet wounds and shrapnel in their legs.
He described catastrophic losses while a former soldier. “Our batch was 130 people, but we also have many amputees, and we probably have 40 people left”, he added, saying many different groups of prisoners were added to their unit over time. He said his unit had only 15 survivors and that it was now known as the Storm unit. “In short, the meat grinder,” he added. He told CNN he had been sent back to the frontline after his injuries healed.
“I don’t have any complaints, war is war. Some come here, hear the machine gun, and run. It isn’t good. He said that they put everyone else up as nobody has his back. This soldier was wounded severely in the leg in October, after 25 days on the front, but described how he felt no fear. “In the trench, 2-6 meters from me a shell lands, soil falls down to the trench, but I don’t feel any fear at all. I don’t know why it happens like this with me.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russian-army-prisoners-conscripts-ukraine-intl/index.html
On the fate of convicts employed by Wong and his family, and the death of a Tanzanian student, Nemes 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.
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 open decrees and there are decrees with various classifications of secrecy,” he said. That is why I am not able to say anything about them. The procedure for pardoning prisoners is done 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.
Wagner released a ghoulish video of a memorial ceremony in Tarimo’s honor at a graveyard in Molkino, western Russia, saying he died in October near Bakhmut. 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 tells CNN that he was obedient when he was a child. He wasn’t a scamp, but was a very religious person.” She also said they had heard nothing about his recruitment until after his death. When he was alive, we never heard about him being arrested for drugs, but now that he is dead, we are told he was. It leaves a huge amount of sadness and sorrow in the family. He never even had a dream of becoming a soldier.”
“The last of us” — an old Russian prisoner. Now you know what happened to him, and now you don’t – or what did you do?
He spent his whole 20s in jail. “He emerges just before his 30th birthday into this rapidly changing country with the very last death throes of the Soviet Union,” Walker says. He sold hotdogs while he was in prison. He moves quickly on to bigger things.
The pitch is six months: it’s going to be terrible. It’s going to be very difficult. If you try to run away, we’ll shoot you. If you don’t give your everything, we will shoot you,” Walker says. After six months you’re free to go, if you want to.
“It’s just so out of the realms of fantasy that this former convict is going to fly around prisons in his helicopter and offer people salvation for fighting for him at the front, and then lead these battalions of prisoners to their almost certain death,” Walker says. “It’s so dystopian that it’s really hard to believe. Yet it has happened.
He’s a big man. He has a shaved head. He speaks in quite coarse language. It’s clear that this is not a polished guy. This guy is not very smart or cultured. When we researched this article, we got hold of a few prisoners who are still in prison and were able to speak with them via text message, and we asked them why they agreed to go. “We could tell that he was a member of us”, they said. We kind of respected him because he’d also been in prison.” … They all said it was clear that he was a man who had served his time and would give them their freedom if they fought for him. All of the people said that they wouldn’t trust a normal Russian official, but that the guy had something about him that made them believe he was one of them.
He’s not making a big deal of it. This is not going to be pleasant or it is going to be a holiday. He’s basically saying, look, you’re probably going to die. It’s going to be absolutely horrible. The fighting is intense. You will be thrown right in at the front line. But if you survive this, I’ve got your back.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/23/1158944377/russia-ukraine-war-mercenaries-prisoners-yevgeny-prigozhin-putin
Why do the convicts in the Wagner Group get their kicks? Some sinister things can happen to you if you cross Yevgeny Prigozhin
Perhaps a couple of weeks [of training]. All of the reports we’ve had of the way that the convicts are used by the Wagner Group is that they’re not used on sort of difficult strategic operations or anything particularly targeted and careful. They’re used as cannon fodder. In talking to Ukrainians who have been on the other side of the lines, they have said that there’s really strength in numbers, which is the opposite of what we’ve heard. It’s a bit of a disregard, really, for human life. For those who have decided that they do not want to advance, there have been many reports of their people being put to death in order to keep everybody else in line.
People who look into Prigozhin’s activities tend to have rather worrying, sinister things happen to them. One journalist from the Novaya Gazeta newspaper who did a large investigation into Prigozhin had his head delivered to his office and his house was given a funeral wreath. It’s kind of like a mafia touch.
The team for Alexei Navalny investigated how Prigozhin was able to win these government contracts. One of the Navalny’s top advisers was the main investigator on this case. After one of these investigations took place, her husband was stabbed by an unknown attacker with a needle, who fled, and he then collapsed. I was talking to Lyubov about this recently when we were preparing this article about Prigozhin. She thinks that this attack was connected to her investigation and that they were able to get her husband to the hospital. He received quick medical attention. The doctors told her if it had been longer, he wouldn’t have made it. It was a very strong animal tranquilizer that had been injected into his leg. … So, yes, some pretty sinister things can happen to you if you cross Yevgeny Prigozhin, let’s put it that way.
Max and the Ukrainian troops clearing a trench: “They were really young,” says Andriy, the safe house commander in the Donbas region
Max, a sniper from the Ukrainian side, is using his phone to listen to a song by the band AC/DC.
Max and a team of soldiers went to work on the night before, clearing a trench of Russian troops that had killed one of their friends with a machine gun.
Andriy, the team leader, lays out the contents of the dead men’s green backpacks on the ground, outside the Ukrainian team’s safe house in the country’s eastern Donbas region.
“They were really young, really, really young,” says Andriy, referring to the dead soldiers, “none older than 25 years old. They were not provided with anything.
The Russian mobilizeal reserve is pretty much infinite, which means that they have the luxury to make mistakes. They can lose a brigade or they can lose a platoon, and some of those people are going to survive and they can share experience with the new conscripts.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1159671076/ukraine-war-donbas-russian-ukrainian-troops
The Soledar parade: a “small army” of Russian soldiers preparing for the war in the Ukrainian city of Solevi
“They approach us, telling us not to shoot!” We are your people.’ This is how they try to get close to us,” Andriy says. “Our soldiers start to think, ‘OK, it’s our camouflage, so maybe it is our people.’ “
Max and his teammates share a house. It is a mixture of cozy domesticity and modern weaponry near the front lines.
“This subculture of football hooligans, it’s a small army,” says Max, who wears a military olive-green hoodie. He has a bat on the back of his hand, and a snake on his left. “I have a feeling that my whole life, it was preparing me for this war.”
“They’ve been told you either sit in the prison or you’ll get your freedom in the battlefield,” he says. “They are now just used as meat. They push them in the water.
“They push them forward under the threat of being shot,” Max says. The conscripts just keep going until they make it to the enemy. Then the Russians see where we are and they say “Let’s bomb there.” “
People are reluctant to use it. Max remembers a time when his team prepared for an attack in the Ukrainian city of Soledar, which was 40 miles east of here. A soldier led a group of Russian troops through the town oblivious that Max’s team was 150 feet away.
Max thought he looked like he was walking at the front of the parade. “Then some of our guys did something stupid. They shouted at him, ‘Stop!’ “
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1159671076/ukraine-war-donbas-russian-ukrainian-troops
Zelenskyy tries to force the Russian troops out of Ukrainian lands, but he doesn’t know how long it takes to recover
The view from the front line shows that Zelenskyy’s vow to push Russian soldiers out of Ukrainian lands is not a sure thing.
Max said it was cowboy-style shooting in the voice memo he recorded while in the hospital. We began to think what to do after the grenade hit my butt.
This is the first time Max has been wounded since he began fighting the Russians nearly nine years ago. He says he doesn’t know how long it will take him to recover.