Vigilante justice in the Wagner group: deserted, persecuted, killed

The Russian Wagner Group has been recruiting prisoners for the fight in Ukraine for months. Those who secretly plan to desert should be deterred by martial punishments. One case is particularly noteworthy.

There are images of horror that haunt the internet. Images intended to show executions by mercenaries from the Wagner group. Men who signed up with the private military contractor to serve in Ukraine changed their minds and surrendered to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The best-known and probably also the most horrible case: Yevgeny, a former prisoner. Deserted, exchanged, killed.

A trade and its consequences

Yevgeny’s mission in Ukraine is said to have started on September 2 last year. The convicted murderer had agreed to a deal with the Wagner troupe – early release from prison in return for combat use in Ukraine. On September 4 he defected to the Ukrainian side and surrendered.

This is what the skinny man tells a journalist who interviewed him while he was a prisoner of war in the Ukraine. The interview, which has been watched by more than ten million people since the fall, provides a rare, if subjective, insight into the inner lives of desperate people for whom the Wagner Group’s promise to be released after six months of military service seems like a last helping hand .

Right at the beginning of the interview, the journalist asks a question that would later become Yevgeny’s undoing: “You don’t mind if I ask you questions with the camera and then publish the video later, do you?” The supposed Wagner militiaman replies that he doesn’t mind.

Become visible – also for the Wagner troupe

So Yevgeny has a face and a story, also for the Wagner troupe. Under the YouTube–Video is another Ukrainian number of the program “I want to live”. Russian soldiers who wish to desert can use this number to contact the Ukrainian authorities.

But instead of a To get life and security, another video of Yevgeny is haunting the Internet a good month after the publication. It shows the alleged execution of the deserter. Apparently, after the interview was recorded, he had returned to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange.

There the punishment awaited him for what the Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin had once listed in an alleged recruitment video as the “first sin” in combat: “No one gives up.”

Apparently not an isolated case

Olga Romanova works for the prisoner organization “Russia behind bars”. She, too, knows videos like the one from the supposed execution of Yevgeny.

In an interview with the Russian YouTube channel Breakfast Show last week, she said she was aware of four extrajudicial executions. People were shot in the back of the head, and one was hanged from a beam, Romanowa says.

Stories like that of Yevgeny and the other alleged executions made the rounds in Russian prisons and, according to the human rights activist, have led to fewer and fewer prisoners volunteering for service in Ukraine. In the past, 200 or 300 prisoners there signed contracts with the private military contractor Wagner, but suddenly there were only 20 or 30.

This is one of the reasons why other videos are now making the rounds, Romanowa says in the interview: videos that are supposed to show how Wagner group boss Prigozhin releases prisoners as promised after six months of military service.

A PR campaign?

Romanova has her doubts about the promised amnesty, since even in Russia business people cannot simply grant pardons and the necessary papers also contain explanatory data. But the head of “Russia behind bars” suspects that it’s not even about a real amnesty.

For Romanova, the latest videos and rumors that after the war you can even study at renowned Russian universities without admission tests are more like a PR campaign: “Now we will see many people again who are ready to go to war with Prigozhin to pull.”

Escape across the ice

Some, like Yevgeny, will try to flee. So should this week Andrei Medvedev, commander of one of the Wagner units, fled across the border from Russia to Norway. “As I stepped on the ice, I heard a dog barking,” Medvedev later told YouTube channel Gulagu.net.

The former Wagner employee says he fled because his life was in danger. “My ’employer’ was on to me: Prigozhin and his gang. Also the Russian secret service FSB.”

There was a risk of being arrested and also killed: “Shot, or worse – beat to death with a hammer,” says Medvedev, alluding to the Yevgeny case.

A source for the security authorities?

He himself tried not to take part in such “activities,” says Medvedev. From a distance, however, he was “able to see everything well”. He now wants to work with the Norwegian authorities and also promises to share information with them about executions that are believed to have taken place at the Wagner Group.

Not only Norwegian authorities have now confirmed that Medvedev has applied for asylum in Norway. Wagner Group boss Prigozhin has already commented on the case. He confirmed on his Telegram channel that Medvedev was a member of his troops, but added that he should have been prosecuted for “attempted abuse of prisoners”: “Be careful, he is very dangerous.”

The lure of reduced detention

Yevgeny, who has now apparently been executed, had apparently already served almost his entire sentence when he signed with the Wagner group. In 1999 he was sentenced to 24 years for murder.

This year could actually have been his last if he hadn’t tried to escape from the prison in Nizhny Novgorod with three fellow prisoners. Two of the prisoners died, but Yevgeny survived and got four more years. So he would have had to wait another five years before he was released.

At the very end of his interview with the Ukrainian journalist, Yevgeny calmly warned that the promised “shortcut” as part of a Wagner mission was tempting, but it was also dangerous.

Home, work, family – that’s what counts, he wanted to tell his sons, not war. He has one piece of advice for the other prisoners: they shouldn’t go to war, but rather sit in prison until the deadline and then go home.