CNN
—
The voice may be distorted, but the emotion is unmistakable.
“I am being taken to be shot. I want to kill you.”
This is the last message sent by Viktor Sevalnev. A prisoner serving time in prison for armed robbery and assault, he was sent from prison to fight for Russia in Ukraine.after most of his colleagues were killed in an attack on an outdoor factory Soledarit was an act of survival that turned out to be fatal for Sevarnev.
In his final message to his wife, he said he feared that Russian Defense Ministry officials would soon remove him from his hospital bed, record a voice message there, and execute him. A few days later, the body was returned to his wife in Moscow in a closed coffin.
Sevarnev’s callous fate adds to the growing list of abuse complaints from inmates CNN spoke to.For months Russia has been using shadowy Private Mercenary Company Wagner Strengthen frontline presence with prisoners – initially the plan negative and secretivebut was then openly promoted by Wagner’s owner Evgeny Prigozhin.
On Thursday, Prigogine announced that Wagner had stopped recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine, saying: To those currently working for us, all obligations have been fulfilled. No reason was given for the decision, and CNN cannot independently verify the allegations.
But Sevalnev and several prisoners whom CNN spoke to appear to point to a disturbing new strategy.
A Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed to CNN that a prisoner recently captured by the Ukrainian military said he was employed directly by the ministry.
“They stressed that they were formally invited by the Ministry of Defense, not by Wagner,” Andriy Usov, head of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Defense Intelligence Service, told CNN.
Usov said the deployment had “echoes of infighting among the Russian military leadership” and was directly controlled through them by the Russian Defense Hierarchy, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the new head of the Ukrainian operations, Valery Gerasimov. He said he was creating a prisoner resource that could. Provincial private enterprise. Usov said the ministry’s prison population is down for now, but like Wagner, “will be used like cannon fodder.”
Vladimir Osekkin of the prisoner’s rights group Gulagu.net said the Ministry of Defense used “more favorable terms” to recruit recruits and prisoners to check the growing influence of its owner, Mr. Prigozhin. He said he seemed to be luring him out of Mr. Wagner. part of the army.
“Many people in Moscow are really afraid of Prigozhin,” said Osechkin. “They understand that he commands a huge gang (an organized criminal group consisting of mercenaries and murderers). They always arrange what God knows in Moscow can do.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
CNN spoke to several prisoners who worked for the unit known by the number “08807.” They all said they were directly employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Others held documents indicating their eventual deployment to part of the Luhansk separatist forces belonging to the Russian Ministry of Defense. Unit 08807 he deployed in October to the front line around Soledar, known as the “Sturm” brigade, to storm the Ukrainian front and suffered devastating casualties.
Grainy footage obtained by Gulagu.net shows Sevarnev and his unit dancing in a camp inside Luhansk to celebrate the pre-deployment. Survivors also reported seeing them eating and joking right behind the front lines the night before they launched their attack on a key Soledar factory.
Prisoners spoke of casual mistreatment both on and off the battlefield, but Sevarnev’s fate stood out. , his sudden death was apparently due to shrapnel damage.
Sevarnev’s wife declined to be interviewed for this report, but his audio message and images of him during the war were provided to CNN by Gulagu.net. According to Russian court documents obtained by CNN, Sevarnev was convicted of theft and, according to his sentence, should have been in prison when he died. His grave is outside Moscow and the month of his death is recorded as November 2022.
Three other survivors from the unit spoke to CNN from the hospital. One of the prisoners also said that Sevarnev was wounded once, but he was sent back to fight on the front lines, where he was wounded again.
“No one has had surgery here, no one has had surgery,” he said. CNN has withheld the names of him and the other surviving inmates for their safety. “People walk around [the hospital] He has bullet wounds and a shrapnel lodged in his leg. ”
A former soldier before his imprisonment, he also described the devastating loss. “Our group was 130 people, but we also have a lot of amputees and maybe 40 left,” he added, noting that many different groups of prisoners have been added to the unit over time. He said there were only 15 survivors in his unit and 08807 is now called 40321, or “Storm Unit”. “It’s basically a meat grinder,” he added. He told CNN over the past few days that he was sent back to the front line with his injuries not healing.
A second prisoner, a former Russian Civil War veteran, was initially overlooked when Wagner was drafted out of prison, but said last year he was hired by the Russian Ministry of Defense a decade later on murder charges. He described himself as a “patriot” and complained that many prisoners sent to the front were “green”.
“I have no complaints, war is war. set everyone else up,” he said. explained. “In the trenches, he is two to six meters away from me, the shells land, and the dirt falls into the trenches, but he doesn’t feel any fear. I don’t know why this happens to me. ”
A third said he was serving time for manslaughter when he was directly recruited into the Ministry of Defense. He lamented that prisoners did not receive the kind of treatment and benefits that Wagner boasted lavishly providing to recruits. [Wagner recruits have also complained of being used as cannon fodder and poorly treated.] He described a battle in which half of his troops were casualties. “We were sent to the front line. I radioed my men to aim slightly to the right as they were firing mortars at us. They shot us from both sides, and then I understood that they were deliberately firing at us.”
The fate of the inmates hired by Wagner doesn’t look good. CNN report for August.
According to his brother, one had been missing without a trace for four months. Another remained silent, sending his brother a sealed plastic bag of his monthly salary collected from his rented office. A third appeared in the video with his Prigozhin portrayed as a lucky returnee. But friends described his “zombie-like” appearance, heavy drinking and an urgent desire to return to the front.
Plans to send prisoners to war appear to be expanding rapidly, with figures obtained by CNN from the Russian criminal system showing that the prison population fell by 27,000 between March and November last year. .
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also elaborated on the legality of the pardons Wagner claimed would be granted to prisoners, telling reporters last month that the presidential decree pardoning prisoners is likely to be classified. “There are public statutes, and there are statutes with different classifications of secrecy,” he said. “That’s why I can’t say anything about these decrees.
Wagner’s recruitment also traps non-Russian prisoners, who may not have been convicted of a crime. was arrested and remanded. He was sentenced to seven years in prison last March, according to the Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing information from the Russian side.
His family in Tanzania told CNN they hadn’t heard anything about his fate until they were told by authorities that he had died.
Wagner released a gory video of Tarimo’s memorial service at a cemetery in Molkino, western Russia, where he said he died in October near Bakhmut. His body was returned to Tanzania last month, state television said, and the foreign ministry said in a statement that Tarimo had accepted an offer to fight in exchange for money and his freedom.
His cousin Rehema Makrene Kigoga told CNN: He was no cheater, but he was a very religious man. She also said that nothing had been heard of his recruitment until after his death. , he was reportedly arrested for drug-related crimes.
This story has been updated.
