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Bloodied Wagner fighters captured in Ukraine recount path from prison to war
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/23/wagner-mercenaries-captives-war-ukraine/
Gift Link: https://wapo.st/3Ky3tDT
DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — The two men lay on the dirty tile floor of an empty office, still in their bloodied combat fatigues and bandages. One dozed without a pillow under a blanket; the other stretched out with a tourniquet strapped above the knee of his blood-soaked pants.
The men were two of three Russian fighters with the Wagner mercenary group who had been captured a few hours earlier in a northern section of the embattled city of Bakhmut, according to a Ukrainian officer with a sidearm on his hip, who was the only other person present. The third, more seriously injured, had been taken to a hospital, the officer said.
...
Prigozhin told the prisoners that he came with President Vladimir Putin’s offer to “wipe the slate clean” of criminal convictions for anyone signing up to fight.
Mikhail also heard Prigozhin promise that anyone who ran away from the front would immediately “go to zero,” the Wagner term for assassinating its own men. Within 10 days, he was on a flight to western Russia, far from his wife and four children in the East, and by November he was in occupied eastern Ukraine.
Gift Link: https://wapo.st/3Ky3tDT
DONETSK REGION, Ukraine — The two men lay on the dirty tile floor of an empty office, still in their bloodied combat fatigues and bandages. One dozed without a pillow under a blanket; the other stretched out with a tourniquet strapped above the knee of his blood-soaked pants.
The men were two of three Russian fighters with the Wagner mercenary group who had been captured a few hours earlier in a northern section of the embattled city of Bakhmut, according to a Ukrainian officer with a sidearm on his hip, who was the only other person present. The third, more seriously injured, had been taken to a hospital, the officer said.
...
Prigozhin told the prisoners that he came with President Vladimir Putin’s offer to “wipe the slate clean” of criminal convictions for anyone signing up to fight.
Mikhail also heard Prigozhin promise that anyone who ran away from the front would immediately “go to zero,” the Wagner term for assassinating its own men. Within 10 days, he was on a flight to western Russia, far from his wife and four children in the East, and by November he was in occupied eastern Ukraine.
I hope Prigozhin and Putin get captured somehow and tried for war crimes. Prigozhin has served in prison way back in Soviet times.
