Ukraine war: video shows head of Wagner mercenary group recruiting at a Russian prison
- Wagner is a Russian private military company with close ties to the Kremlin that is now in Ukraine
- In a video shared on Telegram, the group’s founder can be seen recruiting at a Russian prison
Surrounded by prisoners dressed in black, a man identified as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a shadowy mercenary group, makes this pitch: Come fight in Ukraine and be rewarded with your freedom – if you can make it back alive.
“Nobody goes back behind bars,” Prigozhin, founder of the Russian private military company Wagner, can be seen telling men in a video from a Russian prison yard, per a translation from The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov. “If you serve six months, you are free. If you arrive in Ukraine and decide it’s not for you, we execute you.”
He gives the men five minutes to make a choice.
It appears to confirm prior reporting from The Daily Beast and The Wall Street Journal that Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is recruiting inmates to to fight and kill Ukrainians with Wagner forces reportedly operating in the Donbas region.
Wagner mercenaries have already been linked to a massacre in Bucha, where hundreds of civilians were found executed, and a recent report accused them of war crimes in Africa, where they have deployed to fight insurgencies in Mali and the Central African Republic.