Nearly seven months after Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine, the war appears to have a new, unofficial leader: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin-linked businessman long accused of being the puppet maker behind the shadowy Wagner Group.
After countless reports in recent months of Prigozhin touring Russian prisons in search of new cannon fodder, video It was leaked Wednesday that, for the first time, it appears to provide visual confirmation of the recruiting effort, with a man clearly resembling Prigozhin depicted in a movie telling the inmates of a penal colony that they could join Wagner and earn their freedom by fighting in Ukraine — or shot if they tried to retreat.
“After half a year, you will come home, after you will be pardoned. … Those who arrive and say on the first day ‘I am in the wrong place’ will be labeled as fugitives, and execution will follow,” the inmates were told.
The video went viral on pro-Kremlin social media channels, in which Prigozhin was praised, among other things, for possessing “balls of steel”, and prison conscription was praised as a ruthless new way to win the war after a string of military forces. setbacks.
Prigozhin’s management and consultancy firm Concorde declined to confirm that he was indeed in the video, and on Wednesday offered a little trolling instead.
“We can confirm that the man in the video is very similar to Yevgeny Viktorovich. Judging by his speech, he is somehow involved in issues related to the implementation of the missions of the special operation, and this seems to be working out successfully for him, ”said the press service of the company, addressing a Russian journalist That the man who appears in the video the speech was “very well delivered, just like Yevgeny Viktorovich’s speech.”
“And a person who looks like Yevgeny Viktorovich vividly explains things that are understandable to ordinary people,” the company said.
The video, posted online by allies of imprisoned Kremlin nemesis Alexei Navalny, appeared to be a fascinating PR for the Wagner Group, a special military force linked to the Kremlin with a long string of allegations of war crimes in Syria, Ukraine and the Central African Republic. , and in other places.
Russian military bloggers celebrated him, apparently, unconcerned that Prigozhin’s increased role in the war could be a sign of the desperation of the Kremlin.
“Wagner became an important phenomenon in this war, and Yevgeny Prigozhin is one of the main participants in it. wrote Alexander Guchkovsky, who was considered a terrorist by the United States government for his role in recruiting fighters in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The video even sparked calls for Prigozhin to take the place of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu as the war communicator — a move that some experts say could help the Kremlin placate Russians frustrated after recent humiliating defeats on the battlefield.
“Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is being established as a front for Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine,” Institute for the Study of War He said In her assessment on Wednesday, she noted that Prigozhin’s popularity among military bloggers may boost “support for the Kremlin’s war effort while ceding Shoigu and the Russian Defense Ministry to defeat around Kharkiv Oblast.”
With hundreds of prisoners enlisted so far after Prigozhin was said to be acting on Putin’s orders for an “organised crime syndicate” known as Wagner – and Wagner said he preferred the most “calculating” killers in Russian prisons – it appears that many prisoners do not. They are alarmed by Prigozhin’s alleged brutal conditions.
In the video leaked this week, the prisoners were told not only that they would be executed if they tried to retreat, but that they must die before they could be caught.
“When you undergo training, you will be told what to do with the two grenades that you will get yourself if you are caught,” said the man who looked like Prigozhin.
Oleksiy Aristovich, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, says he believes Russia was behind the leaking of the recruitment video in an attempt to “scare us so that other inmates would see it and run to join”.
This video will have an honorable mention as we discuss the death of Putin’s empire. It is the culmination of the one day falling of a great empire, because there is no story more terrifying than a major nuclear power, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, sending a friend of Putin to shoot such a video,” Aristovich said in an interview With Russian journalist Mark Feigen.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Usishkin, founder of the human rights group Gulagu.net, which has extensively reported on Wagner’s role in inmate recruitment, He said Thursday that Prigozhin presents himself as a “god” and “liberates the killers so that they can kill more.”
He said he had received information that “Prigozhin’s gang executed at least five prisoners” so far after they tried to withdraw from the war in Ukraine.
Olga Romanova, head of the human rights group Ross Sidiachaya, who has worked with relatives of the conscripted prisoners, He said In an interview on Wednesday, the group learned of one case in which Wagner recruited a “crazy, so to speak, has cannibalism in his wallet. He also went to war.”
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