“Wagner” beat a prisoner recruited for the war in Ukraine with a hammer

The authenticity of this video cannot yet be independently confirmed, but according to Gray Zone, the video shows Dmitry Yakushenko, who is a former prisoner from Crimea. He went to war in Ukraine after being recruited by “Wagner” in prison.

Four days after arriving at the front, he reportedly surrendered to the Ukrainian army. The man in the video says that he is now being tried.

He is then seen being hit on the head with a sledgehammer. The moment of the murder is blurred in the video.

At the beginning of the video, you can also see a fragment from another video, which may have been made while Yakushenko was in Ukrainian captivity.

In the video made last fall, Yakushenko says that he was previously sentenced to 19 years in prison, which he served in Russia’s Saratov region. After being recruited for the war, he ended up in Eastern Ukraine, where he surrendered as a prisoner.

The publication “Agenstvo” reports that Dmitry Yakushenko may have returned to Russia as a result of the exchange of prisoners of war between Ukraine and Russia. This exchange took place on December 1, 2022.

In November of last year, “Grey Zone” published a video showing Yevgenii Nuzhens, a prisoner previously recruited for the “Wagner” war, being beaten with a hammer, who had also surrendered to Ukrainian forces.