“I can’t count the numbers.
As more bodies piled up, more prisoners were recruited under me.”
This is the confession of a Russian mercenary who was committed to Eastern Bahmut, one of the fiercest battlefields of the Ukrainian war.
26-year-old Andrei Medvedev signed a contract with the Russian mercenary company Wagner Group in June last year to serve as a field commander in Bakhmut, Ukraine.
In an interview with the American broadcaster CNN, Medvedev revealed that he initially had 10 people assigned to him, but the number increased rapidly as he mobilized prisoners for war.
This is because Yevgeny Prigozhin, CEO of the Wagner Group, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, recruited prisoners from correctional facilities across Russia as mercenaries and sent them to the front in large numbers.
However, many of these recruited troops were driven to the battlefield without even receiving proper operational instructions and died meaninglessly.
Medvedev also confessed that the more dead people came out, the more they took on the burden.
“There was practically no tactics.
The orders given to us only indicated the location of the enemy.
There were no clear instructions on how we were to act.”
Because of this, Medvedev recalled that Wagner’s mercenaries were ‘cannon fodder’.
On the sixth day of his deployment to Ukraine, he confessed that he did not want to go to the front anymore after seeing such a situation.
It is also said that the upper echelons of the Wagner Group ruled the mercenaries with low morale with fear.
“They surrounded those who did not want to fight and shot them in front of the recruits’ eyes. They even shot two prisoners who refused to fight in front of everyone and buried them in trenches dug by trainees,” Medvedev said.
He said that there were times when he reported directly to Prigogin, the founder of the Wagner Group, and Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian military special forces officer, and referred to these two as “devils.”
“If Prigogine had been a Russian hero,” Medvedev said, “he would have taken up a gun himself and gone out with his soldiers.”
In addition, Prigozhin promised to pay consolation money of 5 million rubles per person and about 87 million won in Korean money to the survivors of mercenaries who were killed in war in Ukraine, but in reality, “no one has received that kind of money, and many of the fallen It was just dismissed as missing.”
In the end, Medvedev escaped from the unit at the end of last year and went into hiding in Russia, but recently succeeded in crossing the border and applied for asylum in Norway.
He said he was nearly arrested more than 10 times in the process and had to cross a frozen river disguised in white at the end.
Medvedev said he wanted his statement to help bring Prigozhin and Putin to court.
Meanwhile, in an e-mail statement sent to CNN in this regard, Prigogine denied the allegation that consolation money had not been paid, saying, “There has not been a single case recorded so far in which the Wagner Group has not paid insurance money.”
At the same time, he refused to comment on Medvedev’s remarks that the Wagner Group treated its mercenaries as cannon fodder and executed them summarily, saying it was a “military matter”.
Prigozhin had earlier argued that Medvedev should have been punished for attempting to harass the prisoners, CNN reported.
