“They shot those who did not want to fight in front of the new ones”: the testimony of a former leader of the Wagner Group

The commanders of the Wagner mercenary group, to which the latest Russian victories on the Ukrainian front are attributed, act with their men as if they were “cannon fodder”, “cornering those who do not want to fight and shooting them in front of their newly arrived”. This is how a former commander of this group, Andrei Medvedev, narrates itto the US chain CNN from Oslo, where he is seeking asylum after having defected from the group led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and a confidant of President Vladimir Putin.

“They rounded up those who did not want to fight and they were shot in front of the new arrivals“The 26-year-old ex-soldier alleges: “They brought two prisoners who refused to go fight and shot them in front of everyone and buried them right in the trenches that the trainees had dug.” Medvedev, who says he previously served in the Russian Army, joined Wagner as a volunteer.He crossed into Ukraine about ten days after signing his contract in July 2021, serving near Bakhmut, the frontline town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, recounts to CNN.

A fake press pass created by an NGO helped Andrei Medvedev escape from Russia, who claimed that the Wagner Group lacked strategy and improvised on the spot. “There were no real tactics. We only received orders about the position of the adversary… There were no definite orders on how we should behave. We just planned how to act, step by step. Who would open fire, what kind of turns we would have… How it would turn out It was our problem,” he said.

As he declared to the US chain, on the sixth day of his deployment in Ukraine he already knew that he did not want to return to that country after seeing how they turned the troops into “cannon fodder”. He started with ten men under his command, a number that increased when prisoners were allowed into the group, as he explained: “There were more corpses, and more and more people entered. In the end I had a lot of people under my command,” he said.

“I couldn’t count how many there were. They were in constant circulation. Corpses, more prisoners, more corpses, more prisoners“He also denounced that the prisoners who enlisted were told that their families would receive a payment of five million rubles (about 71,000 dollars) if they died in the war. But in reality “nobody wanted to pay that amount of money,” he said Medvedev Many Russians who died fighting in Ukraine were “simply declared missing,” he said.