The paramilitary troops of Vladimir Putin They’ve been around as an open secret for years, but their involvement in the Ukraine war has drawn attention to the feared Wagner Group.
Around 50,000 men, from Russian prisons, were enlisted in the Wagner Group to fight in Ukraine, a figure collected by the NGO “Russia behind bars”.
Andrey Medvedev, a former commander of the paramilitary group, has become a key witness to understanding how Russian troops operate in enemy territory.
The 26-year-old started with ten men under his command, a number that increased as the conflict in Ukraine unfolded, but the horrors of war led him to flee the group and seek asylum in Oslo. The Norwegian capital became Medvedev’s refuge, from where he communicated with the US news channel CNN and narrated the atrocities among the troops.
According to the former commander, the commanders of the Wagner Group treat their soldiers as “cannon fodder, they round up those who do not want to fight and shoot them in front of their newly arrived comrades”.
On one occasion “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 apprentices had dug.”
In addition, Medvedev assured that the Wagner Group he does not use any strategy over his enemies. “There was no real tactic. We only received orders about the position of the adversary… There were no definite orders on how we were to behave. We just planned how to act, step by step. Who would open fire, what kind of shifts would we have… How it would turn out was our problem, ”he said.
The responsibility of commanding the troops was extremely overwhelming for the soldier, who voluntarily joined the group. “There were more corpsesAnd more and more people came in. 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”.
Medvedev’s testimony confirmed a “Russia Behind Bars” figures report. According to the organization, at least 40,000 Wagner Group men have been killed, wounded, gone AWOL or deserted, and only 10,000 are still fighting in the invasion of Russia.
(YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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