Wagner's fighters tell about mass murder of Ukraine’s civilians, including children

They told this to the Gulagu.Net project, Sibir.Realii reports.

Former convict Maksim Zelenov said that in November 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin personally arrived at the Irkutsk prison for law enforcement officers. From two colonies, 500 convicts were taken to the Wagner PMC.

According to Zelenov, in a camp on the outskirts of Luhansk, convicts were forced to carry stones from a nearby mountain for training. If they refused, the mercenaries were killed.

"One man refused, and that was it, he was killed. They beat him with sticks right in front of us. He was still alive, but they tied him to a tree and told everyone that if you come near him, you will be dead. They shot people in front of me, right in the back of the head, with a machine gun," he said.

Zelenov himself was appointed commander of the 11-person Umbrella group, which included prisoners with HIV and hepatitis C. And he himself suffers from diabetes.

Zelenov said that in one village, Wagner fighters killed several dozen civilians.

"Kill them all. Regardless of gender. There were old women and men. When we reached this five-story building, we probably killed 40 people. These were civilians. There were people in balaclavas behind us, and if you went back, they would kill you too. It was called, as Prigozhin himself said: 'One grenade through the door, another through the window, and if someone survived, finish them off'" he says.

The publication notes that it could be a settlement near Soledar.

The second ex-convict, Aleksey Chernyavsky, said that during the training, Wagner PMC commanders were looking for those who were "ready to kill women and children."

"During one of the sweeps, we saw it. I saw a grenade thrown into the apartment, and there were children crying. Children were crying there. We went in, there was a woman and a child, we had to finish them off. I personally could not do it, so I left. Other people from my group carried out the order, they killed those who were crying. They were crying because they were wounded, asking for help, but they killed them. The woman was 35 years old, the girl was 7 years old," he said.

The former Wagner members claim that on January 1, 2023, they escaped from the PMC base, and are now probably in the Luhansk region.

• The Kremlin believes that even after the elimination of Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, there is a threat of a new military coup in Russia.