CNN
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The audio is poor at times, but emotions are clearly visible.
“I am being taken to be shot. I lost a lot of people there. Remember this: don’t send too many people here. Enough is enough, they want to kill us all.”
This is the last message that Viktor Savelnev will send. A criminal, who was in prison for armed robbery and assault, was sent from prison to Ukraine to fight for Russia. After most of his colleagues are killed in a factory attack outside solderIt was an act of survival that proved fatal for Savelnev.
In a final message to his wife, he said he feared Russian Defense Ministry officials would soon take him from the hospital bed where he had recorded the audio message and kill him. A few days later, his body was returned to his wife in Moscow in a closed coffin.
Sevalnev’s brutal fate joins a growing list of abuse complaints from convicts CNN spoke to. Russia has been using Shadow for months private hire company wagner To increase your frontline presence with prisoners – the first plan denial and secretBut then openly promoted by Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
On Thursday, Prigozhin announced that Wagner had stopped recruiting defectors to fight in Ukraine, adding that “those who work for us are now fulfilling all of their obligations.” No reason was given for the decision and CNN could not independently verify the claims.
However, Savelnev and several inmates who spoke to CNN indicate a disturbing new tactic. They say they were hired directly by the Russian Defense Ministry.
A Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed to CNN that prisoners recently captured by the Ukrainian military said they were directly employed by the ministry.
“They emphasize to us that he is not Wagner, that he was officially invited by the Defense Ministry,” Andrey Usov, a representative of defense intelligence at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, told CNN.
Usov said the development had “echoes of internal bickering among the Russian military leadership”, and that the Russian defense hierarchy, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the new chief of Ukraine operations Valery Gerasimov, were creating a deterrent resource that they could directly control. The ministry had its own private companies. Usov said that the ministry now has fewer criminals but that they “will be used in the same way … as cannon fodder,” as Wagner does.
Vladimir Osechkin of the prisoner rights group Gulagu.net said it appeared the Defense Ministry was luring recruits and convicts away from Wagner using “more favorable terms” as a check on the growing clout of its boss, Prigozhin, is increasingly being seen as a competitor. parts of the armed forces.
“Many people in Moscow are really afraid of Prigozhin,” Osechkin said. “They understand that he commands a huge gang – an organized criminal group of mercenaries and assassins – who at any moment can arrange God knows what in Moscow.”
CNN has sought comment from the Russian Defense Ministry and has not received a response.
CNN spoke to several prisoners who worked for the unit known as its number “08807” – who say they were hired directly by the Russian Defense Ministry. It was suggested in some documents that he was eventually posted to a part of the Luhansk separatist army, which has been subordinated to the Russian Ministry of Defense. Unit 08807 was deployed to the front lines around Soledar in October, known as the “Shtrum” brigade – for storming Ukrainian lines – and suffered devastating casualties.
Grainy footage obtained by Gulagu.net shows Savelnev and his unit celebrating pre-deployment by dancing in a camp inside Luhansk. Survivors said it also shows them eating and joking right behind the frontline on the night before launching an assault on a major factory in Soledar, which would prove fatal for most of Savelnev’s unit.
Convicts spoke of casual abuse on and off the battlefield, but Savelnev’s fate was different. According to a recording of a call to his wife from a Russian separatist official who arranged for the repatriation of the body, his sudden death was apparently caused by shrapnel.
Savelnev’s wife declined to be interviewed for this report, but his audio messages and photographs of him from the war were supplied to CNN by Gulagu.net. Russian court documents obtained by CNN show that Savelnev was convicted of theft, and according to his sentence, should have been in prison at the time of his death. His grave is located outside Moscow, and his month of death is recorded as November 2022.
Three other survivors from the unit spoke to CNN from the hospital. One, also a prisoner, said that Savelnev was wounded once, but was sent back to fight at the front, where he was wounded again.
“No one is being operated on here, no one has had any surgery,” he said. CNN is withholding his name and the other surviving convicts for their safety. “People wander [the hospital] Along with the bullet wound, there were shrapnel in his legs.”
A former soldier before his imprisonment, he also described the devastating loss. “Our group was 130 people, but we also have many cripples, and we have maybe 40 people left”, he said, adding that over time many different groups of prisoners were added to his unit. He stated that there were only 15 left in his unit and that 08807 was now called 40321 or “Storm Unit”. “In short, meat grinder,” he said. He told CNN that in the last few days he had been sent back to the frontline, his injuries had not healed.
A second prisoner, himself a veteran of previous Russian conflicts, said he had been hired by the Russian Defense Ministry last year, a decade into his sentence for murder, initially overlooked when Wagner was released from his prison. was admitted. He described himself as a “patriot” and complained that many prisoners sent to the front were “green”.
“I ain’t complaining, war is war. Some come here, hear the sound of machine guns and come running. Not a good thing. They set everyone else up because nobody has my back,” he said. said. This soldier was seriously wounded in the leg in October after 25 days at the front, but told how he felt no fear. “In the trench, a shell would fall 2-6 meters from me. The mud falls into the ditch below, but I am not scared at all. I don’t know why this happens to me.”
A third said he was serving a sentence for murder when he was recruited directly by the Ministry of Defence. He lamented how his convicts did not receive medical treatment or benefits that Wagner claimed he lavished on his recruits. [Wagner recruits have also complained of being used as cannon fodder and poorly treated.] He described how one battle left half his unit casualties. “We were sent to the very front. I told my men over the radio that they were firing mortars at us, that they should aim a little to the right. And yet they fired at us from both sides. Then I understood that they were deliberately firing on us.
The fate of the convicts employed by Wagner is no better, according to relatives of the three convicts who appeared in the summer. August CNN reports,
According to his brother, one had gone missing for four months. The other had also gone silent, but was sending his brother his salary, collected monthly from a rented office, in a sealed plastic bag. A third appeared in a video with Prigozhin, who was portrayed as a lucky returnee. Yet a friend described his “zombie-like” appearance, heavy drinking and an urgent desire to return to the front.
The plan to send convicts to war has grown exponentially, with data obtained by CNN from Russia’s penal system showing a 27,000 drop in the prison population between March and November last year, when the scheme was just three months old. Was.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also elaborated on the legality of the pardons Wagner has given to convicts, telling reporters last month that any presidential decision to pardon prisoners was classified. “There are open decrees and there are decrees with different classifications of secrecy,” he said. “That is why I cannot say anything about these decrees. I can confirm in fact that the entire process of pardoning prisoners is carried out in accordance with Russian law.
Wagner’s recruitment has also implicated prisoners who are not Russian, and may not be convicted of a crime. Tanzanian student Nemes Tarimo was on an exchange in Moscow when he was apparently arrested on drugs charges and placed on remand. He was sentenced to seven years in prison in March last year, according to Tanzania’s foreign ministry, citing information from his Russian counterparts.
His family in Tanzania told CNN they didn’t hear anything about his fate until authorities contacted them to say he had died.
Wagner released a poignant video of a memorial ceremony in Tarimo’s honor at a cemetery in Molkino, western Russia, where he died near Bakhmut in October. His body was returned to Tanzania last month, according to state TV, with the foreign ministry saying in a statement that Tarimo had accepted an offer to fight in exchange for money and his freedom.
His cousin Rehema Makrin Kigoga told CNN, “Names was a very obedient boy since childhood. He was not a bully, but a very religious person. She also said that they didn’t know about his recruitment until after his death.” I didn’t hear anything.” When he was alive, we never heard of this report, but now that he’s dead we’re told he was arrested for drug-related offenses. It brings a lot of grief and sorrow as a family. He never even dreamed of becoming a soldier.