The Wagner Group thrives in the shadows, but now its founder has been caught on camera: recruiting prisoners from a Russian penal colony for the war in Ukraine.
In the video, Yevgeniy Prigozhin paces about a large group of prisoners, giving them the hard sell on joining the Russian war effort. He offers them a deal: six months of service in return for a pardon for their crimes. But, should they arrive in Ukraine and refuse to fight, they will be considered deserters and shot. ‘The war is difficult,’ he says; the pro-Kremlin group has used ‘more than two and a half times’ the amount of ammunition used by Soviet forces during the battle of Stalingrad in the second world war.
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