Since Vladimir Putin kicked off his war in Ukraine in February, the recruiting strategies have been sketchy at best and devastating on every other level. He recently attempted to clean up his public image after sending thousands upon thousands of soldiers to their deaths, but his meeting with “soldiers’ mothers” looked all too transparent. As well, his massive draft sent a few hundred thousand more Russians to Ukraine, where they’re being told to use tampons to treat their own bullet wounds. And then there’s the private army, the Wagner Group of mercenaries, that Putin has used to beef up his forces.
That hasn’t gone terribly well, either, considering that those mercenaries reportedly shot Russian soldiers by accident. This shouldn’t be too shocking, considering The Daily Beast’s new coverage of how the Wagner Group is not only recruiting from the harshest prisons but they’re doing so under threat of bodily injury. Of course, the men end up with even more bodily injury in Ukraine, so there are nothing but losing options on the table:
Russia’s infamous Wagner Group is freeing hardened rebels held in jail cells in the Central African Republic and deploying them overseas, including in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, two senior military officers in CAR told The Daily Beast….
In July, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner supremo, began touring Russian prisons in an increasingly desperate bid to recruit more soldiers to send into Ukraine. He was later accused of using “pressure” to recruit raped and abused prisoners from Russia’s penal colonies to join the mercenary group’s frontline fighting units, where they are being slaughtered with little training and poor equipment.
The Wagner Group (which has been linked to Erik Prince, the brother to ex-Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and who famously charges absurd prices to fly civilians out of war-torn countries) has never enjoyed a sterling reputation. Now, The Daily Beast details how the recruits are being promised salaries but are instead “left stranded and starving after being abandoned in the Donbas region by Wagner.”
Meanwhile, Putin is reportedly starting to worry about losing his own life to an assassin, should his war continue going down the tubes. His few allies are apparently descending into “civil war,” and this war seems no closer to an end.
(Via The Daily Beast)