Ex-Wagner mercenary unwraps shocking Prigozhin orders These 13 photos and videos show the magnitude of Greece’s storms

“grenades through the window, grenades through the door, and then you go in and do it” – this is said to have been one of the orders of the former Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.

This is what former mercenary Maksim Zelenov claims in an interview with the Russian human rights organization ‘Gulagu’. What he experienced and did once again reveals the brutal, inhumane behavior of the Wagnerites under their dead boss Prigozchin.

Wagner mercenaries ‘purge’ Ukrainian villages

According to “Gulagu”, Zelenov was a police officer in Russia. He was in prison for murder, but Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin released him in mid-November 2022 so he could join the Wagner mercenaries.

Now he tells how Russia allegedly committed mass murder of the civilian population during the offensive in the Ukrainian villages near Bakhmut and Soledar. He himself speaks of ‘cleaning’.

«On November 23, 2022, we left Irkutsk. We rode in 19 prison vans. In total we were 500 people from two camps,” he says in a video call with Vladimir Osechkin, founder of “Gulagu”. Apparently they had to do the “dirty work” for the Russian army. The former Wagner fighter describes almost emotionlessly the atrocities in a Ukrainian village.

Wagner mercenaries did not stop at children

The order was to throw grenades through windows and doors, storm into the house and shoot, he says. “Then it went on.” He draws on his cigarette and tired eyes stare into space. When asked who gave this order, the man replies: “Prigozhin himself.”

“I killed a lot of people during the purge,” he admits. It was a large village with many citizens. ‘We just killed everyone’, he says. It didn’t matter if they were kids. He couldn’t remember the name of the place. That doesn’t matter to him either. But his interlocutor does not give up. When asked which city was nearby, the Russian answers Soledar.

The cleansing of the village took place during the battle of Soledar in the Donetsk region. After the area was ‘cleaned up’, the Russian army is said to have moved in. But apparently the murder was too much for the Wagner mercenary.

Maksim escaped from the Wagner camp and went into hiding for over eight months. Now, after Prigozhin’s death, he has the courage to speak out about the war crimes, writes Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior. On X, formerly Twitter, he shares an excerpt from the interview with the ex-Wagner mercenary.

Gruppe-Wagner played a key role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, particularly in the bloody battle for the city of Bakhmut. But they are also active in countries such as Syria, Libya and Mali. The mercenaries are notorious for their brutality.

The British government has already announced that it wants to ban them as a terrorist organisation. That means it is then illegal to be a member of or support the organization. It is likely that the Russian private army has also tried to recruit men in Poland and Latvia in the past.

However, since the mutiny against the Kremlin and the death of the entire Wagner leadership, the group’s future is currently uncertain.