Wagner fighter: “Our life has no price, we can be sacrificed” Tiger King star Baskin’s ex declared dead should be alive – and no one knew about it

Oleg was in a penal colony in Russia when Wagner’s people came to recruit him. Her offer sounded good: amnesty. Ultimately, that’s what he was looking for when he agreed to go to war against Ukraine.

He traded prison clothes for a uniform – and back again. Because now Oleg is somewhere in the west of Ukraine in a prisoner of war camp. A sparse building: dormitories, a TV room, workshops in which paper bags are glued together. He is a tall, thin man in his mid-thirties with tired eyes.

Oleg knows the routine, the orders of the guards – as if he’s never done anything but stand in line with his head bowed. He does not enter the room until the guard asks him to. He stops. Then he hurriedly sits down as instructed, clasps his hands between his compressed knees, raises his head and says with a piercing look: He was in prison for drug offenses. He never shot people, nor was he a violent criminal.

Listening to the war stories told by the prisoners in the camp, you might think that the Russian armed forces consisted of cooks, medics, drivers. Allegedly they were everything, just not soldiers fighting and shooting. Reality confirms the opposite. But of course: in individual cases this can hardly be proven – or disproved. Not so with Oleg. A month after training in Luhansk, he was actually deployed, but spent only two days in the trenches in the front line before being captured just before Christmas.

Waiting for prisoner exchange

Oleg fought for the Russian mercenary group Wagner. Legally, this is no man’s land: the Geneva Convention only applies to soldiers in regular armies, not to mercenaries. But he didn’t know that until he arrived here in Western Ukraine to wait for an exchange along with several hundred other captured Russians – most of them regular soldiers.

Ukrainian authorities treat Wagner people as prisoners of war. According to a Ukrainian spokesman, no distinction is made. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has access to the camp. The ICRC would neither confirm nor deny this citing the fact that the ICRC does not comment publicly on such delicate details.

Wagner is a private army. Even before Russia’s frontal assault on Ukraine, it had conducted foreign military missions in Russia’s interests: in Syria, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Libya, Venezuela, Mozambique and Mali – as a kind of private special forces whose losses not included in official statistics. Wagner is a militia with exclusive access to heavy equipment. A private army that has access to government resources. And all this against existing Russian law: armed private security companies such as Wagner are banned in Russia.

“Wagner exists because someone needs Wagner,” says Oleg. But when asked who this person is, he says nothing, shrugs, says nothing.

Those who survive are free

As exclusive as Wagner’s scope may be, the group’s owner is just as powerful: the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. A petty criminal in the 1980s, serving nine years for armed robbery, he rose to fame as a St. Petersburg gastro entrepreneur in the 1990s, later earning the nickname “Putin’s Cook”.

Before the start of Russia’s open war against Ukraine, Wagner had a reputation for being an almost sectarian and untouchable elite force. However, since February 24, 2022, the company has simply been fueling the Russian war in Ukraine with cheap fighters. When things got tight for the Russian army in Ukraine, Prigozhin got a license to recruit in Russian prisons: murderers, thieves, swindlers, thugs, drug dealers like Oleg. Everything can compete for Wagner, except rapists. The deal: Anyone who survives six months gets an amnesty.

He himself has seen nothing but Wagner in the Ukraine, says Oleg. From training in Russian-occupied Luhansk in eastern Ukraine to deployment. No army. From logistics in the hinterland to the first line, according to Oleg: everything is Wagner. Because, and he says so openly, Wagner is there to pave the way for the regular Russian army.

And then, after a pause, Dent looks straight ahead again: “We knew we were made of flesh and agreed to that.” Ideology, he says, played no role in this. Only the amnesty. But he also believed what Russian TV told him: that Ukraine was occupied by Western powers who killed civilians there.

Prison cannon fodder for what Russia calls denazification. “Our life has no price, we can be sacrificed,” says Oleg.

Probably no one is alive anymore

About 30,000 men are said to have been recruited from Russian prisons. According to Ukrainian estimates, 80 percent of them have already been killed, wounded or captured in Ukraine. Oleg says: His group of 50 men is probably dead.

But he knew what he was getting into. A barter: death or freedom. Run away, throw up, back off – none of these are options. There are numerous reports of Wagner fighters being shot at by their own people when they refuse to run to certain death. But what if, while on a message through a crater desert, you lose your bearings between impacts and come across a Ukrainian position? That happened to him, says Oleg.

Wagner treats deserters like this: A Wagner man who ended up in Ukrainian captivity, who was overly cooperative and said that from the beginning he had only gone to Ukraine to switch sides and fight against Russia, was followed and his head smashed with a sledgehammer during the prisoner exchange – on camera. Wagner boss Prigozhin personally reacted to the video as follows: A dog died the death of a dog. The murder cannot be an isolated case.

“You can get rid of me,” says Oleg with a soft shrug. He still wants to go home. After all, his contract is up in two months — and so, he says with a questioning undertone, he’s probably off the hook. (bzbasel.ch)