"Educational videos" were shown to recruits of a private military company even before the full-scale war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
Russian prisoners recruited into the ranks of the private military company Wagner are shown videos of brutal executions of deserters before being sent to the front in Ukraine. So the mercenaries are trying to discourage the desire to flee from the battlefield.
According to BBC News Russian Service, several sources close to PMCs, on condition of anonymity, confirmed information about such a practice of intimidation in the ranks of the Wagnerites.
One of the publication's interlocutors noted that “training videos†were shown to recruits of a private military company even before the full-scale war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. In addition, the sources also said that they are aware of at least three massacres of "traitors" who have not yet leaked into the public space.
An interlocutor of the publication in one of the Russian prisons said that prisoners who agreed to join the ranks of PMCs and go to war in Ukraine were taken to a special room, where they showed on the tablet the murders of those who allegedly fled the battlefield.
"He says there - I, (name and surname), a traitor, left my comrades on the front line - and then they shoot him in the back of the head," one of the mercenaries told to BBC about what he saw.
Another interlocutor of journalists from the colony said that he was also shown the video. However, on it a man was executed by hanging.
- On December 6, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine announced that the Russian invaders in the Donbas had killed their deserters, most of whom were "prisoners".
- Earlier it was also reported that a group of US senators introduced a bipartisan bill to Congress to designate the Russian private military company Wagner as a foreign terrorist organization. The co-sponsor of the bill, Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, noted that the mercenaries from this PMC "are reliably connected with countless atrocities in Ukraine, in Syria, and throughout the African continent."
