(JustPatriots.com)- Last week, the Wagner Group posted a video on Telegram showing the horrific execution of one of its convict fighters who was beaten to death with a sledgehammer after he refused to continue fighting against Ukraine, the UK Express reported.
In addition to the Russian forces, mercenaries from the private military company the Wagner Group have been fighting in Ukraine.
In the video posted to the Wagner Group-affiliated Telegram channel “GrayZone,” the convict fighter was accused of falling ill “with the same disease” in which someone loses consciousness in a Ukraine city only to wake up “in the basement at your last court session.”
The man appears in the video with his head secured to a rock with duct tape. He says his name is Dmitry Yakushchenko and that he was a convict recruited by the Wagner Group to fight in Ukraine. He confesses that he realized that the war in Ukraine was not his fight and now he would be judged.
When Yakushchenko finished speaking, the man behind him swings the sledgehammer down on his head. A second man then takes the sledgehammer and hits Yakushchenko.
The paramilitary Wagner Group is owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman with close ties to Vladimir Putin.
Last month, the US designated the group a Transnational Criminal Organization, accusing it of committing human rights abuses and atrocities. Prigozhin has denied the allegations and demanded that the US “clarify” which specific crimes the group has been accused of committing.
US officials estimate that the Wagner Group currently has approximately 50,000 mercenaries fighting in Ukraine, including 40,000 convicts recruited from prisons in Russia.
In a video interview released last week, Yevgeny Prigozhin suggested that it could take Russia up to two years to gain full control of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and at least three years if Moscow wants to fully control everything up to the Dnieper River, according to Reuters.
Prigozhin also said that the group has stopped recruiting Russian prisoners. Denying the prisoners were deployed as cannon fodder, Prigozhin said the percentage of losses among the prisoner recruits is similar to that for the rest of his mercenaries.
