Inside Russia's Wagner Mercenary Army

An excerpt from the book, "Our Business Is Death"

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CrashOut’s Russian connection Niko Vorobyov not only brings his own exclusive mafia interviews to the CrashOut table, he’s also hooked up this crazy excerpt from inside the Wagner mercenary army by his friends, the Russian investigative journalists Denis Korotkov and Ilya Barabanov. It’s hard to make sense of the blood and power in the East, but this glimpse into the recruitment of hardened convicts from the gulag to the militia is illuminating and scary - and Russian writers who cover these mobster mercenaries are brave men indeed. IG

In January 2023, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned the Russian private military company (PMC) Wagner as a Transnational Criminal Organization akin to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel or Mara Salvatrucha. Wagner is a mercenary outfit founded by small-time hoodlum-turned oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, which until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 provided plausible deniability for Russian operations in Syria and eastern Ukraine, as well as more for-profit ventures in Africa.

Since then, it’s more openly become a paramilitary wing of the Kremlin, recruiting hardened convicts to storm the front lines. This has ignited fears of blowback, as these veterans take their combat skills back to the criminal underworld. In this extract from their book, “Our Business is Death: The Story of the Wagner Group,” recently translated into English, investigative journalists Korotkov and Barabanov explain how the real-life Dirty Dozen strategy is playing out. NV

Denis Korotkov and Ilya Barabanov

“Do you have someone who can get you out of jail when you’ve been sentenced to ten years? What do you reckon? There are only two who can get you out, Allah and God — and that would be in a wooden box. I will take you out alive, but don't expect me to always bring you back alive.”

A decisive-sounding bald man in a khaki jacket stood on a drill ground against a backdrop of dusky sky and two-storey barracks. He was addressing several hundred identically dressed men lined up in a row, almost at attention. All of these men had, according to the Russian state, committed a crime and received a sentence for it, which they were serving in a penal colony close to the Volga river. Some were there for theft, some for fraud, others for murder. Now, the owner of the Wagner group and Concord corporation, the billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin, was offering them the most unexpected of chances: get out of prison right now, go fight in Ukraine, and, from there, if they managed to survive…freedom, home.

“The first prisoners who fought with me — it was June 1, the storming of the Uglegorskaya thermal power plant,” Prigozhin told his potential subordinates. “Forty people from St. Pete, strict regime, numerous offenses. Forty people went into enemy trenches, slaughtered everyone with knives. There were three dead, seven wounded. Of the three dead, one was 52 years old, served thirty years. He died heroically.”

Prigozhin then promised the men from the Volga colony that they would become Wagner “stormtroopers” and would be treated no differently from ordinary fighters, i.e., free men who had signed a contract with the Company. The prisoners were offered six months at the front.

“After six months you can go home and receive a pardon. Those who want to stay with us, stay with us. There is no option of returning to jail. Those who join us and say on the first day, “Oh, no, I am in the wrong place,” we mark them as “deserters,” and after that comes a firing squad,” Prigozhin concluded.

Where have the men gone?

“Prigozhin is a Russian citizen, that’s the main and most important thing. And an entrepreneur. And you know he cares deeply about what is going on. And he makes a big contribution in his own way, as many entrepreneurs in our country do, in fact.”

Up until the beginning of October 2022, Russia’s presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov had continued to lie in answer to all questions about what mercenaries were doing at the front and why Prigozhin was touring Russia’s penal colonies: apparently, he was just a patriotic businessman helping the front as much as he could, and the Russian authorities had nothing to do with it. Prigozhin, however, could only have received permission to recruit prisoners from Vladimir Putin personally. Russian penal colonies are part of the Federal Penitentiary Service system: as long as a person is in prison, it is the state that is responsible for them.

Despite all the documented abuses committed in Russian penal colonies, ranging from corruption to torture, prior to the invasion of Ukraine, it would have been inconceivable for a businessman — even one very close to the authorities — to not only gain access to a penal institution, but to take people from it. To do this in a truly legal way, Prigozhin would have had to have formal approval. And he had it.

For once, the owner of the Wagner group was not lying: the prisoners who joined Wagner really did receive a pardon. According to Russian law, such pardons can only be signed personally by the president. Putin may have decided to commit such an obviously lawless act to avoid political risk: his army needed manpower at the front, but announcing mobilisation would see the war affect the wider Russian masses directly.

After the initial offensive against Kyiv failed, the Russian authorities and state media had quickly gone into “nothing happened” mode, trying to convince the Russian people that the invasion of Ukraine and its aftermath had no real impact on life in the country. Forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens into the trenches would obviously show these statements to be untrue, and, in the summer of 2022, the authorities decided to try to make do with recruiting men in the regions, launching a wide advertising campaign for contract service, and, at the same time, allowed Prigozhin to make up for losses by drawing on the country’s prison population.

By autumn, when the whole world knew about Prigozhin’s tour of Russian penal colonies, it was already clear that this plan was not working. The Russian army had suffered heavy defeats in Kharkiv Oblast, losing control of the region, and, on September 21, 2022 Vladimir Putin announced the start of a “partial mobilisation” in an address to Russians. In many regions, summons were sent to everyone, including fathers with many children and people with disabilities, and the official presidential decree did not limit the number of people to be mobilised or the duration of the mobilisation measures. Tens of thousands of men fled from Russia to neighbouring countries, queueing for days at borders with Georgia or Kazakhstan to avoid being drafted into the army.

This did not affect Wagner’s work in the penal colonies: Prigozhin and his commanders continued to encourage convicts to enlist. When relatives of convicts began to call the penitentiary to ask where the men had gone, staff responded with murky answers, implying convicts had been sent to some new place to serve their sentences.

The fact that these criminals were not where the courts had sent them but at the front sometimes came as a surprise not only to their relatives but also to the loved ones of their victims. In the autumn of 2022, Natalia Nechetnaya, whose daughter Maria Nechetnaya had been brutally raped and murdered in the Kaluga region by Vladislav Korobenkov and his brother six years earlier, stopped receiving payments from the penal colony: the court had imposed a large fine on Korobenkov as well as a 19-year sentence, and payments for this fine were deducted from his prison earnings. Nechetnaya soon understood that Korobenkov had gone to the war with Wagner, despite the murder of her daughter Maria Nechetnaya having been a very high-profile case, in which the authorities had offered a reward of a million rubles for the capture of the criminals.

The murder of Timur Gavrilov in Volgograd had been no less high-profile: in June 2020, the Azerbaijani medical student was stabbed to death in the street by Vitaly Vasiliev, a far-right nationalist who had simply decided to kill the first non-Russian he saw. Vasiliev was sentenced to 19 years in a strict penal regime. After just more than two years, Timur Gavrilov’s mother learnt that Vasiliev was no longer in the colony — he too had gone to war. She went to Volgograd to find out what was going on and demand justice — she visited the prison itself, the FSIN department, the governor’s and the mayor’s offices, but nowhere was she told anything definite. When Irina Gavrilova contacted Wagner directly via the Telegram chatbot, she was told that “they do not provide information on employees.”

Once the relatives of victims learnt that the men who had ruined their lives had gone to the front, they could only hope that they would not return. The odds on this were, admittedly, pretty good.

Cannon fodder

The recruitment campaign in the colonies began just before Wagner mercenaries entered the battle for Bakhmut in August 2022, and became bogged down there for many months.

At the time, there was an obvious military sense to storming Bakhmut. The Russian army continued to control the eastern part of Kharkiv Oblast, including the small town of Izium, which was seen as a springboard for future offensive operations. Once Wagner had captured Bakhmut, Russia expected to be able to launch a two-pronged final takeover of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, advancing from the north and east towards Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and other cities.

But it all went wrong. It soon became clear that there would be no quick assault on Bakhmut and that Ukrainian soldiers were fighting for every house in the city. Then, in September 2022, the Ukrainian army conducted a successful, unexpected, and rapid counter-offensive operation in the Kharkiv region: having broken through the front line, the Ukrainians managed to liberate most of the region in a few weeks, regaining control of several towns including Izium. In mid-September, mass graves dug by Russians were discovered there; the Ukrainian prosecutor of the region said that at least 445 bodies were of civilians.

After the Russian army lost Ilium, and with it a bridgehead for a further offensive to the south, military experts agreed that there was no longer any strategic or operational sense in storming Bakhmut. Prigozhin, however, continued to fulfil the task that had been set for him. This is characteristic of the “power vertical” that Vladimir Putin has been building for more than twenty years: if an order is given, it must be carried out, and never revised or recognised as erroneous.

Due to the massive influx of new mercenaries, Wagner had to expand its infrastructure: the arrival of so many prisoners in Krasnodar’s Molkino could cause unnecessary local talk and threaten security, and the training ground itself was simply not designed for so large a number of recruits. Accordingly, Wagner got a new base, located on the territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, not far from its capital of Luhansk, to which prisoner-volunteers were transported from the airport in Rostov Oblast.

Prisoners often arrived there without personal belongings — at most, the prison administration would allow them to take a packet of cigarettes. “Of course, they had to buy everything for us,” said one prison recruit. “Towels, soap, and toothpaste. And socks and pants. They dressed us properly. Two pairs of boots, jackets, three suits. And trainers. It was no problem at all. The guys argued among themselves: ‘Shit, we’re like cannon fodder, shall we go?’ Another said: ‘Cannon fodder my ass, they invested so many millions in us, look at ammunition we have!’”

The newly minted Wagnerites were trained at the base near Luhansk. According to one former prisoner who later found himself in Ukrainian captivity, instructors taught them how to use a Kalashnikov assault rifle and how to storm a trench. Wagner commanders proved that Prigozhin was not kidding when he threatened deserters with the death penalty: according to another Wagner prisoner captured in Ukraine, one of his fellow prisoners had escaped from the base, but was then caught by local police, the Wagnerites brought him back, tied him to a pole, and shot him.

Despite some prisoners’ expectations given the “millions” spent on their ammunition, prison recruits were treated as cannon fodder by Wagner commanders. In Syria and Africa, Wagner had sought to create an image of an organisation that takes care of its personnel, however, with the arrival of a huge number of newcomers without the slightest combat experience, the PMC’s tactics changed. One could not expect special training or discipline from prisoners, but it was necessary to keep discipline in combat conditions. For this purpose, Wagner used its usual tool — violence. Commanders of prisoner units — who were also prisoners, like their subordinates — were ordered by their superiors to kill anyone who tried to flee the battlefield, and told that failure to do so would mean death for the commanders themselves.

The Ukrainian military watched in amazement as the Wagnerites used the “meat assault” tactic. Groups of ten prisoners would follow one another at equal distances apart — and keep advancing, even as the Ukrainians shot those ahead and any normal regular army unit would have retreated to pick up their dead and wounded.

After returning from Bakhmut, one Ukrainian serviceman recounted that he had to seek help from a psychologist because he did not understand how one could fight like this: “We take them down with a machine gun by the dozens, and new dozens come at you, and you take them down and take them down again.” Another Ukrainian officer found an explanation for this insane approach: “If they move forward, they have at least some chance of survival. If they retreat, they will definitely be killed.”

Near the Wagner chapel at the base in Molkino, dozens of graves appeared for fighters who had no one to collect their bodies: in a few months, the cemetery grew sevenfold, and in the spring of 2023, local authorities even tried to ban new burials there. We do not know exactly how many Wagnerites died in the storming of Bakhmut, but journalists’ managed to confirm the names of 6,291 deceased. Prigozhin himself estimated the losses of his mercenaries during the storming of the city at 20,000 people, but he also probably understated their true scale. It is all the more impossible to say how many of these people died in battle and how many died at the hands of their own commanders.

By the end of 2022, the Wagner group and its owner personally had tangible political capital. Prigozhin constantly gave interviews, offering measured comments to some journalists and responding in a very gangster-like manner to others: he called one a petty, dirty bastard, while another “reminded one of the folk wisdom: don't stick your nose where the dog doesn’t stick his dick.”

In the case of one of the authors of this book, Denis Korotkov, Prigozhin traditionally did not answer questions for many years and, breaking his own rule, never published Korotkov’s enquiries on his channels. Prigozhin’s only response would come in the winter of 2023, when Korotkov once again asked Prigozhin about Wagner’s losses at Hsham. The reply came half an hour later and was quite personal: “Korotkov, you fucker, you know I think you’re a complete shit! Let another journalist ask all the same questions, and I will answer them as a man of culture. But I’d be ashamed to even take a shit with you in the same field.”

Meanwhile, the battle for Bakhmut, despite all the “meat assaults,” did not end. Gradually, the first wave of prisoners recruited for the war began to finish their six-month contracts and return home: Prigozhin kept his word, and his new employees appreciated it.

“I think [the Wagnerites] opened the door for me,” said Stanislav Bogdanov to reporters enthusiastically — Bogdanov had beaten a judge to death in Novgorod but was released after serving less than half his sentence thanks to Prigozhin. “This company is expanding, and it doesn’t abandon its own. We will have money all the time. We will have work even if this war ends. I have new comrades, new friends, and new family. I am loyal to these people.”

The worst nightmares of the victims of crimes committed by prisoners who had gone to the front, and those of their relatives, began to come true. When the sister of the murdered judge saw a video clip in which Prigozhin met Bogdanov and other criminals who had been wounded in the war, she felt sick. After learning that one of the men who had brutally raped and murdered her daughter Yana had been released, Anna Boltynyuk, a resident of Kaluga, appealed to the prosecutor’s office, the Federal Penitentiary Service, and the president’s office, which had pardoned the murderer. She was told that, according to the law, no one had been obliged to consult her on the pardon.

Thanks to Prigozhin, thousands of murderers and rapists were released after serving six months at the front. It was obvious that sooner or later, some of them would commit further crimes.

In April 2023, in a town near Kirov, Ivan Rossomakhin, who had served only a couple years of his 14-year sentence, stabbed his 85-year-old neighbour to death. Such stories became commonplace. In Krasnodar Krai, an ex-convict and his friends killed two children’s entertainers and burned their car. In Primorsky Krai, a Wagnerite veteran strangled and incinerated an acquaintance. Near Krasnoyarsk, another man set fire to a house in which a mother and daughter were staying; both women died. In the Nizhny Novgorod region, a pardoned mercenary doused his sister with petrol and burned her alive. In Lipetsk, a Wagnerite killed his four-year-old daughter.

Prigozhin himself claimed that by the summer of 2023, 32,000 men had served their contracts and received pardons. Russians now live with these convicts-turned-mercenaries in their midst.

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2025