Already widely reported is that President Putin, desperate for bodies to fight his illegal war in Ukraine, has permitted Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the notorious paramilitary Wagner Group, to recruit Russian prisoners, including rapists and murderers.
The prisoner project began in July. Prigozhin visited prisons to recruit, but he went beyond that. So imperative were more men on Ukrainian battlefields, Putin's pal and oligarch pressured potential recruits from Russia's penal colonies to enter the killing fields in exchange for clemency and a salary between $1,500 and $3,000 monthly. One such Progozhin pep talk was captured on video.
The Daily Beast relates that Prigozhin, in Russia, "has reportedly recruited over 6,000 prisoners to fight in Ukraine." There is no known accounting on the number of deaths that have ensued.
DB now reports that the Wagner Group is recruiting in the Central African Republic, where a civil war has raged for years and where Prignozhin's mercenaries have supported President Faustin-Archange Touadéra in his fight against rebel forces, a fight that has involved, as you might imagine, many human rights abuses.
"They [members of the Wagner Group] have been walking into military and police cells and releasing rebels, including those held for attacking Bokolobo village [in southern CAR] in May and for raping women and girls,” said a military officer who works in CAR’s capital, Bangui. "Nobody can stop them because the government has given them so much power to act the way they want," said the officer.
Further notes DB:
"Many of CAR’s high-risk criminals, particularly rebels accused of harming, raping, and killing civilians are held in military and police cells rather than in understaffed and poorly secured conventional prisons. Although the detainees are under the custody of local forces, Wagner mercenaries—who’ve been active in CAR since the government turned to Russia for help in securing arms and paramilitaries in 2017—continue to exert influence over the Central African nation’s security agencies."
And now the raping, child-killing criminals are headed for Ukraine — courtesy the world's most prominent criminal, Vladimir Putin.