Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ A Ukrainian citizen mobilised into the Russian army has spoken of the extraordinarily high number of casualties among Wagner's mobilised convicts in eastern Ukraine. He says they are suffering three times as many dead as wounded. Many are infected with HIV and heptatitis. ⬇️

2/ The Ukrainian YouTuber Volodymyr Zoldin has interviewed a man named Vladimir Nikolaevich Saychuk, a Ukrainian citizen from Luhansk who has worked at a monastery in Crimea since 2010. He was taken prisoner by the Ukrainian army but agreed to be interviewed by Zoldin.

3/ Saychuk says he was forcibly mobilised after receiving a summons. 5 busloads of men were taken to Krasnodar in Russia on 3 November 2022 and then sent immediately to Luhansk in Ukraine on the following day. None were given a medical examination or any training.

4/ The mobilised men were brought to an agricultural technical school in Luhansk. Saychuk was put to work pulling corpses out of the ground – it's not clear exactly where, but from the context it's likely to be have been in the Bakhmut-Soledar area.

5/ According to Saychuk, in 10 days of work he found the remains of 55 people in an area of the battlefield only 30 m (98 ft) wide. Many of them were collected 'in pieces' and were taken to the occupied town of Popasna, which Russia captured in May.

6/ The majority of the dead were Wagner fighters "of retirement age", Saychuk says. He saw white and red bracelets on their wrists, meaning that they had HIV and/or hepatitis. (This corroborates Ukrainian accounts of infected prisoners being recruited.)
gur.gov.ua/en/content/vah…

7/ Notably, Saychuk says that the casualties were all killed by shrapnel; the total number of dead was three times that of the wounded. The typical ratio of those wounded to those killed in conflict has been around 3:1; if he is correct, this ratio has effectively been reversed.

8/ Saychuk and his colleagues were captured on 3 December while recording the remains, presumably at or very close to the front line. The earth and corpses he has handled are now so ingrained in his hands that he can't wash it off. /end

Sources:

🔹 t.me/poisk_in_ua/95…
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