@reuters Russia correspondent, covering Russia & ex USSR from Tbilisi. Erstwhile @MoscowTimes. Views all my own. felix dot light at thomsonreuters dot com
Mar 16, 2023 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
NEW: We spent the last few weeks identifying ~30 Wagner convict fighters who returned from Ukraine and received their pardons. Five agreed to talk to us. What resulted is the most detailed insider account of Wagner's prisoner army yet published @Reuters
reuters.com/investigates/s…
The men who spoke to us said they joined Wagner for various reasons: some for money, some for the pardon, some out of patriotism. Some said prison officers tried to talk them out of joining.
NEW: together with @reuters colleagues, I spent the last month reconstructing the lives of dozens of convicts who joined the Wagner mercenary army and who were killed in Ukraine. A window onto the grim reality of Russian prison life.
reuters.com/investigates/s…
Many, if not most, of the dead evoke little sympathy: a hitman who killed his victim for $5k; a career criminal who cut a woman’s throat in a drunken row; a baby-faced 25 y-o who killed a man by beating him unconscious and setting him on fire.
File under revolutions eating their own: Tatiana Yumasheva, Boris Yeltsin’s daughter and one of the key people instrumental in choosing her dad’s successor in 1999, is against the war.
ex-wife of Putin press secretary Dmitry Peskov against war:
