Exclusive: Russian prisoners report being sent to fight as ‘cannon fodder’ in Ukraine

The audio is garbled at times, but the emotions are unmistakable.

“I am being taken away to be shot. I lost a lot of people there. Remember this: don’t send more people here. That’s enough, they want to kill us all.”

It’s the last message Viktor Sevalnev would ever send. A convict, who was jailed for armed robbery and assault, was sent from prison to fight for Russia in Ukraine.

After most of his colleagues died in an attack on a factory on the outskirts of Soledar, it was the act of survival that proved fatal for Sevalnev.

In a final message to his wife, he said he feared Russian Defense Ministry officials would soon pull him out of his hospital bed, where he recorded the audio message, and execute him. Days later, his body was returned to his wife in Moscow, in a closed coffin.

Sevalnev’s callous fate joins a growing list of convict abuse claims with whom the CNN talked.

For months Russia has been using the shadowy private Wagner mercenary company to bolster its frontline presence with prisoners – a scheme initially denied and secretive but later openly promoted by Wagner group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin.

On Thursday (9), Prigozhin announced that the group had stopped recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine, saying that “those who work for us are now fulfilling all their obligations”.

No reason was given for the decision and the CNN cannot independently confirm the allegations.

However, Sevalnev and several prisoners with whom the CNN talked about seem to indicate a disturbing new strategy. They say they were hired directly by the Russian Defense Ministry.

A Ukrainian intelligence officer confirmed to CNN that prisoners recently captured by Ukrainian forces said they were directly employed by the ministry.

“They emphasize to us that they are not Wagner, that they were officially invited by the Ministry of Defence”, he told the CNN Andriy Usov, defense intelligence representative of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.

Usov said the development had “echoes of infighting among the Russian military leadership” and that the Russian defense hierarchy, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the new head of the Ukraine operation, Valery Gerasimov, were creating a resource of convicts that they could control directly through the ministry’s own private companies.

Usov said the ministry has fewer convicts for now, but they “will be used just as much as cannon fodder” as the Wagner group does.

Vladimir Osechkin of the prisoner rights group Gulagu.net said the Ministry of Defense appears to be luring recruits and convicts from the Wagner group using “more favorable terms” as a check on its owner Prigozhin’s growing influence, which is increasingly seen as a competitor to parts of the military.

“Many in Moscow are very afraid of Prigozhin,” said Osechkin. “They understand that he runs a huge gang – an organized criminal group of mercenaries and assassins – who at any moment can arrange God knows what in Moscow.”

A CNN asked the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment and did not receive a response.

A CNN spoke with several prisoners who worked for a unit known by the number “08807” – all said to have been directly employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Some had documents suggesting they were sent to an element of the Luhansk separatist army, which was bribed by the Russian defense ministry.

Unit 08807 was deployed in October to the front lines around Soledar, known as the “Shtrum” brigade – to attack the Ukrainian lines – and suffered catastrophic casualties.

Grainy footage obtained by Gulagu.net shows Sevalnev and his unit celebrating pre-deployment dancing at a camp inside Luhansk.

It also shows them eating and playing just behind the front lines the night before an attack on a key factory in Soledar began that would prove fatal to most of Sevalnev’s unit, survivors said.

Convicts spoke of casual mistreatment on and off the battlefield, but Sevalnev’s fate stood out.

According to a recording of a call to his wife from a Russian separatist officer who arranged for the body to be repatriated, his abrupt death was apparently caused by shrapnel wounds.

Sevalnev’s wife declined to be interviewed for this story, but her audio messages and footage of him from the war were provided to CNN by Gulagu.net.

Russian court documents obtained by CNN show that Sevalnev was convicted of theft and should, according to his sentence, have been in prison when he died. His tomb is located outside Moscow and records his month of death as November 2022.

Three other survivors from the unit spoke to the CNN from hospital. One of them, also a prisoner, said that Sevalnev was wounded once but sent back to fight on the front lines, where he was wounded again.

“No one is being operated on here, no surgery performed on anyone,” he said.

A CNN is withholding your name and those of other surviving convicts for your safety. “People walk around [hospital] with bullet wounds, with shrapnel embedded in their legs.”

A former soldier before his arrest, he also described catastrophic losses. “Our batch was 130 people, but we also have a lot of amputees and there are probably 40 people left,” he added, saying that many different groups of prisoners were added to his unit over time.

He said his unit only had 15 survivors and that 08807 was now called 40321, or “Storm unit”.

“In short, the meat grinder,” he added. he said to CNN in the last few days he had been sent back to the front lines, his wounds not healing.

A second prisoner, himself a veteran of previous Russian conflicts, said he was hired by the Russian Ministry of Defense last year, a decade after his murder sentence, after being initially ignored when Wagner recruited from his prison.

He described himself as a “patriot” and complained that many of the prisoners sent to the front were “green”.

“I have no complaints, war is war. Some come here, hear the machine gun and run away. It is not good. They set everyone up, as no one protects me,” he said. This soldier was seriously wounded in the leg in October after 25 days at the front, but he described how he felt no fear.

“In the trench, a few meters from me, a shell falls, the ground falls into the trench, but I don’t feel any fear. I don’t know why this happens to me.”

A third said he was serving a sentence for manslaughter when he was recruited directly by the Defense Ministry. He lamented how his convicts did not receive the medical treatment or benefits that the Wagner group boasted of granting its recruits. [Os recrutas do grupo Wagner também reclamaram de serem usados ​​como bucha de canhão e maltratados.]

He described how one battle left half of his unit as casualties. “We were sent to the battlefront. I communicated to our boys that they were firing mortars at us, that they should aim a little to the right. And yet they fired at us from both sides. Then I understood that they were deliberately shooting at us.”

The fate of the convicts employed by the Wagner group looks no better, according to relatives of three convicts over the summer, who appeared in a report by the CNN In August.

One had disappeared without a trace for four months, according to his brother. Another had also fallen silent, but was sending his brother his salary, collected monthly from a rented office in a sealed plastic bag.

A third appeared in a video featuring Prigozhin, portrayed as a lucky returnee. However, a friend described his “zombie” appearance, heavy drinking and an urgent desire to return to the front.

The scheme to send convicts to war seems to have grown rapidly, with figures obtained by CNN of Russia’s penal system showing a drop of 27,000 in the prison population between March and November last year, when the scheme was only three months old.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also detailed the legality of the pardons the Wagner group insisted the convicts be granted, telling reporters last month that any presidential decrees pardoning prisoners were likely to be confidential.

“There are open decrees and there are decrees with different secrecy classifications,” he said. “That is precisely why I cannot say anything about these decrees. I can really confirm that the entire procedure for pardoning prisoners is carried out in strict accordance with Russian law.”

The Wagner group recruitment also arrested prisoners who are not Russian and may not have been convicted of a crime. Tanzanian student Nemes Tarimo was on an exchange in Moscow when he was apparently arrested on a drug charge and held in pre-trial detention.

He was sentenced in March last year to seven years in prison, according to the Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing information from his Russian colleagues.

His family in Tanzania told CNN who heard nothing of his fate until they were contacted by authorities to say he had died.

Wagner released a gruesome video of a memorial service honoring Tarimo at a cemetery in Molkino, western Russia, saying he died in October near Bakhmut.

His body was returned to Tanzania last month, state television reported, with the foreign ministry saying in a statement that Tarimo had accepted an offer to fight in exchange for money and his freedom.

Her cousin Rehema Makrene Kigoga told CNN : “From childhood, Nemes was a very obedient boy. He was not a trickster, but he was a very religious person”.

She also said that she didn’t hear anything about his recruitment until after his death. “When he was alive, we never heard of this report, but now that he has died, we have been told that he has been arrested for drug related offences. He gives a lot of grief and sadness as a family. He never dreamed of becoming a soldier.”

Sammy Awami, Josh Pennington and Bethlehem Feleke, Victoria Butenko and Alex Stambaugh of CNN contributed to this story.