The latest information handled by United Nations experts have triggered all the alarms at the UN headquarters. According to their sources we are witnessing a “alarming” recruitment of prisoners in Russian jails by the Wagner Group. Mercenaries related to Vladimir Putin who use warlike tactics that violate Human Rights and who are now seeking reinforcements in Russian prisons.
“We are deeply concerned by reports of visits by members of the so-called Wagner Group to penal institutions in various regions of Russia, offering pardons for criminal sentences to prisoners who join the Group and participate in the war in Ukraine, in addition to making payments monthly payments to their families”, explained the UN experts in a statement in which they revealed that this mercenary group would have thus recruited both Russian and foreign citizens serving time on Russian soil.
Recruitment for which they do not hesitate to use their tactics as pressure through threats and intimidation for example by preventing prisoners from speaking with their families or lawyers. Furthermore, the UN denounces that it has information that several inmates have been executed while trying to escape and others have been seriously injured as a warning to the rest of the inmates. Again violations of Human Rights that could also constitute war crimes.
According to data from the United Nations, the prisoners who are being recruited are being transferred to a center in Rostov, near the border with Ukraine. There they would be being trained before being sent to the front. In addition, they would have been introduced into Ukraine without identification documents or a contract with the mercenary group or the Kremlin.
“We are especially concerned that the Wagner Group has extended recruitment to prisons in the Donetsk region in Ukraine,” also reads the statement in which the UN confirms that it fears that these inmates will be used not only in war but also to rebuild infrastructure in the Ukrainian territories that are now in Russian hands.
Thus, The United Nations calls on the international communityas well as Russia. He reminds Putin that “States have an obligation to prohibit individuals and companies from exploiting the vulnerability of prisoners for their own benefit.”
Bakhmut, “death zone”
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defense of the United Kingdom assures that the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the nerve center of the attack by the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, is already divided between the Russian and Ukrainian positions. Positions divided by the river that crosses a city that has become, they maintain in the English Defense Department, in a “death zone”.
Confirms the ministry of Ben Wallace that in the last four days there have been Russian advances at the hands of the Wagner Group would already control most of the eastern part of the city, while Ukrainian forces have blown up the bridges across the river Bakhmuta and have entrenched the buildings near the shore to try to thwart any attempt by the mercenaries to cross the waters.
The British estimate confirms the announcement made in the last few hours by the head of the mercenaries, the oligarch Yevgeni Prigozhin, who considered the entire eastern part of the city conquered, although he did not rule out a Ukrainian counteroffensive.
For his part, the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelenski, has warned that the taking of Bakhmut by the Kremlin could provide a “direct route” for Russian forces to attack other cities in the east from Ukraine.