20 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeni Prigozhin, has denied this Thursday the stories that two of his mercenaries were arrested by the Ukrainian forces, who claimed to have followed orders to shoot children and the civilian population, stressing that they are nothing more than “paranoid nonsense” fruit of coercion on the part of Kiev.
Prigozhin has tried to delegitimize the versions of these two mercenaries, who would have entered Wagner’s ranks through prison, one of the main recruitment centers of this security company, with ties to the Kremlin, although recently confronted with the Ministry of Defending.
“None of the statements have anything to do with reality. They are absolute and complete nonsense,” Prigozhin said on his Telegram channel, referring to the testimonies of Azamat Uldarov and Aleksey Savichev on Gulagu.net.
In response to these versions, Prigozhin has announced that they will file a lawsuit against both, based on the Russian Criminal Code that protects the interests of war veterans and those who participate in armed conflicts, as well as against the journalist Vladimir Osechkin –responsible from Gulagu.net– for blackmail.
Prigozhin assures that both would have been blackmailed with sensitive material about their sexual behavior in prison. For this reason, he has also filed a lawsuit against a series of prison officials in charge of gathering this compromised material to later be used “to coerce these people to commit illegal actions.”
It is not the first time that Prigozhin has come out to deny these reports that his mercenaries are behind war crimes, although it is the first time that he has announced that he will take legal action on the matter.
At the beginning of the week, Gulagu.net published some videos in which Savichev and Uldarov could be seen talking about alleged orders they received from the high command to kill the civilian population, including children, during the battles that are taking place in the last weeks in Bakhmut.
