PMC Wagner posts video of execution with sledgehammer of one of its imprisoned fighters. The man spent time in Ukrainian captivity and criticised Putin in Ukraine’s media (TW)

Telegram channel affiliated with private military company Wagner has posted a video of the execution of its prisoner Yevgeny Nuzhin. This information has also been confirmed by a source within PMC Wagner to Russian anti-torture website Gulagu.net.

In the video, Nuzhin says that he switched to fighting for Ukraine in the war back in September and that he was kidnapped from Kyiv in November. The man regained consciousness in a basement, he was told that he “would be tried”, he adds. After that, the video shows Nuzhin’s head being smashed with a sledgehammer.

The man was recruited for PMC Wagner in the penal colony #3 of the Russian city of Ryazan. He was serving a 24-year-long sentence for murder, destruction of others’ property, hooliganism, and attempted escape from place of imprisonment. Eventually, he surrendered into Ukrainian captivity and gave an interview to Ukrainian journalist Yury Butusov, in which he criticised Putin and said that he wanted to fight on Ukraine’s side.

PMC Wagner previously carried out extrajudicial executions in Syria. In 2017, they recorded a video, in which a man’s legs and arms were smashed with a sledgehammer, his head was cut off, his arms chopped off, and his decapitated body burned. The head was then put on the closest fence. It was later reported that there were at least two people executed.