Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of PMC Wagner, Russia’s mercenary group in Ukraine, has visited a hospital in Anapa where Wagner’s fighters recruited among former convicts are receiving treatment. One of the mercenaries there was earlier found guilty of murdering his own grandmother, a WW2 veteran, Agentstvo says.
RIA FAN, a media outlet connected with Prigozhin, posted a video of his visit to the hospital. Agentstvo has managed to identify several former convicts present at the meeting. One of those is Dmitry Karyagin who was earlier sentenced to 14.5 years in a maximum-security prison for murdering his own grandmother, 87, a WW2 veteran.
The court declared that the man convinced his grandmother to sell her apartment for 820,000 rubles [€10,600], took her to a garage, and hit her on the head with a hammer. He told his relatives that the grandmother moved to Ukraine instead.
Karyagin posted on his VK page on 5 January 2023 for the first time since his arrest, telling his friends he was in Anapa after suffering a wound and was soon going “home”.
Agentstvo also managed to identify several more criminals, such as Daniil Savelyev, a repeated offender who was most recently convicted to six years in prison for robbing a telecom store in Saint Petersburg. Viktor Karnakov of Kirov, another mercenary, was convicted to 13 years for fraud, and several more men were convicted for theft. Prigozhin promised to set them free.
The first group of Russian convicts recruited by PMC Wagner as mercenaries for the Ukraine War had its members’ six months contracts finished a few days ago, Prigozhin reported, noting that all of those had their criminal record cleared. He also asked the mercenaries “not to drink much, to avoid drugs, and not to rape women”.
