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Nearly six months into Russia’s bloody war against Ukraine, it appears Vladimir Putin has pinned his hopes for claiming victory on a self-described “organized crime syndicate” that is now trawling prisons for cold-blooded killers and deploying mercenaries to straighten out fed-up troops.
That’s according to several explosive new reports out Thursday by the independent Russian investigative news outlets iStories and The Insider, both of which uncovered disturbing new details about the notorious Wagner Group’s alleged role in the war.
After myriad reports in recent weeks that Kremlin-linked businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin has been personally touring Russian prisons and promising inmates full amnesty if they fight for Wagner in Ukraine, a staffer at a high-security penal colony in the Tula region has revealed the real reason behind the desperate recruiting drive.