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Wagner chief boasts he is turning convicted killers into ‘real CANNIBALS’ after they were released from prison to join his mercenaries in Ukraine
- Prigozhin was seen in a video at a special training ground for his private army
- He boasted he is turning prisoners into ‘cannibals’ before deployment to Ukraine
Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has boasted he is turning convicted killers into ‘real cannibals’ after they were released from prison to join his feared mercenary group.
Prigozhin was seen in a video at a special training ground for his private paramilitary fighters in the village of Molkino in the Krasnodar region, southern Russia.
Prigozhin’s mercenary group consists of around 50,000 prisoners including rapists and murders who will be pardoned and free to live in society no matter how heinous their crimes if they survive six months of war.
The Wagner chief boasted he is turning the prisoners into ‘real cannibals’ before they are deployed to Ukraine.
Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has boasted he is turning convicted killers into ‘real cannibals’ after they were released from prison to join his feared mercenary group
Prigozhin was seen in a video at a special training ground for his private paramilitary fighters (pictured) in the village of Molkino in the Krasnodar region, southern Russia
Ukrainian BMP-2 infantry combat vehicles drive in a convoy down an icy road in the Donetsk region on Monday
‘This is a supplementary training base for our fighters,’ Prigozhin said in the video, as Wagner troops conducted combat drills behind him.
‘The primary training is in Molkino [Krasnodar region], and here experienced fighters are given additional training in their specialties.
‘So they raise young eagles there [in Molkino]. And here they make real cannibals.’
Prigozhin, himself a former jail inmate after assaulting and robbing a woman, has become a billionaire under Putin’s rule, and he also runs troll factories pumping out Russian propaganda on social media.
He mocked his foes who criticise him as running a private army with appalling losses at the frontline.
Prigozhin was seen in a video at a special training ground for his private paramilitary fighters (pictured) in Molkino
Ukrainian servicemen fire a mortar on a front line, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues, in Bakhmut, on January 27
He slammed those who ‘were once in the army’ or ‘once wore the shoulder straps of a general’ in the ‘distant past’.
He said: ‘Live in the present. [This is] a war unlike anything that has happened, in the previous century or this one – except WW2.’
It was reported earlier that Wagner recruited at least one ‘maniac’ killer convicted of cannibalism and ‘hundreds of murderers’ to fight in Putin’s war.
Olga Romanova, from human rights group Russia Behind Bars told Mozhem Obyasnit media outlet: ‘We have started to hear that he has begun taking rapists, too.
‘They have also taken a maniac from [a jail in] Saratov region, who has cannibalism in his ‘portfolio’.’
Meanwhile, Putin is said to have turned against Prigozhin after he ‘failed to take the hint’ and kept on bragging that his forces were achieving more success than Russia’s army.
And the Wagner chief has risked further angering the Russian President by dismissing Moscow’s generals as ‘a bunch of clowns’.
Prigozhin is increasingly seen as posing a rising threat to the Kremlin leader with his daily grandstanding and outspoken boasts.
Last week, he claimed his ragbag fighters have achieved heroics greater than Soviet soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad, a key military turning point in the Second World War.
He has also openly mocked General Valery Gerasimov – the Russian commander-in-chief – who ordered that Russian soldiers should shave off their beards as part of a discipline drive in the armed forces.
Russia’s defence chiefs were ‘a bunch of clowns’ seeking the ‘glamorisation of the army’, raged Prigozhin, a Soviet-era jail inmate who came to fame arranging banquets and managing online troll factories for Putin.
‘Female war correspondents go into the absolute heat of [war],’ said Prigozhin.
‘Jail inmates fight better than units of the Guards. Servicemen with broken spines pass on their military experience at training camps, moving around like robots.
‘And a bunch of clowns try to teach fighters exhausted with hard military labour how many times they ought to shave — and what kind of perfume they must use to greet high commanders.’