- Two captured Wagner Group fighters say the company hired convicts as long as they could march a few yards.
- They said the mercenaries recruited practically any inmate, regardless of their crimes, per CNN.
The physical selection process to qualify to fight in Ukraine for Wagner Group, a private Russian military company, was so lenient that inmates only had to show they could march several yards, two of its fighters say.
The two men were captured by Kyiv's forces, according to a CNN report by Tim Lister and Frederik Pleitgen published Sunday. CNN kept the fighters' identities anonymous for their safety.
Both Russian fighters told CNN they were serving prison sentences when the Wagner Group approached them in September and August, offering six-month contracts in exchange for pardons. Older prisoners only had to show they could march a few yards to be recruited, one of the fighters said.
"They took almost everyone," one of the men said, per CNN. "Some of them were head cases."
"The crazy ones, the ones who when they get a weapon in their hands they wouldn't know how to handle it," he added.
The Wagner Group has been regularly hiring convicts to fight in Russia's invasion, though its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced on Thursday that it would stop recruiting such men. Western officials say Moscow has so far deployed around 40,000 to 50,000 inmates in the war.
One of the two captured men said Prigozhin promised that he was given the authority to pardon recruited convicts, regardless of what crimes they'd committed or how much longer they'd have to serve.
"They lined everyone up in the yard and Prigozhin started recruiting people," he said, per CNN.
"The ideal candidates are murderers, robbers," the prisoner added, according to the outlet.
In exchange, the inmates would have to fight for six months in Ukraine, and were told they would be fighting Nazis, one of the men said, according to the outlet. "At the same time, he promised us wages, repayment of loans, and a clean history," he said.
One of the men told the outlet that when he took the job, he had 10 years of his sentence left for a manslaughter conviction.
The pair said Prigozhin told them they would be stationed on the second line of defense on Russia's front, per CNN. However, they were given only basic training on how to handle guns, and were then ordered to assault Ukrainian positions — resulting in most of their Wagner units being wiped out by mortar fire and landmines, they told the outlet.
Similar reports previously emerged of Russian reservists dying by the hundreds from Ukrainian shelling and of Wagner Group recruits being executed for refusing to participate in suicide charges.
"Those who disobey are eliminated — and it's done publicly," Yevgeny Novikov, a former inmate recruited by Wagner, told the Russian independent outlet Poligon Media.
One prisoner told another independent outlet, Meduza, in a report published Wednesday that inmates no longer want to sign up with the Wagner Group after hearing about the casualties suffered by convict units.