Moscow, Apr 13 (EFE).- A former mercenary from the Wagner Group who fled from Russia to Norway last January has assured that the combatants of the Russian private military company beheaded the Ukrainian soldier, after identifying the voices in the video that shows the execution and whose authenticity is being investigated.
“Former Wagner fighter Andrei Medvedev, who fled to Norway, recognized the voices of his colleagues in a video recording,” Gulagu.net founder Vladimir Osechkin said on his Telegram channel.
According to this human rights activist, who lives in exile, the former mercenary “unequivocally identifies his colleagues there – Wagner’s fighters – by their characteristic nicknames, by the way they speak, by what they express on the radio” during the beheading of the Ukrainian soldier.
A reward of 3,000 euros for identifying the “executioners”
Osechkin announced a reward of 3,000 euros for information about the people who appear in the video.
The founder of Gulagu.net contacted Medvedev to analyze the video, as he supported him in his flight from Russia to Norway after the ex-combatant turned to him in December 2022 to ask for help to avoid extrajudicial reprisals after leave the front
Osechkin recalled that this is not the first time that an execution of this type has occurred, since in 2017 there were videos of Wagner fighters beating a prisoner in Syria with a sledgehammer and then dismembering the body, dousing it with gasoline and burning it.
On Wednesday, Wagner’s chief Yevgeny Prigozhin denied that his units, currently fighting in Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region, were linked to the soldier’s beheading.
“I saw that video. It is wrong when people are beheaded, but I did not find anywhere that this takes place in Bakhmut or that Wagner fighters participate in this execution, ”Prigozhin said in an audio posted on his Telegram account.
For its part, the Kremlin called to verify this video that is circulating on social networks.
“To begin with, you have to check the veracity of the images,” said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, in his daily press conference, in which he admitted that the images are “terrible.”