The GRAY ZONE Telegram channel associated with PMC Wagner has again published a video of the execution with a sledgehammer of a prisoner who surrendered to Ukrainian captivity. The video was posted on the night of February 13, it is alleged that the footage shows Dmitry Yakushchenko, born in Crimea, born in 1978.
Yakushchenko was repeatedly convicted, the last time for 19 years, for robbery and murder. From the colony, he ended up in the Wagner PMC, according to GRAY ZONE, he went over to the side of Ukraine after four days. In captivity, Yakushchenko gave an interview and admitted that he immediately planned to escape and did it in the Bakhmut area. In addition, in an interview, he said that Crimea would be Ukrainian. The video was assembled from two videos, on the first one there is an interview with Yakushchenko from captivity, in the second minute there are frames signed as “trial for treason”. The prisoner himself claimed that he felt a blow in the Dnieper and lost consciousness, and then found himself already at the place of execution. How exactly the prisoner got from captivity back to the PMC is unclear.
“Like his colleague Yevgeny Nuzhin earlier, [Yakushchenko] fell ill with the same disease, from which you lose consciousness in the cities of Ukraine, then in Kyiv, now in Dnipro, and then you wake up in the basement at your last court session,” Telegram escorted -channel video with the execution of a prisoner.
This is not the first time that PMCs have used such methods of killing prisoners recruited for the war with Ukraine and defected to its side. In November, GRAY ZONE published a video of the execution of Russian prisoner Evgeny Nuzhin, who also surrendered to Ukrainian captivity, after which he gave an interview to Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov. The Telegram channel "VChK-OGPU" wrote that Nuzhin returned to Russia during the exchange of prisoners of war. One of the founders of the PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, commented on the video of the execution with the words: "To a dog – a dog's death." Later, he began to claim that Nuzhin was executed by the US and NATO intelligence agencies. Former mercenary of PMC Wagner, Nuzhin commander Andrei Medvedev told The Insider that he crossed the border into Norway and requested asylum there.