Former mercenaries of the PMC “Wagner” from among the pardoned prisoners began to accept for service in the Russian Guard, according to the investigation “Important stories”.
Investigators claim that former Wagnerites, who were recruited into PMCs from Russian colonies and then pardoned for participating in hostilities in Ukraine, began to be recruited into the Russian Guard from August 2023.
The journalists drew this conclusion from the correspondence from the private chats of the relatives of the mercenaries, which came into the editorial office’s disposal.
Several relatives of former convicts, who were contacted by Important Stories, said that after serving in the PMC, their relatives were invited to serve in the Russian Guard. But not everyone was recruited, only those who had been convicted of crimes of minor or moderate gravity. At the same time, the publication’s sources noted that former Wagnerites are hired into the Russian Guard “not for leadership positions or even for the average officer corps.”
In one of the Moscow units of the Russian Guard, a journalist from the publication, who introduced himself as a former mercenary of the Wagner PMC, was confirmed that militants from among the prisoners have a chance to get into service in this unit even without experience in the regular army, but it all depends on the nature of the crime committed and how long ago the candidate was in the colony.
In the Rostov division of the Russian Guard, investigators were offered to sign a contract as a serviceman of the National Guard troops and go to guard strategic facilities in the occupied part of the Donetsk region.
At the end of August, after the death of the founder of the Wagner PMC, Evgeniy Prigozhin, in a plane crash in the Tver region, “Important Stories” reported that the PMC itself advised mercenaries to look for another job due to competition with the Russian Ministry of Defense in Africa and the Middle East. In addition, in Belarus they began to dismantle the camp in which the Wagnerites who moved from Russia after the June uprising were located.
