The recruitment of prisoners in Russia by the mercenary group Wagner to fight in Ukraine could be considered a war crime, UN experts said Friday.
In a public statement, the A UN expert group, including members from several UN working groups, accused the Wagner Group, a mercenary army involved in the invasion of Ukraine alongside Russian forces, of recruiting prisoners from several Russian prisons.
This statement was signed by members of several working groups, namely the UN Working Group on Mercenaries and the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, as well as by the Special Rapporteurs on Arbitrary Executions and Torture.
The advice was drawn up on the basis of accounts of visits by members of Wagner, who allegedly offered prisoners a remission of the crimes they had been convicted of and a monthly income for their families in exchange for their participation in the war, experts said. said they were “deeply concerned”.
Prisoners of different nationalities are threatened and intimidated into accepting, in meetings where they cannot access their lawyers or contact their relativess, as described in the statement.
Some prisoners who accepted the forced deal attempted to defect and were executed, the UN says
Those who accept to become recruits are taken to a detention center in Rostov (south), near the border with Ukraine, where they are trained before being sent out to fulfill the assigned missions, after signing an agreement and being theirs deleted. , they added.
UN experts said that, according to information they obtained, the recruits were deployed to Donetsk and Lugansk, tasked with various missions, from rebuilding infrastructure to directly participating in the clashes.
“This kind of practice is a violation of human rights that could be considered war crimes,” they said, after describing the threats and ill-treatment recruits are subjected to, sometimes in front of colleagues as a form of warning.
Some prisoners who accepted the forced deal attempted to defect and were executed, they said.
In addition to recruitment, in the communiqué deExperts accused the Wagner group of being involved in several “human rights violations” committed in the context of the conflict, including the enforced disappearance of Ukrainian soldiers.
Experts urged the Russian government to protect the detainees from the “violence, exploitation and intimidation” they are subjected to.
The Wagner group, which has already acted in several conflicts, namely on the African continent – cases in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic – today announced the opening of 58 soldier recruitment centers in 42 Russian cities.
The leader of the mercenaries, Yevgeni Prigojine, recognized the need for reinforcements to continue fighting the Ukrainian resistance, which he described as “colossal”, in strategic areas such as the Donetsk city of Bakhmut.
Prigojine had already complained about the lack of ammunition in recent days and hinted that the Russian Defense Ministry could try to boycott the group’s actions by blocking the promised transfer of ammunition.
Source: DN
