“Your contract has ended”
Prigozhin visits the morgue with dead Wagner soldiers in Bakhmut
On New Year’s Eve, Wagner boss Prigozhin visited a mortuary in Bakhmut. There he showed up next to dozens of dead bodies lying in black body bags before being taken to Russia.
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Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin appears in a video next to black body bags in which dead Wagner mercenaries are lying.
Drone attacks on Kyiv and heavy fighting on the front in Donetsk: Even at the beginning of the new year there seems to be no end in sight to the Ukraine war.
In Bakhmut the Ukrainians are trying by all means to hold their positions. According to reports from Kyiv, the Russian army has suffered heavy losses in recent days. The spokesman for the Ukrainian Army Group East, Sergei Cherewati, spoke on Saturday of 170 soldiers killed and a “conveyor belt of death”.
Whether this figure is correct cannot be independently verified. The fact that Russian soldiers are dying there is also shown by recordings from their own ranks.
Prigozhin appears next to body bags
A video appeared late Sunday evening showing the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin (61), in an improvised morgue. The recordings are said to have been taken on New Year’s Eve near Bachmut.
In the video, Prigozhin can be seen next to several black body bags. The man behind the camera asks him who is lying there. «Wagner fighters who fell as heroes at the front. They will now be respectfully placed in the zinc coffins and taken home,” Prigozhin replies.
He says of the dead Wagner mercenaries: “Your contract has ended. You’re going home in a week. We have to prepare for the journey now.”
Prigozhin, who is considered a close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin (70), has recruited numerous prisoners for the war in Ukraine in recent months, among other things. The criminals were lured into the contracts with amnesty and lots of money. So now they come home dead men.
The video shows the body bags being loaded into a truck. Prigozhin calls out to the men who are piling up the corpses: “Happy New Year, folks.” (man)