A former Wagner Group mercenary has been arrested in Russia’s Volgograd region for raping his 13-year-old niece.
The Novoanninsk court press release did not mention the detainee’s name, only the first letter. But as determined by the independent website Mediazon, the remaining circumstances coincide with the case of 35-year-old Alexei Khlebnikov, who returned from the war in Ukraine and was placed on the wanted list in mid-August.
According to investigators, Khlebnikov raped his 13-year-old niece in a forest in Novoannin district and threatened her with a knife.
In 2018, a court sentenced him to 11 years in prison in a high-security penal colony for the murder of a friend. He had previously been convicted of theft and robbery. While in prison, he was recruited by the Wagner group to participate in the war in Ukraine. In the summer of 2023, he returned to the family farm.
War in Ukraine. Dangerous criminals have returned to Russia
In June, 32,000 former prisoners who took part in the invasion of Ukraine in the ranks of the Wagner group returned to Russia from the front. They were pardoned by President Vladimir Putin.
This was announced by the head of the Wagnerians, Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s cook”, who recruited thousands of people from Russian prisons and offered them a chance for freedom in exchange for participating in the fighting in Ukraine.
Prigozhin, who died in a plane crash on August 23, argued that only 83 crimes were recorded among the mercenaries released after the war, which is “80 times less than among those released from prison during the same period” and who had no contract with the Wagner group.
Convicts in the ranks of the Wagner group
The recruitment of prisoners from Russian prisons and gulags for the military operations department in Ukraine has been known since the summer of 2022. In exchange for being allowed to be transferred to the front, the convicts were promised cash payment and a pardon.
The media had previously reported crimes committed by former members of the Wagner group, including attacks on police officers. In one, a Wagnerian soldier returning to Russia from Ukraine opened fire on the policemen with a machine gun, “mistaking” them for soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
According to US government estimates, the Wagner Group had 50,000 employees by the end of 2022. people, of which 40,000 are recruited in Russian prisons, and only 10,000 are professional mercenaries. 20 percent of those 50,000 fell in battle, most of them at Bakhmut, where one of the bloodiest battles since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine took place.
Source: Do Rzeczy
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
