Russia’s notorious Wagner Group has sent mobile brigades to trawl shopping malls, parking lots, and even restaurants for new recruits after being sidelined from prison recruiting.
While Bloomberg reported last month that the mercenary group was on track to back away from Ukraine and shift instead to Africa, an amped-up recruiting drive is well underway in multiple regions across Russia—with Wagner-branded vehicles venturing even into remote villages in the Sverdlovsk, Murmansk, and Irkutsk regions in recent days, as well as the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia and Yakutia in the Far East.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the group’s cutthroat founder and public face, told The Daily Beast he expects the mobile Wagner brigades to “soon make it even to European territory of the globe. But where the [new recruits] will go — let that remain a mystery for our dear publication The Daily Beast.”
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The nationwide tour involves “consultants” for the group parking their Wagner-branded vehicles in highly trafficked areas and offering passers-by the chance to join for a salary of 240,000 rubles ($2,940) and “maybe” a bonus of up to 1 million, according to one recruiter captured in video shared on social media. Hundreds of such mobile brigades plan to visit tens of thousands of Russian cities over the next month.
At the same time, Prigozhin has made no secret of the fact that many new recruits will be killed in battle before they can spend any of that money.
In a video filmed in front of a cemetery in the Krasnodar Krai on Thursday, Prigozhin stood before rows and rows of freshly filled graves and admitted that “here they are continuing to bury Wagner fighters.”
“Yes, it’s growing,” he said, because “those who go to war sometimes die.”
The cemetery, he said, will be turned into a “memorial for future generations.”
Residents of the Komi and Karelia republics also reported finding invitations to join the group stuffed into their mailboxes. A photo of one such letter shared on social media showed a plea for recipients to spread the word as well: “We ask that you inform all those who might be interested in working for Wagner about this letter.”
Recruiting ads purported to be from the group have also been spotted on porn sites, with one particularly cringe-worthy ad featuring a woman who asks a man where he “learned” to be so good in bed, to which he replied, “Wagner.”
The recruiting efforts come after thousands of prison inmates-turned-fighters completed their contracts with the group and returned home, freshly pardoned, to live among ordinary civilians.
At least one of those fighters was already arrested on murder charges within days of his return. Many of the other former inmates have been taken to hotels in the resort city of Anapa, where Prigozhin has fully or partially rented out at least eight different hotels as a sort of Wagner “resort,” according to a new report from Radio Free Europe’s Mark Krutov.
While the inmates are ostensibly holed up in the hotels to recover from their injuries after their stint in the war, relatives have complained in group chats that instead of getting medical treatment, they’re getting drunk and doing drugs, RFE/RL reports.
“Ours went blind from the shock wave [of an explosion], his eyes were full of shrapnel. Two months in a hospital in Luhansk. Three months in Anapa until it became inflamed, then they treated him in Vityazevo. They sent him to Calypso, where there is no medicine, no medical staff, no doctors,” the wife of one wounded Wagner fighter was quoted saying. “They don’t care about our guys.”
