“Putin’s cook” jokes – Wagner mercenaries kill Russians with sledgehammers

The Russian is Yevgeny Nushin, a 55-year-old ex-convict. He had joined the Wagner group over the summer after “Putin’s cook” Yevgeny Prigozhin showed up at his prison to recruit criminals.

Wanted to fight for Ukraine
Nushin was sent to the front in eastern Ukraine and surrendered to the Ukrainians in September. In an interview with Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov, he explained his desertion by saying that he had been treated like cannon fodder. In it, Nushin also expressed his desire to fight for Ukraine.

In the video, shared on Telegram’s Gray Zone channel on Saturday and titled “Hammer of Revenge,” the Russian says he was abducted from Kiev and woke up in a basement. He may have been forced to tell this to warn others. According to human rights organization Gulagu.net, Nushin could also have returned to the Russians through a prisoner exchange. He was told he would be sentenced, the man in the video continues. Its head is attached to a goat with plastic wrap. After the confession, the video is grainy, someone hits Nushin on the head with a sledgehammer, causing him to fall backwards.

“Putin’s cook” is a joke
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian founder and financier of Wagner, joked about the execution video on Telegram: “I think this movie is called ‘The Dog Shall Die Like a Dog’. Excellent directorial work, I watched it on the train. I hope that during filming no animals were injured.”

Such executions are a tradition among the Wagner group, and the mercenary group also prints motifs on T-shirts with sledgehammers, explains human rights expert Kamil Galeev of the US Wilson Research Center. Wagner had already executed deserters in Syria this way, Galeev said on Twitter. From the mercenary’s perspective, the brutality is necessary to control unmotivated combatants.