The head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeni Prigozhin, on Monday denied claims by some of the men who fought for hire on the Russian side in the Ukrainian war that they had received direct orders to shoot children and civilians.
»Of course, nobody shoots civilians or children, nobody needs it at all. We came there to save them from the regime they were under,» Prigozhin said in a statement echoed by Ukrainian media.
These statements are a response to the series of videos published on Monday by the portal Gulagu.net, in which alleged Wagner mercenaries captured by the Ukrainian forces claim to have received orders to shoot civilians.
These claims were made by Aleksei Savichev, who spoke of mass killings of children and teenagers in Bakhmut, one of the main theaters of this war because of its privileged location in eastern Ukraine, coveted by Moscow as one of the main distribution centers of Kiev.
For his part, Azamat Uldarov has told of having participated with other mercenaries, and by order of his superiors, in the murder of 400 people held in the basement of a building in Bakhmut a month ago.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)