Wagner's leader says his mercenaries will no longer take prisoners

The leader of Russia’s Wagner Group said his mercenaries will no longer take prisoners after hearing an alleged audio recording that exposed the killing of one of his captured soldiers. 

“We will kill everyone on the battlefield. Take no more prisoners of the war!” Yevgeny Prigozhin said in an audio message according to a translation by The Kyiv Independent. 

Prigozhin's audio message was posted to Telegram by the Wagner founder's press service as a response to a recording of two Ukrainian soldiers deciding to shoot a prisoner of war. 

The Kyiv Independent noted that the recording of the alleged Ukrainian soldiers is difficult to verify and a number of issues with the clip call its authenticity into question. 

“The voices in the 21-second audio file speak Russian and don't even mention that their apparent prisoner is Russian or give any indication that they themselves are Ukrainian,” The Kyiv Independent wrote before going on to note other issues with the clip. 

“No visual evidence or contextual information is given concerning the recording, making its authenticity highly dubious,” The Kiyv Independent added. 

The audio clip was posted by the Wagner-affiliated Telegram channel Unloading Wagner, which provided a transcript of the conversation between the two voices heard on the recording as they discussed what they should do with the soldier they had. 

According to a Google translation of the posted transcript, one voice asked another if the soldier they had "smoked out of the hole" was still alive. The other soldier responded that he was and said to "shoot him" because they did not take prisoners. 

"We don't know the name of our guy shot by Ukrainians," Prigozhin said, remarking that international law required Wagner to “take care, treat, not hurt" their prisoners of war according to a translation from Kyiv Post.

Prigozhin added that Wagner’s forces would “not violate the rules of humanity and [would] simply destroy everyone on the battlefield,” according to a translation from the New Voice of Ukraine, meaning all killing would be done in the heat of battle and not afterward. 

The New Voice of Ukraine added that Prigozhin called this his “Law of 300,” which is a reference to the common term in the Russian and Ukrainian armies for dead soldiers. 

Prigozhin’s statement comes just weeks after two sickeningly brutal videos of Wagner's atrocities in Ukraine were released by pro-Russian social media channels. 

In one video, Wagner mercenaries can be seen beheading the corpses of two dead Ukrainian soldiers near a destroyed armored vehicle in Bakhmut according to CNN. 

The second video was far more disturbing and revealed the decapitation of a possible still-living Ukrainian soldier that probably happened in the summer, CNN noted. 

“There is something that no one in the world can ignore: how easily these beasts kill,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video message about Wagner’s atrocities. 

“We are not going to forget anything. Neither are we going to forgive the murderers. There will be legal responsibility for everything. The defeat of terror is necessary,” Zelensky added, a sad statement on the gruesome reality of the war unfolding in Ukraine.