Anastasia Pechenyuk08:09, 01/31/23

Killed “Wagnerites” were quickly replaced with new “cannon fodder” recruited from Russian colonies, Medvedev said.

Andrey Medvedev , the former commander of the Wagnerites, who fled to Norway , claims that the Wagner PMC threw its “warriors” into battle without any orders or discussion of tactics.

In an interview with CNN, he said that the untrained Wagner PMC troops were making plans on the fly.

“There were no real tactics at all. We just received an order about the position of the enemy … There were no specific orders on how we should behave. We just planned how we would act, step by step. Who would open fire, what kind of there will be shifts… What happens is our problem,” he said.

He repeated his previous claims that the “Wagnerites” were simply “shooting them in front of the newbies” who didn’t want to fight.

Medvedev also calls the head of PMC Yevgeny Prigozhin a “devil” and claims he changed his mind about killing Ukrainians on his sixth day at the front, as he witnessed how his troops, whose prisoner ratio was growing, turned into cannon fodder.

“There were more and more corpses, and more and more people came in. … I couldn’t count how many. They were in constant circulation. Corpses, still prisoners, more corpses, still prisoners,” he says. 

Ex-commander of Wagner Andrey Medvedev – who is he and what you need to know about him

Andrei Medvedev is 26 years old. He is a former commander of the Russian private military company Wagner, signed a contract in July 2021. This is the first “Wagnerian” who fought against Ukraine and then managed to escape abroad. 

He crossed the border on January 13, allegedly with the assistance of the Russian dissident group Gulag.net. Medvedev himself says that he crossed to Norway on an icy lake using white camouflage. 

In December, before crossing the border, Medvedev, who defected, told reporters from the Russian edition of The Insider about the executions of Wagner mercenaries for refusing to take part in hostilities in Ukraine. He spoke about ten episodes of which he is aware, and claimed that the two killed were not prisoners of Russian colonies recruited by PMCs. He repeatedly stated that he was ready to tell everything he knew about Wagner and its leader Yevgeny Prigogine.

On January 16, Norway confirmed that Medvedev had asked for asylum in the country. At first, he was in a safe house, after which he was transferred to a secure immigration center. On January 22, he was detained, but he was soon released.

Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service, which is involved in investigating war crimes in Ukraine, said it was interrogating Medvedev, who “has the status of a witness.”  

(C)UNIAN 2023