As I described here last week, former Russian prisoners were recruited by the Wagner group in order to gain a pardon. But they quickly found themselves sent to the front lines where they are being used in human wave attacks against Ukrainian positions. They are used as cannon fodder and can’t refuse to follow orders because they’ll be shot by their own commanders if they do. Today CNN has a report that includes one conscript’s final message to his wife.

It is the last message Viktor Sevalnev would send. A convict, who had been in jail for armed robbery and assault, he was sent from prison to fight for Russia in Ukraine. After most of his colleagues died in an assault on a factory outside Soledar, it was the act of survival that proved fatal to Sevalnev…

Grainy footage obtained by Gulagu.net shows Sevalnev and his unit celebrating pre-deployment by dancing at a camp inside of Luhansk. It also shows them eating and joking just behind the frontlines the night before they began an assault on a key factory in Soledar, which would prove fatal for the majority of Sevalnev’s unit, survivors said.

The convicts spoke of casual mistreatment on and off the battlefield, but Sevalnev’s fate stood out. According to a recording of a call to his wife from a Russian separatist official who arranged the body’s repatriation, his abrupt death was apparently caused by shrapnel injuries…

Three other survivors of the unit spoke to CNN from hospital. One, also a prisoner, said Sevalnev had been wounded once but sent back to fight on the frontline, where he was then wounded again.

“No one is being operated on here, no surgeries performed on anyone,” he said. CNN is withholding his name and those of the other surviving convicts for their safety. “People walk around [the hospital] with bullet wounds, with shrapnel stuck in their legs.”

Contrary to the official claim that Sevalny died from “shrapnel injuries,” Sevalney’s own final call to his wife indicated he was about to be shot by his own commanders. “The Ministry of Defense executes by shooting…I am being taken to be shot…I want to go back to where I was but they won’t let me…I lost a lot of people here…Remember this. Do not send more people here. It’s enough. They want to kill us all,” he said.

It was a few days after that message that his body was returned to his wife in a closed coffin.

Another prison conscript CNN spoke to described an incident where he became convinced that his own people were trying to kill him:

He described how one battle left half his unit as casualties. “We were sent to the very front. I radioed at our guys that they were firing mortars at us, that they should aim a bit to the right. And still they shot at us from both sides. Then I understood they were deliberately firing at us.”

The conscripts are clearly seen as expendable. Maybe the regular recruits found it amusing to use them for target practice? Who knows but clearly not many of them are going to return with the pardon they were promised. Earlier reports have suggested that conscripts injured in human wave attacks are left where they fall, to either bleed to death or freeze to death overnight.

Here’s the CNN report including the actual audio of Viktor Sevalnev’s final message to his wife.

Update: Sevalnev apparently died last November. Newsweek reported on his story in December and has a few more details.

Sevalnev headed the 7th motorized rifle company of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) in eastern Ukraine, and had been hospitalized after sustaining injuries in battle…

“Don’t send people here…they want to kill everyone,” he said in a phone call with his wife Lilia, according to the report.

“Today it’s me, tomorrow another, that’s all. We’re just murder material [to them]. The Ministry of Defense executes people. They know that we’re [dead men] and they don’t give a damn,” he also reportedly said.

According to the news outlet, in November, Sevalnev’s unit sustained heavy losses, some soldiers were killed and the rest deserted.

So it sounds like he was killed because his men had deserted, though the official reason given was “shrapnel wounds.”