[News] Wagner still recruiting despite mutiny, BBC finds

[BirSaNN]

The Wagner Group is still recruiting fighters across Russia, days after staging a mutiny that led Vladimir Putin to raise fears of civil war.

Using a Russian phone number, we called more than a dozen recruitment centres saying, if asked, that we were inquiring on behalf of a brother.

All those who replied confirmed that it was business as usual.

From Kaliningrad in the west to Krasnodar in the south, no-one believed the group was being disbanded.

In the Arctic city of Murmansk, a woman at the Viking sports club confirmed that she was still signing up fighters for Ukraine.

"That's where we are recruiting for, yes. If someone wants to go, they just have to call me and we'll set a day."

Wagner's long list of contact points are mostly based at fight clubs, including martial arts schools and boxing clubs.

Several people who picked up the phone stressed that new members were signing contracts with the mercenary group itself, not the Russian defence ministry.

"It's absolutely nothing to do with the defence ministry," a man at the Sparta sports club in Volgograd was adamant. "Nothing has stopped, we're still recruiting."

The demand for the mercenaries to transfer to the defence ministry, thus bringing the Wagner Group and its boss Yevgeny Prigozhin to heel, was at the root of the fierce feud that exploded into last weekend's armed uprising.

It was the biggest challenge to President Putin's authority in his more than 20-year rule, despite the Kremlin's scrambling ever since to redefine his response as strong and decisive.

And yet the criminal case against the mutineers has been dropped, in a country where multiple opposition activists are serving long prison sentences just for speaking out against Russia's war on Ukraine.

link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66060392