Dear Readers:
Today our third and final installment of this article from KP. Our third Wagner zek goes only by his call-sign Spartak. (Which is Russian for “Spartacus”, that goes without saying.) Unlike the other two, Spartak chooses not to divulge what he was incarcerated for. The Wagner Company do not disclose this information either; they have a strict privacy policy in this regard.
Spartak is a solitary guy. He says he had no friends and no family. Until he joined Wagner. That was where he found his friends and family: “I found true brothers, the kind who always have your back. I was one of the first [zeks] to join up. We had our training and preparation. But it was early days, we didn’t get as much training as the guys get now. Competent instructors torment you for a month.
“Did you find it hard to follow discipline out on the front line?”
Spartak: Not at all. Everybody was treated the same: Justice was strict but fair. We had to follow a very strict “dry law” and we ourselves understood very well that alcohol and drugs are an evil. Without discipline nothing can be accomplished. Whatever you want to say about us zeks, we are all different people, we were convicted for different things, we all know how to weave intrigues… But out there on the front, it very quickly becomes clear who is who. We proved that we are worthy. Look at me, a former zek, and they provided me with top-notch equipment. Many of the [non-zek] volunteers even envied me.
If we only had 10 men of the type our commander was… I feel like he gave me a second life. Right now I can’t be bothered to engage in the kind of nonsense… You know, many zeks claim they were innocent and wrongly convicted. I don’t engage in that kind of talk. I was guilty. But I have reformed myself. I redeemed myself.
“You hear all kinds of talk about the zeks in Wagner, how awful it was for you there…”
Spartak: Yes, we also heard those rumors. The Human Rights activists claimed that all the zeks had already been cut down. But that was a lie! I think the people who spread those rumors, are traitors. We all had each others back out there. For example, I was wounded, and it wasn’t even a zek, just a regular volunteer, who dragged me out and bandaged me up. Twice they took me for dead, they even phoned my family; but, as you can see, I am still alive.
Spartak brags proudly how smoothly, and without a single loss, they took the village of Andreevka. “Without even a single 300 [army code for a wounded soldier]. And we took it in just 4 hours! Seriously! And in this half-year we have not given up even one meter of ground to the enemy. And never will, I hope. But the very first battle, that was a special one, all the same. The emotions. There were many difficult moments. We lost some guys. But I have no regrets…”
“What are you further plans?”
Spartak: Same as now. I am still in Wagner, I never left it. I’m just on a break now, then I will continue with my service. I want to do this the rest of my life. Never leave, never change anything. This is all I want.
Awful Avalanche 
Mixed feelings about this particular issue, but one could maybe accept it as a useful method to channel the destructive energy of psychopathic minds for a worthy cause. Social reintegration though is another matter.
All veterans who experienced deadly battle will be traumatized. To heal and reintegrate them, to make it possible for them to live a harmonious peaceful civilian life, will need systematic concerted efforts of the whole society.
The USA failed in this respect, one can only hope that Russia makes it better.
And behind all this looms the paramount question, if a peaceful society will ever be possible in a world of competition and war.
Are we chimpanzees or bonobos?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks, mato, I share your mixed feelings. Just from these 3 interviews I have the impression that the Wagner group asks sort of like a cult for some of these traumatized men. I am sure that is not the intention, but I see a cultish way of thinking at work: “These are my brothers, these are the only people I can trust, I am nothing if I can’t be with them…” Like you say, it seems an uphill road to get these men reintegrated into law-abiding, “civilian” life. Maybe that’s too ordinary for some of them. But at a certain point every soldier has to retire from the battlefield.
LikeLike
Very interesting piece(s) as are some of the comments. As they say: Available nowhere else in idiomatic English.
Wagner PMC is Putin’s private army according to the cybernoughts at the God Bless America Wikipedia Foundation. And CBC did an axe job on Prigozhin and Putin being best buddies and hatching evil criminal schemes deep in a Kremlin bunker, cackling as they count up the loot and swigging the best wines, poking fingers at “all those fools out there!” Harty har har.
Well, we can’t have that. Cackling is reserved for the Western oligarch and financial classes. Why, the CBC informed us, a Ukie soldier said the Wagnerites were fearless, attacking in wave after wave like robots, totally unafraid of dying. So many of them, the Ukies had to retreat in the face of madness! But piles of 60 dead Wagnerites were not uncommon. Millions of Russians have died fighting the battle-hardened Ukies he allowed, but the relentless dictatorship of the Putin “regime” prevents anyone even mentioning that fact inside Russia, dontcha know. Upon pain of death as a traitor. Right.
Faced with this utter Wagnerite bestiality as a nation huddled in fright, we were informed that members of our national legislature, the House of Commons at Parliament in Ottawa, were going to vote to declare Wagner an International Terrorist Organization. There, that’ll fix ’em. Any of them trying to get a burger at a DQ in North Battleford SK will be refused service! Dear Chrystia is radiant with delight.
I don’t know myself. Between the feel-good stories of apparently reformed characters we get to read about here, and the story we get slung officially from our lords and masters, I can’t make up my mind whether Wagnerites are semi-good guys or fangs-a-dripping suicidal maniacs prone to rape and pillage. Prigozhin is obviously a cheeky saucy type, now supposedly claiming he hacked the 2016 US election, and he’s rich. Loves to blow his own horn like a showman. Looks as though he’s running a sort of deadly real life TV game show — sounding off to zek prospects as in, “Well if you’re lucky you get to be free, but if you’re not you’ll be wounded or die. Wanna chance it? The pay’s good! The equipment’s Grade A. And three squares a day! Er, usually.”
I mean, c’mon! That’s a better deal than the French Foreign Legion ever gave its grunts. Good pay and food didn’t figure in a Sahara fort repelling goat herders with bronze crooks and Bedouins on racing camels wielding Saracen swords. And all the poor French had for defence was a Maxim gun and rifles.
Weird. Never really expected Russia to feature a mercenary Army in the forefront of their fighting. Specially not led by a crowingly triumphant carny barker who tells Gersaimov where to get off. Russia must have a lot of free money to burn from all those sanctions to pay Wagner. Or something.
Hark, something big this way approacheth! Lo, it is but a Leo-pard, up to its knees in mud. A hundred Wagnerites load up their ATGMs, and boom times ten squared, the Leo-pard expires magnificently spouting smoke and flames. War is hell. Burbock, as the Russians translate Baerbock back into English, dances impotently in Berlin, waving pieces of broken windmills in defiance. I mean, this whole SMO is getting more dystopian by the day. I’m learning to be a good little doggie in public when I know Russia is actually pounding the Ukies to dust. Nobody wants to hear it. So I move forward as if in a dream, silent.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Re. the Leopards and Challengers: the Ukry are up to their usual cargo-cult nonsense: “THIS will be the game changer.” A commenter on one twitter feed asked an inconvenient question: “Are we allowed to ask what happened to all those previous tanks you used to have?” From what I heard, Ukry used to have a thousand, maybe even 2 thousand tanks. All gone now. So what’s a couple hundred Leopards? Well, they’re BETTER, obviously, because they’re Western!
Russians shrug philosophically: All tanks burn just the same.
LikeLike
Well, exactly. And there’s unlikely to be a couple of hundred Leopards turn up for the show anyway. Well, maybe if it’s Polish Leopards fresh from a 600 mile canter from the border to the Donbass, piloted by the Warsaw numbnuts brigade. Fuel, logistics ammo, wherefore art thou? They’re overweight buffoons for the roads and bridges of Eastern Ukraine for a start, prime fodder for drones, ATGMs, and the odd T-90 brigade ambling by over there in the woods. I was attempting to be facetious in my comment above.
And I’d lay a bet that zero Abrams show up. That was just the US lying to get Sergeant Scholz to send some clapped-out Leopards to Ukraine. Promises, promises, and the dumb bunny Burbock bought the scam and shamed her boss into sending Leopards. Beyond my surprise at a privateer company leading the fighting for Russia (and your good reply to mato48 above my comment about the Wagner zeks’ likely social problems), it is stranger still that the Germans have turned into mumbling half-witz, apparently intent on societal suicide.
LikeLike
More like Private Scholz, isn’t he? He even got White House latrine duty and got sent all the way to South America to get snubbed and shamed. And he gets continually ordered around by Baerbock, the Bohemian Corporal. Scholz is lucky he doesn’t live in Ukraine. According to a new law there, talking back to a superior officer will get you 5-10 years. No doubt the Greens, inspired by the Beacon of European Democracy, will try to pass a similar law in the Bundestag.
LikeLike
I love to watch those old episodes of Hogan’s Heroes on youtube. My favorite bit is where Colonel Klink threatens to send Sergeant Schulz to the Eastern Front to fight the Russians. And Schulz gets so scared, he almost pees his pants!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Mercs as a fighting force is an interesting topic. I think Machiavelli compared and contrasted them to the benefits and detriments of citizen soldier. In the U$A we only hear about “Russian” forces. The subtlety of Militia, Merc, Contract, Conscript is never made. In Telegram videos one can make out who is who. Especially the Chechens who really seem to be having a good time door to door, block by block. I wonder if they will end up like our Vietnam vets, broken, homeless, and wracked by PTSD. Why was NATO expansion never a political discussion?
LikeLike
NATO never expanded. Russia just kept egregiously moving her borders closer and closer to NATO bases!
🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
In the U$A we only hear about “Russian” forces. The subtlety of Militia, Merc, Contract, Conscript is never made.
There seem to be diverse mercenaries on the Ukrainian side. All of them American led? One is getting a little more prominent due to a lawsuit. “Mozart” seems to be inspired by “Wagner”. Considering context, Wagner seems to make a little more sense. 😉 You find articles about Mozart and the case, e.g. on Intercept.
One wonders–did one of the authors of diverse articles I read wonder too? I forget–how many US special forces are in place covertly in whatever groups and/or as supporters.
But yes, more generally. As the movie, these interviews sound a bit like a staged PR campaign.
LikeLike
I was just reading in the papers today, the Mozart group is disbanding. Or so they say.
LikeLike
The official American musician force should be called the “Liberace Group”
LikeLiked by 1 person
I like that! They can wear frilly shirts and elegant tuxedos while riding around in Abrams tanks.
LikeLike
while i am 100% against private “armies” and mercs this is an interesting look. wagners go from criminals to mercs whereas blackwaters go from soldiers to mercs to criminals. i’m also against (at least the US form of) mass incarceration so these guys break even as long as they aren’t blowing the brains out of little kids at checkpoints. it also depends on where they use the zek contingent; if it’s russia’s ever-growing western border, fine. if it’s africa then i’d question the general wisdom.
it’s not like the US doesn’t do the same thing out of desperation over low enlistment.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-army-recruits-straight-out-of-prisons
LikeLike
From what I read, the Wagnerites cut their teeth in African conflicts. Usually on the side of the good guys, but all the ambiguities are enough to fill a volume.
LikeLike
“There were many difficult moments. We lost some guys…”
And those are the ones we’ll never hear anything from [or about].
LikeLike
But their families will be taken care of, financially. That is a component of the Wagner contract, if I understand correctly.
LikeLike
Speaking of Wagner discipline, have you been following the “bloody sledgehammer/defector to Norway” episode? Supposedly, a Wagnerite (not sure if he was a zek) tried to desert to the Ukies last year, got caught and was executed by sledgehammer slams to the skull. This is apparently what Wagner tells its mercs that the penalty for serious disobedience will be. A guy who claimed to be the commander of the sledged soldier recently escaped over the Russian/Norwegian border. I’ve read allusions to a dramatic deal where he went across a fence under gunfire from guards, but in these days of “everything’s a lie” who knows? The escapee said he wanted to blow the whistle on Wagner’s human rights abuses. I’m not sure whether he was the sledge-slammer. Also not sure whether this execution episode was connected with a bloody sledgehammer that was supposedly sent to some European Union justice official in mid-2022. So much BS out there! I reckon that the fog of war is not immensely thicker now than it always was throughout history. But we have so many more media channels to fog our screens with, and we have the expectation that we should know everything at the speed of the Internet, so it seems like the muddling is more massive. I can’t be arsed to find links to drop about all this, but they’re out there if you have nothing better to do with your time. Which is probably not the case.
LikeLike
Bukko: Found it. At least according to SouthFront, the execution was likely a Ukraine psyop, meant to malign Wagner. That the SBU (or Ukr-Nazi militias) would resort to such doesn’t surprise me in the least!:
“Kiev Attacks Wagner PMC Group. But Only In Media (Video 18+)”
https://southfront.org/kiev-attacks-wagner-pmc-group-but-only-in-media-video-18/
[Note: I’m video-incapable, do I’m relying only on the article and still photos.]
LikeLike
Thanks for the quick reply. You must be on the early side of the International Dateline, or you stay up late. I have my scepticism about Southfront — Naked Capitalism (my go-to source for information, or at least, directions of where to go to read more stuff) doesn’t allow links to Southfront to be posted in their comments section. I had not heard the theory that the execution thing was a Ukie psy-op, but it sounds plausible. Ultimately, can we ever know WHAT the truth is about anything more complicated than a sportsball score? It’s not a good way to run a complex civilisation, when one does not know the truth about so many important matters. (Such as the true unemployment rate, the number of people dying from Covid, whether the “vaccines” are a load of crap… You can tell by my ironicquotes on “vaccines” which way I fall on that.) The widespread inability to face reality is one of many reasons I expect civilisation to collapse and for the survivors (many fewer people than the number who are alive today, sadly) are going to be living in a simpler but more honest society.
LikeLike
I’ve seen our future. It is Amish.
LikeLike
I don’t doubt it. But, in which case, people really need to buck up and learn those old-time skills: Like raising a barn, milking a cow by hand, churning butter, spinning and weaving. Sewing clothes, for crying out loud, and without electrical machine to help!
LikeLike
I’ve been butted across a street by a cow.
Someone else is going to have to do the milking, not me.
LikeLike
With your artistic skills you can learn to weave rugs on a loom!
No matter how bad things get, we are always going to need rugs.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is such a wonderful series, sad to see it ended, want to know more about these fine Warrior Soldiers with their honor virtues and dignity, it just warms my heart. And you tell it very well Mr. Avalanche, perfect in fact. Thank you, and I appreciate you a lot for your time thoughtfulness and genuine effort. You brought these guys to life, because its true like Sam Gamgee said in The Two Towers, there are things worth fighting for in this world, you showed that, these Zeks and the great leadership in Wagner prove it, and in its way, it is I believe, this small group of Warriors who are committed like they are to fighting evil in this world, with the help of Mr. Putin and his Warriors, I truly believe this can change the world, it will be down the road, it will be these Men who saved the world and destroyed the evil, the wicked thing thats operating along the fringes of the shadows, been doing that for a very long time, too long, because they stand their ground, for good things in this world things worth fighting for, dying fot, as Mr. Putin told the Chechen leader of forces, Putin said “We must live for something that is worth dying for”, Yeah, I believe so, thats true and Men who are true to their hearts understand this, but I’ll be willing to bet Wagner was ultimately not possible as it is now if for Putin, and Prihozhin has mentioned similar for him and his Wagners, figure he and Putin probably see a lot of things thru the same lens, Putin again, but this is in 92′, when his choice was made and his guys followed him, his leadership, and like these Zeks, they did not know it was possible to fight and win and live to fight another day more, but Putin said what they all needed to hear, thats all, just like this ex Zek, when approached in prison, what they where in for, Putin: “You and I do not have the right to allow ourselves a second of weakness, not a second” if they chose to go all in and take the motherland back from the name stealers grasp, way back seems now, when the khazarians sent in their vultures to cut Russia up in tasty pieces, without nothing but their determination and courage, and look where Russia is now. Its a miracle u ask me. See, there is The Redemption but its not all, there is The Sacrifice, like in the movie Constantine, when he kills himself to save another, and Satan slithers down to drag Constantine off to Hades, but it is The Redemption because Sacrifice. See the cathedral built for Wagners, its not as ornate or superbly grand as the new Military Cathedral but its solemn, its a house of Redemption, the honor of The Sacrifice, and who sacrificed for all mankind, right?
What these guys are doing is not beat ukronazis they are defeating what is behind the ukronazis, and “IT” can not tolerate any defiance or resistance, but its up against these Warriors the Brothers in Arms and not only are not losing they are pushing the most evil and determined ukronazis back and nothing can stop Wagners, this is going to cause that evil wicked institutional order to collapse because their grip on the levers of power are very hard to break, at first, but once their grip loosens, they all lose their control, something they all share in common, once ones goes all go, its that kind of wicked men, and then they fail all at once, and this can come from the seeming most diminutive source or thing. Ukronazis are the tip of “ITS” spear. Its the way it works. I think somebody from up above looks out for Wagners if you asked me.
ps,
the video is even better 2nd-3rd time, there so much going on you need a couple times to appreciate everything they put into it.
LikeLike