The Grim Life and Brutal Death of a Wagner Recruit
9 min read . Updated: 25 Apr 2023, 06:17 PM IST 
Premium- A Russian prisoner struck a deal to fight for six months in Ukraine in exchange for his freedom, one of many who hoped to collect his due
Yevgeny Nuzhin, an ex-cop and convicted killer, had carved out as good a life as a penniless inmate could expect inside a high-security Russian prison.
During his two decades behind bars, Mr. Nuzhin had ingratiated himself with inmates and prison authorities, affording him a contraband phone, an exemption from prison work and three nights with a woman he had married in the prison chapel.
“I know everything there is to know about prison life. That’s where I’m a pro," the 55-year-old convict said in an interview last fall with The Wall Street Journal. He was due for release in 2027.
Mr. Nuzhin, who had briefly escaped years ago, saw another opportunity land last July, when a helicopter delivered to the prison Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group, the paramilitary organization employed by Russia to wage war on Ukraine. Mr. Prigozhin made the same pitch to Mr. Nuzhin and 700 other inmates as he had in prison yards across Russia: freedom in exchange for six months of paid military service under Wagner’s command.
Mr. Prigozhin told inmates at one prison that only two entities offered a way out, according to a video of his remarks. One was God—that is, an exit in a wooden box—and the other was him. “I’m taking you out of here alive," he said. “But I won’t return all of you alive."
Tens of thousands of inmates have taken the deal in the past year. It isn’t known how many have lived long enough to collect their due.
Mr. Nuzhin was among 90 or so inmates at Correctional Facility No. 3 willing to take their chances. “I’ve got a plan of sorts," he told his family. Later, Mr. Nuzhin revealed he was going to Ukraine and tried to reassure one of his two grown sons, saying, “See you in six months."
Mr. Prigozhin had offered favorable terms, he later told the Journal, and “got me what I wanted."
The only catch was whether he could survive.
‘I got caught’
Mr. Nuzhin had trained as a welder in the industrial city of Samara, Russia, in the dying days of the Soviet Union and served briefly as a warrant officer in the Interior Ministry’s Internal Troops, a domestic security force.
His life went off the rails around the time of the Russian economy’s collapse and Vladimir Putin’s ascension to Russia’s leader. During a botched robbery in 1999, Mr. Nuzhin fatally shot a man. “Do you remember what it was like in Russia then? Everyone got by as best they could," he said, by way of explanation. “I got caught."
Mr. Nuzhin was convicted of murder and sent to prison. His short-lived escape added four years to his sentence. His brother took a different path, he said, and moved to Moscow where he spent 15 years in a dead-end job as a security guard. “All of Russia is there, in Moscow, trying to earn a living," Mr. Nuzhin said.
In prison, Mr. Nuzhin had neither the physical prowess nor financial resources that make life easier. He instead used his wits to carve out a role as an intermediary between inmates and prison officials. He was assigned the most comfortable cell block and exempted from work in the prison’s sewing workshop.
Andrei Ismagilov, a prisoner who arrived in 2016, recalled Mr. Nuzhin strutting across the prison yard to the bathhouse, dressed only in a towel and slippers, showing off a muscular torso covered in tattoos.
To fill the hours, Mr. Nuzhin spent time online, sharing Soviet-era photos and Russian nationalistic slogans over his page on VK, a Russian social-media site similar to Facebook. He sent his family photos of himself relaxing in prison garb and displaying his tattoos—skulls, a crown, a serpent.
Mr. Nuzhin met Olga Cherkasova online, and they married in 2012. A video of a ceremony held later at the prison chapel shows Mr. Nuzhin and Ms. Cherkasova in Russian Orthodox wedding crowns. A prison guard stands by the doors.
Mr. Nuzhin’s son Nikita Nuzhin recalled a 2015 trip to the prison with Ms. Cherkasova. They stayed three days in a visitors’ block, relaxing and eating meals with Mr. Nuzhin.
After a 2019 corruption scandal, newly installed prison authorities confiscated Mr. Nuzhin’s phone. “Nobody would ever touch Yevgeny," said fellow inmate Mr. Ismagilov. “That was the first and only time I saw it." He eventually got another phone.
Mr. Nuzhin had missed raising his two sons and was anxious about losing time with his four grandchildren. “We’re all he had left," said Nikita Nuzhin, who tried to talk his father out of going to fight in Ukraine.
Mr. Prigozhin, a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Putin’s, was enlisting prisoners to help Russia regain ground in Ukraine after devastating losses by the country’s professional military. The 61-year-old businessman offered inmates the equivalent of $1,300 a month to fight with the Wagner Group for half a year. They were promised freedom if they survived and a burial and gravesite if they didn’t.
He wore a Hero of Russia star, the highest state honor, and Mr. Nuzhin assumed he was from the Ministry of Defense. For years, Mr. Prigozhin denied a connection with Wagner, which covertly deployed fighters to eastern Ukraine to fight government troops in 2014, as well as to Syria’s civil war, in support of President Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Prigozhin stepped into the spotlight last year when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine faltered. In prisoner recruiting trips that began last summer, he told inmates that they would be bound by Wagner’s rules of war—no looting and no retreating, according to a video of him speaking. Deserters, he said, would be shot.
“What the heck are you doing?" Nikita Nuzhin recalled asking his father about going to war. His father was better off serving what was left of his prison sentence, he said, there was so little time left.
Hauling the dead
On Aug. 25 last year, Mr. Nuzhin and other recruits boarded vans and left their prison in Skopin, Russia, about 150 miles southeast of Moscow. They arrived at a nearby airport and flew by plane to southwestern Russia. From there, they traveled by helicopter to a Russian-occupied part of eastern Ukraine.
The men trained for a week at a former prison using rifles without bullets—a sign, Mr. Nuzhin later said, that they weren’t trusted. They were told to advance on command, he said, and warned that “if someone remained in the trench, they would just shoot them dead."
On Sept. 2, the men were driven to a house on the front lines near Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine that Wagner had been assaulting for months—and still is. That night, Mr. Nuzhin joined a group of 17 men who were loaded into pickup trucks and taken to woodlands to retrieve the bodies of comrades killed in a battle.
The next night, Mr. Nuzhin and others returned to the spot. As the men set to work, Mr. Nuzhin said he walked along the edge of the woods toward positions held by Ukrainian fighters and surrendered. He later told the Journal he had planned to do that all along.
He wound up in a village near the city of Barvinkove in Ukraine’s east. He was put in the custody of a unit led by Maj. Yuriy Harkaviy, a 33-year-old known as Skala, or the Rock, for his hulking frame. The men didn’t know what to do with Mr. Nuzhin. Ukrainian authorities didn’t want him. He didn’t have identification papers and wasn’t considered to be worth much in a prisoner exchange.
Mr. Nuzhin said he wanted to switch sides, but nobody trusted him. The soldiers kept him under watch in the cellar of a house that served as headquarters for Maj. Harkaviy’s unit, a group of assorted volunteers. They gave him clothes, shoes, a blanket and a towel. Mr. Nuzhin struck up conversations with Sgt. Viktor Yatsunyk, a 44-year-old Ukrainian known as Britanets, or Brit, because he had lived in the U.K. for more than half his life. The sergeant was in charge of the house where Mr. Nuzhin was staying when he spoke with the Journal.
Mr. Nuzhin’s family and fellow prisoners learned of his whereabouts from an interview on a Ukrainian YouTube channel. He said he had planned to surrender and wanted to fight for Ukraine. “Many thought he was just trying to survive and was making up some kind of tale on the fly," said Mr. Ismagilov, the former prison acquaintance. “He was a real survivor."
While sitting on a wooden stool and speaking in a weary voice, Mr. Nuzhin told the Journal that he took Mr. Prigozhin’s offer because he didn’t trust Russia’s notoriously capricious prison system to release him at the end of his sentence. “If the prison authorities take a dislike to you, you’re done for," he said. “Freedom is here. There will be no freedom there."
On Sept. 17, Sgt. Yatsunyk was leading a team to recover dead and injured Ukrainian soldiers when he accidentally triggered a mine explosion and was killed.
Maj. Harkaviy called on Mr. Nuzhin to join him and three other soldiers to retrieve Sgt. Yatsunyk’s body. With land mines scattered around the area, it was a dangerous task. “They summoned me, I got in with them and went," Mr. Nuzhin said matter-of-factly.
‘I’m alive’
Weeks later, Ukrainian military intelligence, which is in charge of prisoner exchanges, agreed to take custody of Mr. Nuzhin.
Some of Maj. Harkaviy’s soldiers escorted Mr. Nuzhin to Dnipro, a nearby city, and handed him over. The Ukrainians sent a video to Mr. Nuzhin’s family.
“I’m alive. Everything’s OK. Everything will be all right," Mr. Nuzhin said on the video and noted the date was Nov. 1.
On Nov. 13, Mr. Nuzhin was in another video posted on Telegram by a channel close to Wagner. It was captioned, “Hammer of Vengeance." Mr. Nuzhin appears to be kneeling with his head taped to a brick post. He identifies himself and says that he had wanted to switch sides in the war. Then, a man standing behind him delivers a sledgehammer blow to his head. Mr. Nuzhin collapses to the floor, and the man delivers a second blow. The Journal couldn’t verify the authenticity of the video.
“Nuzhin betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades, betrayed intentionally," Mr. Prigozhin said in a statement released from his news service. “The Russian people, Russians genetically smell betrayal." A Kremlin spokesman, asked about the video on a conference call with reporters, said, “It’s not our business."
Nikita Nuzhin said his family hasn’t received the body or any information. He blamed Ukrainian authorities for his father’s death. “He was their prisoner, and they were responsible for his life," he said. “But they handed him over. They knew what would happen."
Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence, said only that Mr. Nuzhin had agreed to be exchanged.
“You know, it’s wrong from a human standpoint," Maj. Harkaviy said in January, while under heavy assault from Wagner forces in Bakhmut. “But 23 Ukrainians returned to their families, and that’s a good thing."