A mercenary from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group has been arrested after brutally assaulting a woman before abandoning her battered body outside in the cold in Russia, it has been reported.
Footage of the attack – which he took and sent to the victim’s son – is understood to show him beating her and making threats.
The man then dragged her outside unconscious and unresponsive, leaving her on the pavement.
The incident happened on Tuesday evening in the city of Novosibirsk, in western Siberia.
The woman had left her home at about 5pm that day, and her family was unable to reach her in the evening.
It was at about 1am that they received a video of the harrowing assault, which has left her in a coma.
‘My mother is currently in intensive care,’ her son told Incident Novosibirsk news channel on Telegram.
‘They had to drill a hole in her skull and she is in an extremely serious condition, in the last stage of a coma,’ he said.
The mercenary, whose identity has not yet been revealed, has been detained and charged with attempted murder, according to the victim’s son.
He said that his mother’s assailant was serving time at a Russian penal colony for stabbing a woman to death.
This is where he was recruited by Prigozhin to join Wagner’s ranks and go to fight in Ukraine.
As the invasion strained Russia’s military capacity, tens of thousands of men were released from prison to join the mercenary group.
Among them were some of the worst criminals in the country, like murderers and rapists.
In August, it was reported that another Russian man also convicted of murder and released to fight in Ukraine returned from the front and killed another victim.
Ivan Rossomakhin, 29, was originally sentenced in September 2020 to 14 years in a maximum security penal colony for murder and violent robbery.
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