Wigerian mercenaries video appearing to show off part of their war heroes

In October last year a Russian news site published a short video by Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner GroupWagner Group, the Russian military mercenary army, sitting on a rooftop terrace in the resort town of Gelendzhik on Russia's Black Sea coast. There are two missing parts of a leg. A third of the population has lost an arm. They were identified as pardoned former convicts who returned from the front in Ukraine after joining Wagner from prison.

You were an offender, now you're a war hero, Prigozhin tells a man in the clip. It was the first video to show the return of some of the thousands of convicts who joined Wagner in return for the promise of a pardon if they survived six months of war.

Between October 2022 and February 2023, Reuters used facial recognition software to examine this video and more than a dozen other videos and photographs of homecoming convict fighters. By cross-checking the images with social media and Russian court documents, reporters were able to identify more than 30 of the men.

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