“The Bullets Were Flying Above Me!”

11-year-old Milania Borodai says Wagner troops rescued her while she was shot at by a Ukrainian sniper. Photo: RIAFAN

You may not know much about Wagner, PMC (Private Military Group). In truth, I didn’t know much about the Russian military contractor until it took the leading role in the battle for Bakhmut. That Ukrainian city, known to Russians as Artemovsk, has tremendous strategic value, and both sides have already lost untold numbers of troops amid intense fighting for the entire Bakhmut-Soledar region.

Bakhmut is situated centrally in the Donetsk Oblast about 112 kilometers from the city of Donetsk, which is under Russian control. Though in peaceful times it’s just a two-hour drive, it has taken months for Russian troops, tanks, and heavy equipment to slog through mud and melting snow, across the seemingly endless labyrinth of Ukrainian trenches, which were literally taken a meter at a time.

Russian troops, including Wagner, are “invaders” in the eyes of those Ukrainians who support Kiev.

However, it’s critical to note that the entire Donetsk Oblast, which is in Eastern Ukraine, is populated predominantly by Russian-speaking Ukrainians who want nothing to do with Kiev or its fascist agenda. They voted to make the Donetsk People’s Republic an independent country shortly after the 2014 Maidan coup, and in 2022, they voted to become part of the Russian Federation.

In their eyes, the Russian troops are liberators, freeing them from the brutal clutches of a fascist regime.

It’s critical to note the ethno-linguistic makeup of the local population because it can help you ascertain when Western media is lying, or at least exaggerating.

For example: On April 18th, CNN ran an article with a video of two men claiming to be “former Wagner commanders,” who “confessed” to killing dozens of children in Bakhmut. The two men, former convicts named Azamat Uldarov and Alexey Savichev, claimed they were ordered to kill the children because they were “in the way.” Uldarov, who sounds like he’s been drinking, described how he allegedly shot and killed a five- or six-year-old girl.

“You see this cigarette in my hand?” Uldarov holds up half a smoke. “With this hand, by command, I killed children.

Russian ex-convict claims he was a “Wagner commander” and that he killed children. Photo: CNN (Trust CNN at your own peril.—Ed)

Another article ran on the same date, April 18th, in The Times UK, claiming the two men killed 40 children. You have to pay to read that one, though.

But coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally), just a week earlier, on April 11th, media in Russia published a story about a little girl who was rescued by Wagner troops.

11-year-old Milania Borodai lived in Bakhmut under Ukrainian control for about a year, hiding in the basement of her grandparents’ home. According to the article, they were hiding from the constant shelling and from the so-called “White Angels” of Ukraine. According to the girl, they introduced themselves as police officers and took children away from families, often while threatening the parents with submachine guns.

Milania and her mother, Oksana. Photo: RIAFAN

They came twice for Milania, according to the article. And if Wagner had not appeared in that part of Bakhmut on that day, they might have taken her.

“We were clearing the central part of Bakhmut, clearing civilian houses,” an unidentified member of Wagner said. “The civilians started running out of the basement. They said there were children in the basement. There was an 11-year-old child, a little girl, frightened. During the evacuation, they opened fire on us and a sniper was shooting at us. It was not in our direction, but directed at the little girl. During the evacuation we had to cover her with flak jackets, but she survived and was taken away. Then they came back and evacuated her grandmother and grandfather.”

Wagner fighter who rescued Milania. Photo: RIAFAN

Milania recalled that the sniper was firing from one of the 9-story buildings nearby. “The bullets were flying above me, they did not hit the Wagners at all, they came right at me,” she said, adding: “But I wasn’t wounded, it’s okay.”

Her mother, Oksana, was living in the city of Popasna and did not know what had happened to her daughter until they were united by PMC Wagner. The girl had been sent to her grandparents’ home when it became too dangerous for her in her mother’s city.

“In Popasna the big shelling began,” Milania said, adding that though the shelling started in February, she was unable to get to her grandparents until April. “My mother had a stroke, she doesn’t think well and it’s hard to talk her into anything. But when a shell flew into the yard, she agreed.”

The terrifying experience in Bakhmut has left its mark on the little girl, according to her mother. “She’s been through too much,” Oksana said. “Things she doesn’t need to go through.”

Now the family is reunited and hopes that the worst is behind them.

Milania and her mother Oksana. Photo: RIAFAN

 

On April 18th, the same day that the negative stories came out in Western press, the story of another child rescued by Wagner surfaced in Russia.

“The Ukrainian side said a lot of terrible things about the Russian people. It’s not like that at all, it’s completely different,” a woman named Nadezhda toldthe Russian Federal News agency (FAN). Her little boy, Vova, was evacuated on the eve of Russian Orthodox Easter, according to the article.

A member of PMC Wagner nicknamed “Uncle Roma” gave the child a tablet so he could play video games and wouldn’t be sad while waiting to move to a new home.

Vova’s mother, Nadezhda, told reporters that she and her son spent almost a day together with Wagner troops after they were evacuated from Bakhmut, where their home and all their belongings were destroyed in a fire. The “Orchestra” (as Wagner is affectionately called in Russian circles) provided the family with food and other supplies.

Vova, whose age and last name were not publicized. Photo: RIAFAN

According to the article, Wagner has been evacuating civilians while fighting to take control of the city. The troops have literally covered the evacuating civilians with their own bodies as Armed Forces of Ukraine attack the mostly-civilian convoys. According to Wagner, the AFU deliberately targets the townspeople.

Now that you have heard two different accounts of Wagner’s treatment of children in Bakhmut, it might be hard to reach a conclusion. Which side is lying, and which is telling the truth?

I contacted former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter prior to publishing this article.

“Wagner is a highly professional organization with a very principled approach toward serving the interests of Russia,” Ritter wrote to me via direct messaging. “The screening process to get into Wagner is very stringent. While it is always possible that human beings fail, and Wagner personnel committed crimes, this would be because the individual went bad, not because of any systemic failure on the part of Wagner. I strongly doubt the veracity of any claim that has Wagner as an organization involved in premeditated criminal acts.”

Moreover, why would Russians kill children in a region where the majority of kids are Russian? Of course, terrible things can happen in war. But given the stringent screening process Wagner insists on, how would those two men have been promoted to commander?

In a February podcast with Richard Medhurst, which you can watch here, the former USMC intelligence officer cleared up some misconceptions about the Russian military contractor. For starters, Ritter says, they’re not “mercenaries” though they are frequently referred to as such in the Western press.

“Wagner is not a mercenary unit,” Ritter said. “If you think they’re a mercenary unit, you don’t know anything about mercenaries. Mercenaries work for the dollar. Wagner works for Russia. The guys that are fighting for Wagner are hard core patriots. But that said, again, they have a different funding mechanism, a different recruitment mechanism, and we know a lot of the assault units come straight out of the prisons.”

According to Ritter, Wagner was created in 2014 as a means of providing help to the struggling People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, which were under near-constant bombardment by Ukrainian military.

“Constitutionally, Russia couldn’t provide active-duty forces,” Ritter said. Since it was not officially “Russian,” Wagner was able to provide military assistance outside of Russian borders. “When the resistance began in Donbass, it was not organized. It was very chaotic and you had a lot of strong personalities, some of whom have extreme political positions, who create their own little miniature armies that are going around fighting the Ukrainians.”

It was up to Wagner to unify all the different militias, which was no easy task according to Ritter. “Some of these people had extreme political ideologies, some of them you could probably call them Nazis. That’s not Wagner. That’s the original, some of the people fighting are the original volunteers. But they got weeded out.”

As early as 2015, Ritter says, Wagner had thinned out most of the trouble-makers. “Some of them are well meaning, some are just doing it because they’re violence-prone and they want to kill. I mean, war does that, especially when you don’t have, you know, sound leadership.”

Once the two republics voted to join the Russian Federation and Russia began its Special Military Operation, Wagner was able to take to the battlefield as an official part of Russia’s military force, and Wagner now reports directly to the Russian General Staff, despite having an alternative funding mechanism.

“Wagner has become an urban assault specialist,” Ritter observed, “and any military professional who has ever experienced urban assault understands that is some of the hardest fighting imaginable, and the best unit in the world for carrying out urban assault is Wagner, one of the most professional military organizations on the face of the Earth, with some of the most disciplined, well-trained servers who are carrying out the hardest missions.”

The real mercenaries, Ritter says, are the ones from Western countries who traveled to Ukraine to kill Russians for money, in some cases as much as $3,000 per month.

“You know what a mercenary is? It’s all the western-European guys over there right now, fighting for the Ukrainians,” Ritter said. “Those are mercenaries, and I can guarantee you this: You can take every single one of them, put them in Bakhmut up against Wagner, and they will all die. Wagner will destroy them. That’s just a reality. I’m not saying Wagner’s perfect. I’m not, you know, I’m not saying that they can’t be prone to excesses. War brings out the worst in people as well as the best in people. And so I’m not going to pretend that somebody can’t dig deep and find, you know, problems with Wagner. You can find that with any unit. I am going to tell you that Wagner is one of the most professional and lethal military operations operating there, and to call them a criminal organization is just wrong.”

As always, use your own mind, draw your own conclusions, and keep searching for the truth!

Courageous witnesses to history like Deborah Armstrong, real people's journalists, expose more important truths than many huge engines of mass disinformation with obscene budgets. After all, the MSM is just Orwell's Ministry of Truth on steroids. People's journalists shame the presstitutes all over, assuming this breed is still capable of shame, which I doubt. Love of justice and decency propels them, not ego and repugnant careerism. That's why their work has to be so tightly censored.