This was written before the inevitable conclusion, by New Yorker reporter Joshua Yaffa, who's been sending stories from there - but still worthwhile if you're interested.
Inside the Wagner Group’s Armed Uprising
How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging a mutiny at home.
The commander of a Ukrainian drone squadron told me that, over many hours of observing Wagner from the sky, he had witnessed “not so much a lack of fear but, rather, the total devaluation of life.” In one case, he watched as Wagner fighters in a trench left a dead comrade in place for several days, cleaning their weapons, eating, and sleeping with the body lying just a few feet from them. “I kept waiting for them to bury him, or at least move him, but they just acted like nothing was the matter,” he said. Another Wagner unit took a wounded Ukrainian soldier prisoner, and then placed him on the edge of their trench, to keep Ukrainian forces from firing on them. The commander said that he watched, helpless, as the Ukrainian soldier flailed and lost blood, and finally froze to death.
When confronted by an armed drone, the commander said, “the regular Russian mobiks”—as mobilized recruits are called—“fall into hysterics, scatter in every direction, try to hide.” Radio intercepts pick up their frantic calls to higher-ups: “We are being shelled!” Wagner fighters from Russian prisons, however, often fire wildly into the air, trying to shoot down the drone. In some cases, they do manage to disable it; just as often, they stand in one place until they’re blown to pieces. “This isn’t bravery,” the drone commander said, “but complete craziness.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...agner-uprising
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