Russia’s most deranged gambit in its war against Ukraine is rapidly turning into a crisis as military leaders lose control over the prison inmates freed in exchange for a stint on the battlefield.In one video played for a group of inmates who expressed an interest in joining Wagner, he said, a man told the camera, “‘I, such and such, am a traitor and a bitch, I abandoned my own on the frontline,’ and then they shoot him in the back of the head.”Another inmate in a different colony told the BBC he’d also been shown another video in which a person was hung from an iron beam.Sources close to Wagner were quoted telling the BBC there have been at least three such executions, with one calling them “training videos.”Olga Romanova, the head of the human rights group Russia Behind Bars, has said inmates have reported a few dozen extrajudicial killings of prisoners tossed into the war.Russian inmates captured by Ukraine have now also reportedly begun begging not to be handed back over to Russia as part of any prisoner swaps, fearing they’d be executed just like Nuzhin was.“The social situation in the country may seriously suffer after these prisoners return from the war zone and have their sentences reduced or get released for ‘atonement’ of their crimes with blood,” Alexander Kovalenko, a Ukrainian military expert, told iStories."