The PROOF Putin’s soldiers and Wagner mercenaries carried out Bucha atrocities from leaked messages

The barbaric atrocities at Bucha were part of a deliberate Kremlin strategy carried out in part by the feared Wagner Group of mercenaries, intercepted Russian radio transmissions have revealed.

Germany‘s foreign intelligence service, the BND, has heard messages from Putin‘s forces discussing the brutal murder of civilians in the city of horrors outside Kyiv, which was recaptured by Ukraine over the weekend.

The transmissions have been linked to specific corpses seen in Bucha, with one soldier talking about how he and his colleagues shot dead someone on a bicycle, while another said: ‘First question soldiers, then shoot them.’

The audio messages have been relayed to German parliament by the BND to further debunk baseless Kremlin claims that the bodies were staged by Ukraine after Russia withdrew from the city in a ‘monstrous forgery’, Spiegel reported. 

The wiretap recordings also show that the Wagner Group was present in the city and played ‘a key role’ in the massacre, and that there are likely similar scenes of slaughter elsewhere in the country.

The shadowy military company which has been linked to a string of killings, rapes and war crimes around the world is known as Putin‘s private army which carries out his dirty work at an arm’s length from the state.

The BND recordings indicate the atrocities were neither accidental nor carried out by individual out-of-control soldiers.

Messages show the troops regularly discussed the potential war crimes as if they were talking about their everyday lives.

The BND told German leaders this shows how the killings were normalised and part of a deliberate strategy intended to sow fear and terror among the civilian population.

Further recordings are being analysed by intelligence chiefs ‘with great concern’ which have not yet been pinpointed to a specific place in Ukraine.

But they indicate crime scenes similar to Bucha in other cities across the country, particularly around Mariupol which remains under heavy bombardment with an estimated 170,000 civilians still trapped.

The mayor of the besieged port city said today there are at least 5,000 dead civilians in Mariupol alone, of which 210 are children.

Ukrainian authorities said the bodies of least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, victims of what Volodymyr Zelensky said was a Russian campaign of murder, rape, dismemberment and torture.

Local officials say more than 300 people were killed in Bucha alone, and around 50 of them were executed. 

Some victims had apparently been shot at close range and others were found with their hands bound.

Zelensky accused Russia of interfering with an international investigation into possible war crimes by removing bodies and trying to hide other evidence in Bucha, north west of Kyiv.

‘We have information that the Russian troops have changed tactics and are trying to remove the dead people, the dead Ukrainians, from the streets and cellars of territory they occupied,’ he said during his latest video address. 

‘This is only an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more.’ 

Ukrainian armed forces said they uncovered a Russian torture chamber, located inside a children’s hospital that was also being used as a makeshift barracks. 

The bodies of five men were found shot to death in the basement, a spokesman said, with their hands tied behind their backs. Some had been tortured.

Graphic images taken by Ukrainian prosecutors show the bodies of the men lying on a rubble floor surrounded by pools of dried blood. At least one appears to have been shot through the kneecap.

Visiting the region on Monday, a shattered President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced what he called ‘genocide’ by Russian forces, adding that ‘we know of thousands of people killed and tortured, with severed limbs, raped women and murdered children … dead people have been found in barrels, basements, strangled, tortured.’ 

The Kremlin has denied any civilian killings, claiming the images emerging from Bucha are fakes produced by Ukrainian forces, or that the deaths occurred after Russian soldiers pulled out.

At a UN Security Council meeting yesterday, Moscow’s ambassador rejected Zelensky’s claims, saying the ‘ungrounded accusations… are not confirmed by any eyewitnesses’.

But satellite photos taken while Bucha was still under Moscow’s control show what appear to be bodies lying in streets where the dead were later found by Ukrainian forces and seen by journalists.

And multiple Bucha residents told AFP they had seen Russian soldiers killing civilians.

‘Right in front of my eyes, they fired on a man who was going to get food at the supermarket,’ said 43-year-old Olena, who declined to give her family name.

During a grim cleanup, the remains of partially burned bodies in black bags were lifted into a van, with officials telling journalists ‘dozens of bodies’ remained in apartments and in nearby woods.

Bucha first came under attack by Russian forces trying to push into Kyiv in the early days of the war, and was the scene of fierce fighting that left streets filled with the charred husks of dozens of tanks and armoured vehicles – as well as the bodies of their crew.

The city was fully under Russian control by early March and endured occupation by Putin’s men until last week when troops began withdrawing, having failed in their aim to assault the Ukrainian capital. 

Over the weekend, Kyiv’s men moved in to reclaim the region. It was during this time that the stories began to emerge.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova has warned that the ‘worst’ of the human casualties are actually located in Borodyanka, a town located some 15 miles further from Kyiv than Bucha.

A ‘similar humanitarian situation’ to Bucha also exists in the cities of Chernihiv and Sumy, which were surrounded and cut off by Russian forces early in the war – which have now retreated.    

After the grisly images of dead civilians sparked international condemnation, Zelensky said Kremlin forces were trying to cover up evidence of atrocities.

‘We have information that the Russian military has changed its tactics and is trying to remove people who have been killed from streets and basements … this is just an attempt to hide the evidence and nothing more,’ Zelensky said.

Moscow has denied targeting civilians and says images of bodies in Bucha were staged to justify more sanctions against Moscow and derail peace talks.

Russia’s six-week-long invasion has forced over 4 million to flee abroad, killed or injured thousands, left a quarter of the population homeless, turned cities into rubble and set off Western restrictions targeting Russian elites and the economy.

How rapes, murders and war crimes dominate the shadowy history of Putin’s ‘assassination squad’ 

The notorious Wagner Group, a private military company known as ‘Putin’s private army’, has been linked to a string of rapes, robberies, murders, and war crimes across the globe.

Widely considered by military experts to be at the beck and call of Vladimir Putin,  the mercenary group is among the list of individual and organisations sanctioned by Britain over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Wagner is said to have been tasked with assassinating Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior Ukrainian figures, including the Klitschko brothers.

The Kremlin has long denied ties to the 600-strong mercenary group, but experts say it is deployed worldwide to carry out Moscow’s dirty work. 

Reports have long claimed the force is Putin’s personal assassination squad – while being far enough removed to afford the Russian president plausible deniability. 

In December, the EU accused Wagner of ‘serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mozambique’. 

The force has already been heavily involved in supplying weapons, experienced special operations personnel, and military training to pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine. 

The army-for-hire, allegedly run by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin – a close ally of the Russian president who is often dubbed ‘Putin’s chef’ – was flown into Ukraine several  weeks ago and offered a huge sum for the mission. 

It has previously been deployed to Africa, where it has carried out black ops operations that the Kremlin wants done while avoiding direct responsibility. 

Russia has continually denied the group’s existence and its origins are murky, though it first appeared in 2014 in the Donbas region of Ukraine, which Russia was trying to destabilise.

Initially, it was made up of only a few hundred Russian army veterans. They were ordered to assassinate Donbas leaders who were broadly supportive of Russia, but refused to follow instructions from the Kremlin.

These assassinations were then blamed on Ukrainian forces, according to security experts. 

Wagner’s founder and leader is Dmitry Utkin, a shaven-headed former lieutenant colonel in Spetsnaz – Russia’s special forces. He named it after his Spetsnaz code name.

Utkin is seen as a neo-Nazi and was described by one Russian newspaper as having ‘an appreciation of the aesthetic of the Third Reich’.

Mercenaries are illegal in Russia but Putin used Wagner to crush Syrian rebels and even awarded Utkin a medal. 

Eventually, however, the Wagner Group became so dangerous that even the Russian government refused to pay them.  

This led to Putin appointing oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin to control the group. 

For Western observers, Wagner Group’s links with the Kremlin are in little doubt. Putin himself has been pictured at a Kremlin function with Wagner troops including lieutenant colonel Utkin. 

In 2020, investigative news site Bellingcat uncovered records revealing Wagner’s reputed boss Prigozhin had made 99 calls to Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff in eight months and frequently spoke to top officials at the Kremlin.

The Kremlin once again denied it has any influence over Wagner and suggested that Prigozhin only provides catering services to the Russian government. 

Wagner Group has been involved in fighting across Africa, including in Syria, Libya, Mozambique and the Central African Republic – with observers noting the close correlation between their actions and the Kremlin’s own policy aims.

In 2017, Wagner employees tortured a deserter from the Syrian army. Sickening footage showed how they   broke his legs with a sledgehammer and then crushed his chest, before cutting off his hands, his head and finally setting his corpse alight. 

In 2019, a man who filmed the torture and beheading was identified as Stanislav D, a soldier who was known to have been employed by Wagner in the country to help prop up its Kremlin-backed dictator, Bashar Assad.

In Libya, the BBC obtained a Samsung tablet owned by a Wagner fighter which revealed the group had been leaving unmarked mines in civilian areas – a war crime.

The investigation also uncovered a ‘shopping list’ of weapons and military equipment, including four tanks, hundreds of Kalashnikov rifles, and a state-of-the-art radar system.

A military analyst said some of the equipment could only have come from the Kremlin.

Shocking revelations also emerged about the conduct of Wagner fighters, with one former member openly admitting to killing prisoners because ‘no-one wants an extra mouth to feed’.

Meanwhile, one Libyan villager described how he played dead as his relatives were killed around him.

Wagner’s appearance in Mali was one of the reasons given by French president Emmanuel Macron for his decision to pull out 2,400 troops from the country, where they had been fighting jihadists.

Mr Macron suspected the mercenaries had struck a deal with Mali’s ruling junta.

He said Wagner was ‘arriving in Mali with predatory intentions, but why?’

‘Because the junta which is in power after two coups d’états considers them to be the best partners they can find to protect their power, not to fight against terrorism.’

Wagner fighters were welcomed into the Central African Republic (CAR) by President Faustin-Archange Touadéra to assist in his fight against rebels. 

Over the course of the campaign, both the UN and France said they had been responsible for raping and robbing unarmed civilians in the country’s rural areas.

In total, the UN documented more than 500 incidents in the country during the year from July 2020, including sexual violence, extrajudicial killings and torture. 

Although inspectors accepted some of the violence had been carried out by rebels, CAR’s Justice Minister Arnaud Abazene acknowledged for the first time that some abuses had been carried out by ‘Russian instructors’.

One military source told AFP that more than 50 people died, some in ‘summary executions’.

In 2018, three Russian journalists reporting on Wagner’s activities in CAR were ambushed and shot dead. Another Russian journalist investigating the group ‘fell’ to his death from his fifth floor flat. 

Wagner has also been involved in operations against ISIS in Syria and Mozambique.

In Mozambique, seven mercenaries were killed by ISIS-linked militants – including four who were shot and then beheaded.

Both attacks were ambushes in Mozambique’s northern Cabo Delgado state, according to sources in the country’s military. 

The Times reported that between 2,000 and 4,000 Wagner Group mercenaries arrived in Ukraine back in January, but with different missions.

General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of Joint Forces Command, said: ‘They are very effective because they are hard to pin down.

‘They can appear from the shadows, do very violent things and then disappear again, without it being obvious who was responsible. They are not directly linked to the Russian government and therefore they are plausibly deniable.’

Sources said the militia were briefed about Putin’s plans against Ukraine back in December, long before the Russian army was told.  

There are claims the notorious mercenaries have been tasked with assassinating Volodymyr Zelensky and other senior Ukrainian politicians. 

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and the presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak have been listed as among other alleged assassination targets. 

Mercenaries were reportedly given a 24-person ‘kill list’ including the entire Ukrainian cabinet, mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko and his brother Wladimir – both boxing champions who have become iconic figures on the front lines of the capital.  

The attack was sabotaged after the plans reached the upper echelons of the Ukrainian government on March 5, prompting Kyiv to declare a 36-hour ‘hard’ curfew, ordering everyone indoors so that soldiers could sweep the streets for Russian saboteurs.