Bracelets can be seen on Wagner mercenaries again and again. What looks like fashionable frills is a signal that can have fatal consequences for the wearer.
Ukraine reports of captured soldiers from the Wagner mercenary unit who wear ribbons to identify infectious diseases. According to the Ukrainian account, the bracelets are a warning signal that can have fatal consequences for the fighters. They could therefore be denied medical care in combat.
Photos of the prisoners keep appearing in the Telegram channels on both sides – also a propaganda tool to humiliate the opponent or to show that extremists are fighting there. Both sides show soldiers with tattooed swastikas or SS runes. On Sunday, Igor Sushko, managing director of the pro-Ukrainian US organization “Wind of Change”, shared such a photo of a Wagner soldier on Twitter. But there was also a detail to be discovered that Ukrainian channels are increasingly showing: the ribbons.
Apparently forced to wear the wristbands
The white bands therefore mean that the wearer is infected with hepatitis C, red bands for AIDS/HIV. It would come as no surprise that some of the fighters among the Wagner soldiers are correspondingly positive: Founder and boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has taken masses of inmates from Russian prisons into his ranks. From a prison near Leningrad alone, 100 inmates with confirmed infections were recruited, Ukraine reported in September.
Captured mercenaries with the ribbons are said to have confirmed that they were forced to wear them – because other soldiers would otherwise rebel for fear of infection. The HI virus and hepatitis C are transmitted through blood. 50 to 80 percent of those infected with hepatitis C develop chronic liver inflammation and even cirrhosis.
Doctors apparently refuse to treat infected people
The soldiers marked with the ribbons would be treated with corresponding care if they were wounded – or not. Even Russian doctors at the front would refuse to care for the fighters marked in this way, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said.
The Wagner soldiers are often sent as cannon fodder in suicide missions against well-secured Ukrainian positions. Russia suffers enormous losses. The Ukrainian general staff announced last week that 1,000 Russian soldiers had died in one day. Such numbers cannot be verified.
