In October 2022, thecannibalguy blog reported on the news that Russia has been boosting the number of soldiers fighting in Ukraine by recruiting within its worst maximum-security prisons, including enlisting a convicted cannibal.

The cannibal, Yegor Komarov, had been the subject of an earlier blog in December 2021. He had been arrested for murder in the town of Sortavala (near the Finnish border) after a headless body fell from his car. Komarov admitted to being a cannibal and confessed to stabbing and killing another man in a St Petersburg park the previous year for the sole purpose of tasting human flesh, adding that he had sliced off the victim’s tongue and fried it in butter.

The recruiters of this motley army of murderers, rapists (and at least one cannibal), all of who are promised freedom if they survive six months of war, is a mercenary force called The Wagner Group. It had first been deployed to the Ukraine back in 2014 to help pro-Russian separatists battle Ukrainian forces.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” because he rose from being a restaurateur and caterer for the Kremlin, is the leader of the Wagner Group. Many of Mr Prigozhin’s companies are currently under US sanctions for what it calls his “malign political and economic influence around the globe”. 

Prigozhin originally denied any connection with the Wagner Group, but now a new video has surfaced (at the top of this page) where he shows how his mercenaries are trained before being sent in as the shock troops of the Russian war to occupy Ukraine.

In the video, Prigozhin speaks about so-called “elite” fighters from a special training base in the village of Molkino in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia:

This is a supplementary training base for our fighters…. Here experienced fighters are given additional training in their specialties. So they raise young eagles there, and here they make real cannibals.

These prisoners from the worst Russian prisons are considered disposable, sent into the front lines in Ukraine as cannon fodder. According to the Ukrainian President, after the fighting around the Soledar salt mines in January 2023,

“Thousands of their people were lost: the whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like.”

Commanders of the brutal mercenary group are reportedly castrating their own soldiers who try to surrender or retreat. In an intercepted call in December 2022, US intelligence said that they learned a member of the Wagner Group was castrated for either trying to retreat or surrender. The intercepted call heard a Russian soldier say, “The Wagnerians caught him and cut his fucking balls off” but the video tape was not released.

We have no reports yet about the fate of the recruited cannibal, Yegor Komarov, nor do we know if he is finding ‘gainful’ employment teaching other recruits how to be “real cannibals”.

We do know that cannibalism is a recurring event in Russian and Ukrainian history, particularly in the last hundred years. Russia’s worst serial killer was a cannibal named Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted of killing fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990, although he had confessed to many more. Chikatilo blamed his cannibalism fetish on the story his mother had told him about his brother being taken and eaten by the neighbours in the 1930s, during the Holodomor.

The “Holodomor” (literally “murder by starvation”) was an event that took place in the Ukraine in 1932-3, during which the population was deliberately decimated by Stalin’s collectivisation of the farms and seizure of food stores. As starvation set in, corpses began to disappear, and the government response was simply to put up signs saying, “Eating dead children is barbarism”.

Not so in war, apparently. What exactly Yevgeny Prigozhin meant by turning his soldiers into “real cannibals” is not clear. But in view of his total disregard for their welfare, we have to wonder how well Prigozhin feeds his soldiers. Or, as Putin’s chef, does he simply give them a recipe book?