A captured Russian soldier who served in Mali with the Wagner mercenary group says Russian forces used local people as "living dummies" to practise battlefield medicine, Ukraine's Defence Intelligence agency (GUR) says. The video of his account was recorded for the "I Want to Live" project and published by the GUR on Wednesday, 30 September.
"Russians blew off one local man's leg with a TNT charge, then practised fitting a tourniquet on him after the amputation," the GUR says. They then shot the same man in the arm to run through the drill again, and left him to die of his wounds.
"They used another prisoner as a dummy to practise knife strikes to the chest," the agency adds. The captured Russian says that at another training session they hacked at a prisoner's leg with an axe near the knee.
The GUR says these are not one-off cases. Human rights groups have already documented extrajudicial killings, house burnings, forced disappearances and attacks on civilians in Mali involving Russian mercenaries.