Wagner Group War Crimes: The Entire Chain of Command

A former mercenary trainer wants to testify before the International Criminal Court. It’s about kidnapped children and the downed flight MH17.

Former Wagner mercenaries who joined a unit of the Akhmat special forces in Ukraine in October Photo: Stanislav Krasilnikov/imago

AMSTERDAM taz | For the first time, a Russian military member entered the Netherlands on Monday to make himself available as a witness to the International Criminal Court in The Hague (ICC). The 60-year-old Igor Salikov was deployed as a colonel in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic from 2014. The former Soviet Army soldier was also an instructor with the Wagner mercenary group and fought for them in Syria, Ukraine and several African countries, as Dutch media reported earlier this week.

Salikov’s testimony as a so-called insider witness can be of great importance for a criminal prosecution of the Russian attack on Ukraine. In March, the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Putin and his government’s children’s envoy, Marija Lvowa-Belova. Salikov arrived in the Netherlands at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, where he recorded a video that is documented on Dutch websites.

Salikow, who began writing down his knowledge of war crimes and their perpetrators in 2022 and sent a version of it to the ICC, had previously given an online interview to the TV magazine “Een Vandaag” (1V).

There he reports, among other things, that he saw children being taken away “for days” and “for one reason or another without their parents.” The editorial team connects this statement with over 6,000 abducted Ukrainian children who were offered for adoption on Russian websites.

Orders from the Russian Ministry of Defense

In a letter to the tribunal, Salikov claims to know the entire command structure of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. The orders there mostly came directly from the Moscow Defense Ministry and sometimes from Putin’s cabinet.

The secret services FSB and GRU were often involved in illegal operations. According to Salikov, the shooting down of the passenger plane MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, in which 289 passengers were killed, was due to a competitive relationship between them.

As for his own motivation, Salikov says he wanted to fight fascists in Ukraine and make Russia “strong and united” again. “We really believed in it. We believed that nationalism was rising in Ukraine.” According to human rights activist Vladimir Osechkin, who supports Salikov, he “suddenly saw what the Russian army was doing in Ukraine.”

Osechkin tells “Een Vandaag” that most of Salikov’s statements have been verified. “As a result, places were discovered where killed Ukrainian citizens were buried, as well as prisoners of war who were tortured to death or executed.”

Osechkin, who runs the Gulagu.Net project against torture and corruption in Russia from France, helped Salikov escape from Russia last summer, which was “complex and risky”.

In the meantime, the ex-colonel was staying in Cyprus with his wife and three children. There, however, reports that Algemeen Dagblad, Not only did the Russian consulate cause them inconvenience, but they were also followed by cars with darkened windows.

The ICC press office refers to the indictment of the criminal court, which did not respond to a query from the taz by the time of going to press. There have been no official statements from the tribunal so far. An employee of “Een Vandaag” reports on the precarious situation of Salikow, who has neither asked for political asylum in the Netherlands nor is part of a witness protection program.