VLADIMIR Putin's feared Wagner Group was behind the brutal decapitation of a Ukrainian soldier, a former mercenary has claimed.
It comes after sickening footage emerged appearing to show the slain defender's head on a spike after being cut off.
An exiled Russian human rights group has now said evidence indicates it was an act by Wagner fighters.
The group, called Gulagu, spoke to Wagner PMC (private military company) defector Andrey Medvedev who fled across the Arctic border from Russia to Norway to reach the West.
After watching and listening to the horrifying footage several times, Gulagu founder Vladimir Osechkin said Medvedev claims to have identified former colleagues in the clip.
Osechkin said: "We contacted Andrey Medvedev, ex-commander of the first squad of the 4th platoon of the 7th Wagner PMC assault squad, now in a deportation prison in Sweden.
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“We sent this video, he listened to it several times and watched it carefully.
“He definitely identifies [in the video] his former colleagues, members of the Wagner PMC [private military company].
“By their distinctive callsigns, the way they talk, what they say on the radios, as they go about this extrajudicial execution, that brutal murder.”
Osechkin, speaking on the YouTube channel of dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man and now exiled in Britain, said Medvedev “was in Wagner and knows their call signs and code words and ciphers”.
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He “helps us to identify them [and establish] that fighters of the illegal armed group known as Wagner PMC were involved in this extrajudicial execution, a terrible murder”.
Medvedev, 26, is currently held in detention in Sweden after he crossed the border from Norway.
Ukraine has vowed to identify the knifeman and a second suspected Russian fighter who appeared to be taunting him to decapitate the prisoner of war.
The timing of the terrifying clip, which appeared on social media, cannot be verified – but the alleged battlefield murder is believed to be from 2022.
The barbaric video showed a masked man in camouflage using a knife to cut off the head of an apparent PoW with Ukrainian insignia.
The victim pleads for mercy repeatedly uttering the words "it hurts" and "stop" before he is killed.
A voice from another allegedly Russian fighter taunts the killer to behead and break the spine of the stricken man.
It finishes with the bloodied severed head of the alleged PoW, whose identity remains unclear, held up to the camera.
Osechkin has offered a £2,670 reward for information on the identities of those behind the atrocity.
The chief of Wagner, close Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, said: "I watched this video.
“It is bad when people's heads are cut off, but I have not found anywhere that this is happening near Bakhmut or that fighters of PMC Wagner are participating in the execution.”
Wagner was set up as a private military company, an armed force loyal to the Kremlin, with the involvement of Putin's military intelligence agency, the GRU.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted the beheading footage was “horrific” but questioned whether it was genuine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed those behind the attack would be held accountable.
He said: "There is something that no one in the world can ignore – how easily these beasts kill.
"We are not going to forget anything.
"Neither are we going to forgive the murderers.
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"There will be legal responsibility for everything.
"The defeat of terror is necessary."
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