Video: Ukrainians appear to take Russian prisoners 2:33
(CNN) --
The audio is sometimes muddled, but the emotions are unmistakable.
"They are taking me to be shot. I have lost a lot of people there. Remember this: don't send more people here. Enough is enough, they want to kill us all."
It is the last message that Viktor Sevalnev would send.
A convict, who had been in jail for armed robbery and assault, was sent from prison to fight for Russia in the Ukraine.
After most of his colleagues were killed in a factory raid outside Soledar, it was the act of survival that proved fatal for Sevalnev.
In a final message to his wife, he said he feared that Russian Defense Ministry officials would soon remove him from the hospital bed, where he recorded the audio message, and execute him.
Days later, his body was returned to his wife in Moscow, in a closed coffin.
Latest-minute and live news from Russia's war in Ukraine
Sevalnev's cruel fate adds to a growing list of allegations of mistreatment by convicts that CNN has spoken to.
For months, Russia has been using the shadowy private mercenary company Wagner to bolster its frontline presence with prisoners, a plan it initially denied and kept secret, but later openly promoted by Wagner's owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
On Thursday, Prigozhin announced that Wagner had stopped recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine, stating that "those who now work for us are fulfilling all their obligations."
No reason was given for the decision and CNN cannot independently confirm the claims.
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However, Sevalnev and several inmates CNN has spoken to seem to indicate a disturbing new strategy.
They say they were hired directly by the Russian Defense Ministry.
Defector from the Wagner group details the brutal executions he witnessed 4:09
A Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed to CNN that prisoners recently captured by Ukrainian forces had said they were direct employees of the ministry.
"They stress to us that they are not Wagner, that they were officially invited by the Defense Ministry," Andriy Usov, defense intelligence representative at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, told CNN.
Usov said the development had "echoes of infighting among the Russian military leadership", and that the Russian defense hierarchy, defense minister Sergei Shoigu and the new head of the Ukraine operation, Valery Gerasimov, were creating a convict appeal. which they could control directly through the ministry's own private companies.
Usov said the ministry had fewer convicts for now, but "they will be used in the same way... as cannon fodder" as Wagner does.
Vladimir Osechkin of the prisoners' rights group Gulagu.net said the Defense Ministry appeared to be luring Wagner recruits and convicts by using "more favorable conditions" as a check on the growing weight of its owner, Prigozhin, considered increasingly as a competitor to parts of the armed forces.
Sevalnev is buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Moscow.
A Russian separatist officer told his wife that he had died from shrapnel wounds.
"Many in Moscow are really afraid of Prigozhin," says Osechkin.
"They understand that he commands a huge gang — an organized criminal group of mercenaries and assassins — that at any moment he can organize God knows what in Moscow."
CNN has asked the Russian Defense Ministry for comment and has not received a response.
CNN spoke to several prisoners who worked for a unit known by their number "08807," who all say were directly employed by the Russian Defense Ministry.
Some had documents suggesting they were ultimately posted to an element of the Luhansk separatist army, which has been surrogate in the Russian Defense Ministry.
Unit 08807 was deployed in October to the fronts around Soledar, known as the "Shtrum" brigade—for storming the Ukrainian lines—and suffered catastrophic casualties.
Grainy images obtained by Gulagu.net show Sevalnev and his unit celebrating pre-deployment by dancing at a camp inside Luhansk.
It also shows them eating and joking just behind the front lines the night before they began an assault on a key factory in Soledar, which would prove fatal for most of Sevalnev's unit, survivors said.
Convicts spoke of casual mistreatment on and off the battlefield, but Sevalnev's fate stood out.
According to a recording of a call to his wife from a Russian separatist official who organized the repatriation of the body, his abrupt death was apparently caused by shrapnel wounds.
Sevalnev's wife declined to be interviewed for this report, but her audio messages and images of him from the war were provided to CNN by Gulagu.net.
Russian court documents obtained by CNN show that Sevalnev was convicted of robbery and, according to his sentence, should have been in jail when he died.
His grave is located on the outskirts of Moscow and it shows November 2022 as the month of his death.
"Just survive": Wagner's fighters tell the horrors of the battle in eastern Ukraine
Three other survivors from the unit spoke to CNN from the hospital.
One of them, also a prisoner, said that Sevalnev had been wounded once, but was sent back to fight at the front, where he was wounded again.
"Here nobody is operated on, nobody is operated on," he said.
CNN is not revealing his name or the names of the other surviving convicts for their safety.
"People walk [through the hospital] with gunshot wounds, with shrapnel stuck in their legs."
A former soldier before his incarceration, he also described catastrophic losses.
"Our batch was 130 people, but we also have a lot of amputees, and we probably have 40 people left," he added, saying many different groups of prisoners were added to his unit over time.
He said that his unit only had 15 survivors and that 08807 was now called 40321, or "Storm unit."
"In short, the meat grinder," he added.
He told CNN that in recent days he had been sent back to the front lines, his wounds unhealed.
A second prisoner, a veteran of previous Russian conflicts, said that last year, a decade after serving his sentence for murder, he was recruited by the Russian Defense Ministry, having initially been passed over when Wagner recruited him from his prison.
He described himself as a "patriot" and complained that many of the prisoners sent to the front were "green".
"I have no complaints, war is war. Some come here, hear the machine gun and run away. It's not good. They set a trap for everyone, since nobody has my back," he said.
This soldier was seriously wounded in the leg in October after 25 days on the front lines, but he described how he did not feel fear.
"In the trench, 2-6 meters from me, a shell falls, dirt falls into the trench, but I don't feel any fear. I don't know why this is happening to me."
A third said he was serving a sentence for manslaughter when he was recruited directly by the defense ministry.
He lamented that his convicts did not receive the medical treatment and benefits that Wagner boasted of lavishing on his recruits.
[Wagner's recruits have also complained that they are used as cannon fodder and treated badly].
He described how one battle left half of his unit as casualties.
"They sent us to the front. I told them on the radio that they were shooting at us with mortars, to aim a little to the right. And they kept shooting at us from both sides. Then I understood that they were shooting at us deliberately."
The fate of the convicts employed by Wagner does not look any better, according to family members of three convicts over the summer who appeared in a CNN story in August.
One had disappeared without a trace for four months, according to his brother.
Another had also kept quiet, but was sending his brother his salary, collected monthly in a rented office in a sealed plastic bag.
A third had appeared in a video with Prigozhin, introduced as a lucky returnee.
However, a friend described his "zombie" aspect of him, his excessive consumption of alcohol and his urgent desire to return to the front.
Ukrainian soldiers say they will fight for every inch of Bakhmut 2:55
The plan to send convicts to war appears to have grown rapidly, as figures obtained by CNN from the Russian penal system show a drop of 27,000 inmates between March and November last year, when the plan was only three months old.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also elaborated on the legality of the pardons that Wagner has insisted are granted to convicts, telling reporters last month that the presidential decrees pardoning the prisoners were likely classified.
"There are open decrees and decrees with various classifications of secrecy," he said.
"That is precisely why I cannot say anything about these decrees. What I can confirm is that the entire prisoner pardon procedure is carried out in strict accordance with Russian law."
Wagner's hiring has also caught inmates who are not Russian, and may not have been convicted of any crimes.
Tanzanian student Nemes Tarimo was on an exchange in Moscow when he was reportedly arrested for drugs and held in pretrial detention.
In March last year he was sentenced to seven years in jail, according to the Tanzanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing information from his Russian counterparts.
His family in Tanzania told CNN they knew nothing of his fate until authorities contacted them to say he had died.
Wagner posted a gruesome video of a memorial service for Tarimo at a cemetery in Molkino, western Russia, saying he had died in October near Bakhmut.
His body was returned to Tanzania last month, according to state television, and the Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Tarimo had accepted an offer to fight in exchange for money and his freedom.
His cousin Rehema Makrene Kigoga told CNN: "Since his childhood, Nemes was a very obedient boy. He was not a rascal, but a very religious person."
He also said that they had not heard anything about recruiting him until after his death.
"When he was alive, we never heard of this report, but now that he is dead we are told that he was arrested for drug offences. We are very sorry and sad as a family. He never even dreamed of being a soldier."
Sammy Awami, Josh Pennington and CNN's Bethlehem Feleke, Victoria Butenko and Alex Stambaugh contributed to this report.
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