Murder, alcohol and prostitutes: Wagner convicts pardoned by Putin return to terrorise home towns

He strode up and down the central street of Tskhinvali on Monday, like he did most days, occasionally stopping to chat with passersby.

Locals knew the man, Soslan Valiyev, 38, as an idiosyncratic but popular fixture in Tskhinvali, the tiny capital of the Russian-backed breakaway region of South Ossetia in Georgia.

The shock was therefore palpable in Tskhinvali when the news broke out that Tsugri had been killed that evening. A harrowing video published on Telegram channels showed a man chasing and kicking Tsugri moments before he reportedly stabbed him to death.

Local authorities announced in the early hours of Tuesday that they had arrested a man who was suspected of murdering Tsugri. The man, who was identified by state-run media, was Georgiy Siukayev, a convicted murderer who was recruited from jail last autumn by the Wagner paramilitary organisation to fight in Ukraine.

Their releases have stoked fears that the men will go on to commit further crimes, worries that will only grow following a string of violent crimes perpetrated by former Wagner soldiers, including the murder of Tsugri.

Commenting on the case in a statement, Prigozhin claimed that Siukayev was defending bystanders who were being harassed.

At the end of March, Yulia Buiskich, an 85-year-old pensioner, was killed at home in the sleepy town of Novyj Burets in the Kirov region, 600 miles east of Moscow.