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.

The perpetrator, 28-year-old Ivan Rossomakhin, was already a repeat offender when he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for murder in 2020. He too was recruited by Prigozhin and recently returned to his home town after fighting in Ukraine.

But a day later, on 29 March, Rossomakhin entered the wooden house of Buiskich, where he is believed to have killed her with an axe.

In one picture shared with the Observer, a smiling Buiskich wearing a flowery dress is holding a large bowl of strawberries. Another image showed Buiskich proudly standing next to her granddaughter.

The relative, as well as other family members contacted by the Observer, said they feared state reprisals for speaking out against Wagner.

Earlier this year, Vladimir Putin signed legislation making it a criminal offence to publicly criticise Wagner fighters or publish negative reports about them. Soon after, a Russian activist who revealed details of the burials of Wagner mercenaries killed in Ukraine fled the country.

And Prigozhin, a longtime ally of Putin, has vouched to help former convicts who have served out their contracts in Ukraine if they get in trouble with law enforcement.

One of those former criminals is Alexey Savichev, who returned in March to his home town of Voronezh, a city in south-west Russia.

Savichev, 49, a convicted murderer recruited by Wagner last September, fought for six months in Ukraine, first in the battle for the town of Soledar and, after its capture, in Bakhmut.

Savichev described to the Observer how police in Voronezh would occasionally detain him for disorderly conduct late at night.