The son of the former head of the Wagner PMC, Pavlo Prigozhin, resumed recruiting mercenaries after his father’s death, several local sites in Russia, cited by Insider, reported.

Recruitment efforts are currently focused on the regional level, as no large-scale nationwide campaign was announced last year, when Prigozhin once became the “face” of Russia’s war effort.

59.ru, a news site from Perm Region, reported on Tuesday that a local representative of Wagner’s group confirmed that Wagner’s group had resumed recruitment there and also said that the militants are led by Pavlo Prigozhin.

At the age of 25, he will become Yevgeny Prigozhin’s sole heir, according to several pro-Wagner channels that have received a copy of his will.

Prigozhin was buried on August 29 at the cemetery in his native St. Petersburg, after a week earlier in the Tver region, north of Moscow, the private plane in which he was traveling with other commanders of the Wagnerites crashed.

Dmytro Utkin, who organized Wagner’s group with Prigozhin’s money and was its de facto commander, was buried two days later in the Pantheon of Defenders of the Fatherland, a military necropolis north of Moscow.

Utkin was a member of the Russian Special Forces before joining Project Wagner.

Pavlo Prigozhin is negotiating the return of the Wagner group to the Kremlin’s favor

Ngs.ru, another Russian site from the Novosibirsk region, reported on Wednesday that Wagner’s group had started recruiting again, but did not mention Pavel Prigozhin.

Telegram channels close to Wagner noted at the end of July that Prigozhin’s son was actively negotiating the return of Wagner personnel to the combat zone in Ukraine.

The Gray Zone Telegram channel, which has repeatedly written about Wagner and Yevgeny Prigozhin, said that Pavlo is negotiating with the National Guard of the Russian Federation, Rosgvardia, regarding the return of Wagner’s fighters to the war in Ukraine. The Russian Guard received much of the Wagner heavy weaponry after the private military company was disarmed following a military uprising led by Yevgeny Prigozhin in June.

The Russian Guard is headed by General Viktor Solotov, Putin’s aide who is considered the Russian president’s most trusted military commander. The Russian Guard also reports directly to Putin, not the Russian Ministry of Defense.

On Tuesday, social media accounts promoting Wagner’s Perm office’s recruiting efforts on Telegram and VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, listed several conditions for potential candidates.

“Wagnerivtsi” seems to be looking for new recruits for Africa

In posts titled “We’re coming back,” Wagner representatives said that applicants will need Russian passports for operations outside the country, documents about family and close relatives, and vaccination certificates.

The first and third criteria assume that recruitment will be for Wagner’s operations in Africa and other parts of the world, not for the war in Ukraine. In addition, the fate of the huge empire built by Yevgeny Prigozhin remains one of the biggest unknowns after his death.

The job postings also state that potential candidates must provide a certificate of no criminal record or drug use.

Earlier this year, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that the Wagner group would no longer recruit in prisons after Russian public opinion was horrified by crimes committed by some “Wagnerians” after they were granted an amnesty after serving mandatory training . in Ukraine.

However, the recruitment was suspended on Wednesday evening, but the administrators of the respective pages did not disclose the reason.

It remains to be seen how far Pavel Prigozhin will be able to take over Wagner’s operations in Africa and elsewhere, given that the paramilitary group was decapitated in a plane crash on August 23, and a power struggle appears to have begun within the group’s military wing.