They operate globally to forcibly advance Russia’s military and economic interests, fight side-by-side with the Russian military in Ukraine, and have made war crimes their trademark. Although the mercenaries of the Wagner group have been active on the world stage for some time, they only emerged from the shadows after the war in Ukraine.
This is the Wagner group
- Founded in 2014 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, it hires soldiers as a private military contractor (PMC).
- He became known as “the green man” during the Russian conquest of Crimea.
- Active in conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Mali and Libya, among others.
- Their performance is characterized by extreme violence, the United States is considering designating the Wagner Group as a terrorist organization.
In 2014, Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin founded the Wagner Group, although he will continue to deny it until the end of 2022. Prigozhin is not only the Kremlin’s head of catering (which has earned him the nickname “cook of Putin”), but also a confidant of Putin. He does his own dirty business, runs a troll factory in St. Petersburg and leads an army of mercenaries with a bad reputation. The Wagner Group owes its name to its other founder: Chechen far-right veteran Dmitri Utkin, who named the group after Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner. Not very surprising, The Economist reports that Utkin has several neo-Nazi tattoos.
Green men
In February 2014, Wagner’s troops made their first appearance in Crimea. they are the much-discussed masked ‘green men’ without military insignia who guard bridges and roads and disarm Ukrainian soldiers. Remarkable: Wagner’s men are distinguished by their polite and well-mannered demeanor. After the Crimea, Wagner travels to the rebellious pro-Russian Ukrainian province of Donbas to further destabilize it.
Kill the commandos
According to the Times, at the end of January 2022 the Wagner group will fly with more than 400 contractors from the Central African Republic to assassinate Ukrainian President Zelensky and members of his cabinet and pave the way for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Two days after the raid, the Ukrainian government announces a harsh 36-hour lockdown in Kiev to rid the capital of Russian soldiers.
No paper trail
Wagner is reportedly registered in Argentina and has offices in St. Petersburg and Hong Kong. Yet it is difficult to find a company registration, tax return or organization chart. Logically, Russian law prohibits private military companies. Top Russian leaders, up to and including Vladimir Putin, therefore repeatedly deny that there are any ties between Wagner and the Russian state.
The picture changes when Putin begins his “special military operation” in Ukraine and soon encounters great difficulty in recruiting enough military personnel. Wagner offers a solution, Wagner Group is increasingly coming out of the shadows and explicitly looming into the public arena, for example with the opening of a new headquarters in St. Petersburg, billboards across the country and the reference in the media as “patriotic organization”.
Many Russian and Western observers believe the organization is a disguised branch of the Russian Defense Ministry. The company shares bases with the Russian military, travels on Russian military aircraft, and uses Russian military healthcare. Research platform Bellingcat showed in 2018 that Wagner soldiers traveling abroad receive international passports from the Russian military intelligence service GRU.
Fight for $2,000
Wagner trains his personnel at Molkino, a Russian Defense Ministry base in Krasnodar Krai. The Wagner Barracks is not officially part of the Russian military, court documents describe the facility as a children’s resort.
An estimated 6,000 people work in administrative and logistical roles for the Wagner Organization, but this is a figure undoubtedly dated as of 2017. It is not known how many combat contractors the Wagner Army has. At least globally, according to the Pentagon chief, the Wagner group today has 50,000 men under arms in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and about 40,000 convicts who enlisted in exchange for reduced sentences, a practice that has become more common with the losses on the Russian side.
Unlike the criminal hoping for a reduced sentence, the typical Wagner Contractor (also known as a Private Military Contractor, PMC) is often a regular retired Russian soldier between the ages of 35 and 55 with a monthly income of between $2,000 and $2,500. experience and rank. Those still in training are paid $1,100 a month.
Secret
Those who enroll in a course in Molkino practically disappear from the radar; recruits are not allowed to reveal their whereabouts, take photos or videos, post anything on the internet, or use social media. Passport and other documents must be handed in, new PMCs sign a confidentiality agreement valid for 10 years. Anyone who violates your duty of confidentiality will have your contract terminated. The former PMC can of course boo about overdue wages.
This duty of secrecy also applies to the families of deceased PCMs. Those who speak to the media are not entitled to compensation. And this can add up, the standard compensation for the family of a slain Wagner employee is around $80,000, although other sources say the compensation is in the range of $22,500 to $52,000, depending on the rank and mission of the slain PMC.
Criminal fodder
Since July 2022, Wagner has been recruiting more and more from Russian prisons to fight in the Donbass region. According to The Guardian, convicts receive 200,000 rubles and an amnesty when they sign up for six months, the family receives 5 million rubles when they die. And that chance is pretty high; poorly trained convicts are being sent en masse to Ukrainian lines, according to the UK’s MoD, to “retain experienced commanders and armored vehicles at the expense of more readily available recruits, deemed by the organization to be worthy”. The ministry calls it a “brutal tactic”.
Bellingcat investigative reporters say Wagner is suffering heavy casualties on the Ukrainian front: Of the 8,000 Wagnerians fighting there, nearly 3,000 are reported dead by April 2022. A later American estimate puts 4,100 Wagner mercenaries killed and 10,000 wounded.
According to independent Russian media Mediazona, Russian prisoners say Wagner’s boss Prigozhin personally recruits the inmates and vows they will not be used as cannon fodder. Wagner also recruits in Afghanistan among former members of the Afghan National Army Commando Corps, the Afghan Army’s elite forces abandoned after the United States’ hasty departure from Afghanistan. A spokesman for Prigozhin calls the messages “idiotic nonsense”.
The British Defense Ministry calls Moscow’s dependence on the Ukrainian Wagner group “significant of the serious personnel problems of the Russian army”. The Russian military is estimated to have suffered up to 100,000 casualties since the start of the war, a surprising number for a conflict of less than a year.
Extreme violence
Extremely violent and brutal behavior seems to be the Wagner Group’s trademark. The violence that the group uses is so extreme that the United States decides in January 2023 to designate Wagner as a terrorist organization. Wagner was frequently accused of war crimes. For example, in the Central African Republic where, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, mercenaries are guilty of mass executions, arbitrary detention, torture, forcible displacement of civilians and attacks on aid workers. Never mind that in the capital Bangui there is a prominent statue of a PCM protecting a family.
Western intelligence services link the mercenaries to torture, kidnapping, rape and mass murder of civilians in the Ukrainian Bocha. In Syria, Wagner gains notoriety through the PMC’s torture, beheading and videotape of a Syrian government army defector.
Global field of activity
In the course of a few years, the Wagner Group has built up an impressive global business field, PMCs are especially active on the African continent, where Wagner effortlessly combines the military-political with the economic. Wagnerians are engaged in training the army, police and gendarmerie of friendly regimes, crushing armed and unarmed opposition, maintaining order and protecting or exploiting mines and oil wells.
In 2017, Wagner fights IS in Syria. He automatically gets the concessions for the oil and gas wells and mines that the group takes back from the caliphate. The group later also recruits Syrians to fight in Ukraine. In 2018, PMCs help the Sudanese regime crack down on anti-government protests. The PMCs also protect (and manage) several gold mines in Sudan together with the Sudanese military.
The group joined Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar in the Libyan civil war. Wagner provides security for Venezuelan President Maduro in 2019, while the mercenaries secure the business interests of Russia’s Rosneft and train pro-Maduro paramilitary militias.
The group also trains the national armed forces in Mozambique, as well as Mali (where it also protects government officials) and Burkina Faso, where Wagnerians operate several gold mines. In 2021, the group will hold offices in about 20 African countries including Madagascar, Eswatini, Lesotho, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Angola, Guinea, Guinea Bissau and possibly the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
US sanctions on Prigozhin
Prigozhin owns or controls two companies that carry out mining activities in the Central African Republic: M Finans based in Russia and Lobaye Invest based in the Central African Republic. The main activities of M Finans are the mining of precious metals and the provision of private security services. The US Treasury Department also links M Finans to Concord Catering, a Prigozhin-controlled company which the US government says provides material assistance to the IRA.
The Americans link both M Finans and Lobaye Invest to PMC Wagner’s CAR operations, both companies have been on the US sanctions list since September 2020.
Meanwhile, Wagner is increasingly mentioned in connection with a possible power struggle within the Russian military and the Kremlin’s entourage. For example, the chief Wagner Prigozhin coûte que coûte wanted to take the city of Soledar to distinguish his group from the Russian army and strengthen his political position. Prigozhin has often spoken condescendingly about Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu and alleged bureaucracy and corruption in the Russian military.
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Source: BNR
Sharon Rock is an author and journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. She has a passion for learning about different cultures and understanding the complexities of the world. With a talent for explaining complex global issues in an accessible and engaging way, Sharon has become a respected voice in the field of world news journalism.
