Russia’s overseas mercenaries come out of the shadows

On paper it didn’t exist. ‘Wagner’ was a brand name, not a legal entity.

The group first emerged after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine when it annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, and from the start its operations were cryptic.

Wagner’s soldiers appeared in unmarked uniforms, gaining the nickname “little green men”: mysterious forces whose affiliation was only identifiable by their aims of dividing off parts of Ukraine and imposing Russian control.

Though it began in Ukraine, Wagner did not stay there.

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Wagner forces were then deployed in Syria, where they assisted the regime of Bashar al-Assad, particularly in extracting oil and gasfields out of Islamic State’s control.

In return, a Russian company called Evro Polis Ltd was granted a “25 per cent share in oil and gas production from the fields”, according to the United States Treasury.

It described the company as being “owned or controlled by Yevgeniy Prigozhin”, the former criminal who had become a Kremlin-connected caterer and oligarch known as “Putin’s chef” due to his close links to the Russian president.

In 2021, Syrian activists described an almost entirely Russian-speaking town developing in the ruins of the city of Palmyra, centred around the mining of phosphate and drilling for oil and gas. This model was to be repeated across Africa: Wagner provided security to struggling regimes, and in return Russian companies linked to Prigozhin were granted rights to exploit natural resources.

A joint investigative report by European news organisations found that a Wagner-linked company was granted logging rights in a pristine rainforest in the Central African Republic from 2021 on. It came as Wagner fighters provided security to prop up the embattled government of president Faustin-Archange Touadéra.

The group became a player in conflicts from Mali, to Mozambique, to Libya, and were accused by human rights groups of grave abuses against civilians wherever they went.

The model proved a cheap way for Vladimir Putin to exert Russian influence in international affairs. Wagner partly paid for itself by opening up the exploitation of natural resources. Officially, only private military contractors were killed on these overseas ventures, rather than Russian soldiers, shielding the public from the unpopular prospect of troops being killed abroad.

The model also allowed Putin to deny involvement.

“This is not the Russian state, not the Russian army,” he said of Wagner forces in Syria in 2019.

Yet in the wake of Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny over the weekend, it’s all coming out of the woodwork. In a televised meeting with soldiers on Tuesday, Putin stated that the Wagner group was “fully financed” from the Russian state budget.

Wagner received €913 million between May 2022 and May 2023 from the ministry of defence, Putin outlined. Meanwhile, Prigozhin catering company Concord made €850 million from state contracts to supply food to the Russian army.

It’s worth taking a moment to recall that Prigozhin only publicly admitted being the founder of the Wagner mercenary group in September. Until that point, he had denied it vehemently and through the courts, suing journalists and media outlets who reported on his Wagner role.

He even took a case to the European Court of Justice in 2020, insisting that sanctions against him be dropped.

“He has no knowledge of an entity known as Wagner Group . . . has not had any links with any such entity and has not been engaged with nor has he supported it,” the court action read.

Then a video emerged last September showing Prigozhin speaking to convicts lined up in a Russian prison yard. Introducing himself as a Wagner representative, he offered them a deal: sign up to fight for six months, and if you survive, you go free.

Not long afterwards, he issued a statement acknowledging that he had founded the group.

“I cleaned the old weapons myself, sorted out the bulletproof vests myself and found specialists who could help me with this,” the statement laid out.

“From that moment . . . a group of patriots was born, which later came to be called the Wagner Battalion.” Its forces fought to “protect the interests of their country”.

The statement was issued through Concord, a bizarre detail that aptly reflects how personal, commercial, and state interests were enmeshed in the activities of the private military company.

Both the European Union and the Russian state are now grappling with the implications of having such a group in operation on the borders of the EU, a group that is clearly volatile and willing to use force to pursue its interests – including against the state it initially served.