The Economist April 9th 2022 53
InternationalMercenariesVladimir’s army
L
ook onlyat the top of the photograph of
four men posing in military garb and
the mood seems light. One man smiles.
Another puffs on a cigarette while staring
straight into the lens. But glance down at
their feet and you see a severed head on the
concrete floor. Before beheading their vic
tim, the men had made a video of them
selves laughing as they smashed his hands
and feet with a sledgehammer. The inci
dent took place in Syria in 2017. The victim
is reported to have deserted the Syrian ar
my, and his killers were probably Russian.
At least one has been identified as an oper
ative from Wagner Group, a Russian mer
cenary outfit with connections to Russian
military intelligence that, not for the first
time, is reportedly operating in Ukraine.
The most highprofile Russian merce
nary group, Wagner has ties that lead right
to President Vladimir Putin. It first came to
prominence in Ukraine in 2014 as Russia
tried to break off the Donbas region in the
east. Then, Wagner provided one of the ser
vices Mr Putin values from mercenaries:deniability. Its men could pass more plau
sibly than Russian soldiers as separatist
fighters. Since then the group has deployed
to a host of countries, including Syria, Lib
ya, Mali and the Central African Republic
(car), as well as dabbling in Sudan and
Venezuela, always to prop up or install
strongmen favoured by Mr Putin.
In Ukraine today, Mr Putin can no lon
ger hope for deniability from Wagner, nor
for much benefit from another service he
prizes from mercenaries—lowered casual
ty counts among soldiers whose families
might wonder why their loved ones were
sacrificed. Since Russia already has some
190,000 troops in Ukraine, even a few
thousand Wagner mercenaries have small
chance of changing the outcome of the
war. But they may make its conduct still
more savage. For service in Ukraine, Rus
sian recruiters have reached out to those
who were turned down in the past for hav
ing too little experience or suspect back
grounds. “They’re taking anyone and
everyone,” says Ilya Rozhdestvensky, aRussian journalist with long experience
tracking mercenaries.
The group reportedly takes its name
from Hitler’s favourite composer, Wagner,
the call sign of its founder, Dmitry Utkin.
Mr Utkin is a veteran of Russia’s military
intelligence, the gru, who fought in both
Chechen wars and later commanded an
elite Spetsnaz, or special forces,unit. Wag
ner’s ties to the Russian armed forces go
on. Its training camp in Russia is near a
grufacility. In Libya, Syria and Venezuela,
Russian military aircraft transported Wag
ner operatives in and out; in Libya the Rus
sian armed forces also reportedly kept
them well supplied. A shopping list of mil
itary hardware including tanks, an ad
vanced radar system and hundreds of Ka
lashnikov rifles was found in a Wagner
document recovered in Libya. Some of the
gear could probably have been provided
only by the Russian armed forces.
Wagner operatives often use passports
issued by a special desk linked to the Min
istry of Defence—the same desk that is
sued the passports of the two men who at
tempted in 2018 to assassinate Sergei Skri
pal, a former Russian spy, in Britain. In
2020, when Belarus surprisingly arrested
33 Russians who seemed to belong to the
Wagner Group, Mr Putin took a personal
interest and worked to securetheir release.
“They’re not independent at all,” summar
ises Kimberly Marten of Barnard College at
Columbia University. P ARIS
How Russia’s Wagner Group may affect the war in Ukraine