Everything you need to know about Wagner, the ‘shadow army’ behind Putin uprising
There were about 40 American soldiers left at the dusty outpost in eastern Syria, and, with every hour, they were watching the enemy advance. These were pro-Assad forces on the horizon, hundreds of them, here to seize territory from US-backed Kurdish fighters. And yet, when the Americans embedded with the Kurds eavesdropped on the enemy’s radio waves that day in February 2018, they heard Russian voices.
From seizing diamond mines in Africa to prowling the streets of Kyiv with alleged orders to murder Ukraine’s president, Wagner has been turning up more and more in conflicts across the globe as Russia seeks to expand its influence. Then in 2022, the group began propping up Vladimir Putin’s, recruiting from Russian prisons to continue “meat grinder” campaigns in the east.
Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin finances Wagner Group which has deployed mercenaries to Ukraine, Syria and across Africa.Officially, Wagner doesn’t exist. Mercenaries – contractors who fight wars for money rather than as part of an army – aren’t legal in Russia .
In Ukraine, they had been fighting in large numbers, reportedly “rented out” as a strike team by Russian army units and even acting as a regular part of the military. Using mercenaries means Russia can distance itself from Wagner atrocities – the group often do the Kremlin’s dirty work – and it helps quell fears at home of Russian soldiers returning in body bags.
“Of course, for an organisation like this that operates in the shadows, it suits them for there to be speculation about who they are, their size, where they are,” MacLeod says. “That adds to the mystique.”Still, journalists and international investigators such as MacLeod have pieced together a picture of how Wagner operates.
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