Pete Duncan on Russian mercenaries
The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army by Jack Margolin published Reaktion Books
The unsuccessful mutiny of the Wagner Group, led by Evgenii Prigozhin, in June 2023 was probably the most significant event in Russian domestic politics since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Wagner troops were advancing rapidly towards Moscow. The road appeared open as the Russian Army let them pass. President Vladimir Putin first denounced the insurgents, pledging to punish them severely, but then persuaded Prigozhin to stand down, promising him and his fighters amnesty. Perhaps Putin’s negotiators warned Putin that the city of Moscow would be defended by the National Guard (Rosgvardiia) and the crack Dzerzhinskii and Preobrazhenskii regiments, and Prigozhin saw that his cause was hopeless.
Two months after Putin saw off the mutiny, Prigozhin and the other top leaders of the Wagner Group were killed in a plane crash, undoubtedly organized on Putin’s orders. The dictator had fulfilled his threat of revenge and broken his promise of amnesty – a warning to the West not to trust him. Prigozhin’s failure has ruled out the possibility of challenges to Putin for several years afterwards, allowing him to have Aleksei Naval’nyi murdered with impunity and securing Putin’s re-election in fake polls.
Mercenary forces frequently play an auxiliary role in imperialist states. America had Blackwater, the French have the Foreign Legion, and Britain has the Gurkhas. It is therefore unsurprising that as it expands its global role, Russian imperialism should follow suit. Jack Margolin is an independent expert on transnational crime and conflict, living in Washington. His book, The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army is the most comprehensive study yet of this military network with its propaganda and business sections attached. It is accessible, well researched, using sources in at least four languages, and meticulously footnoted.
Margolin finds the origins of the group inside the Russian state, specifically in Russian military intelligence, the GRU (now GU).Their interests coalesced with those of the former criminal Prigozhin, known to Putin since the 1990s. Together with battle-hardened veterans Prigozhin established a military organization, which both served Russia’s foreign- policy interests and sometimes also engaged in profitable economic activity in the countries of conflict. Margolin shows that sometimes Wagner entered a country on the Kremlin’s instructions, elsewhere it perceived opportunities for its private profit and persuaded Moscow of the political gains which could flow from its involvement.
Prigozhin was the main political leader of the group, and liaised with Russian state institutions, while Dmitrii Utkin was the most important military leader. It was Utkin’s call sign, Wagner, which gave the name to the army. The name wasn’t accidental; the group deployed pre-Christian Norse rune symbols and Nazi-type images in its propaganda, just as the regime itself later began to use some Nazi themes and anti-Semitism, directed against Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelens’kiy.
The book explains how the mercenary army emerged in Ukraine in 2014, in the process of the Russian annexation of Crimea, and then in the fighting in the Donbas. In this and subsequent deployments, it suited the Kremlin to claim to other states that those involved in military action were not part of the Russian armed forces but independent actors. If they suffered casualties, there would be less domestic concern then if they were official troops.
They fought in Syria in 2015, backing Assad’s regime, along with regular Russian forces, but the group also pursued its own oil interests there. Margolin details all the principal countries of Wagner’s involvement in conflicts in Africa: Sudan, Mozambique (the least successful deployment), the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali. These engagements were in support of corrupt dictatorships fighting insurgents, while often extracting minerals for themselves. From these stories emerges the high level of brutality Wagner used against local populations: the mass arrests, executions and tortures of those suspected of disloyalty. Wagner’s brutality abroad has accompanied the brutalization of Russian society itself.
Margolin shows that a significant enabler of the mercenaries was the United Arab Emirates, which provided refuelling and logistics support. He points out the role of Western countries in providing facilities for international corruption, non-transparent offshore banking and money laundering, which keep in power repressive regimes in Africa and the Middle East.
The GRU called Wagner into action in Ukraine in March 2022. Prigozhin was allowed to recruit from Russian prisons. Those who fought at the front and survived for six months – a tall order, given how they were thrown against the Ukrainians on frequently hopeless missions – were promised and received their freedom. In the meat grinders of Bakhmut and elsewhere, Wagner gradually prevailed against the Ukrainians. Prigozhin complained that the Russian defence ministry was denying the mercenaries ammunition, and launched the march on Moscow in an attempt to persuade Putin to remove the ministry’s leaders. After the failed mutiny, Putin broke up the Wagner network.