Could Russian mercenaries conquer the world?

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Four days before the invasion of Ukraine, an eerily prescient documentary aired on France 5. Le monde en face:Wagner, l’armée de l’ombre de Poutine assiduously tracks the activities of the Russian President’s “shadow army”: the Wagner Group, which arranges military “solutions” for the Kremlin. Since the film was broadcast, members of the 6,000-strong mercenary organisation have been deployed to Ukraine. Their orders: to kill President Zelenskyy and dismember his government.

This isn’t the first time the Wagner Group has taken part in a war; it’s just the first time it’s caught the attention of UK newspapers. In France, though, it has been on the radar for years. And with good reason. The Putin regime has long had bases in the south of France (Putin himself was actually holidaying in Biarritz when Yeltsin called him with the order to take over the Kremlin). But more pressingly, in the last decade Wagner have increasingly interfered in French zones of influence in the Middle East and Africa: Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and, in January this year, Mali, the focus of France’s Operation Barkhane against Sahel jihadists.

As Alexandra Jousset and Ksenia Bolchakova’s TV documentary made plain, the key problem in understanding the Wagner Group is this: it does not officially exist. No company of that name is registered in Russia. Instead, Wagner is a grey network of Russian businesses and mercenary activity. But what is clear in the murk are two key figures.

Wagner’s founder and leader is former Russian special forces officer Dmitry Utkin, a veteran of the Chechen wars. Reputedly, Lieutenant-colonel Utkin’s military call sign was “Wagner”, after Hitler’s favourite composer (Utkin is obsessed with Nazi Germany, suggesting Putin’s “de-nazification” programme could start closer to home than the Ukraine). But the power behind the Wagnerian throne is oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is serially sanctioned by the United States, including for his financing of the troll-factory Internet Research Agency, which interfered in American elections in 2016 and 2018.

https://unherd.com/2022/03/will-russian-mercenaries-conquer-the-world/