For Russians, the name Wagner no longer reminds them of the famous 19th century composer of The ring of the Nibelung. Instead, they associate the name with the Wagner Group, a mercenary company that has committed atrocities in Ukraine and is tied to the neo-imperial ambitions of President Vladimir Putin.
This structure of mercenaries sees itself as a rival to the Russian Armyan institution that its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, openly mocks for its countless failures in the war.
It has its origins in the “Slavic Corps”, a Russian private mercenary unit that was formed in 2013 as part of Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war. In those days, its effectiveness on the battlefield was so poor that when it encountered the Islamic State, it was crushed and forced to retreat. Shortly after, members of the group were recruited to invade and help annex Crimea in 2014.
See the special: Ukraine, a year of a war without truce.
That was the year that Prigozhin formally incorporated the Wagner Group. Its name comes from the call sign of one of its commanders, former GRU Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Utkin. It is rumored that Utkin himself chose the name as a tribute to Hitler’s admiration for Richard Wagner. In any case, the “Slavic Corps” was renamed the “Wagner Private Military Company” in order for the group to participate in the initial assault on Ukraine.
After committing mass atrocities in several African countries (including Mali and the Central African Republic), where it financed itself by exploiting the continent’s natural resources, the Wagner Group managed to lower its profile for a brief period. In the years before the invasion of Ukraine, hardly anyone was monitoring the behavior of the structure. It was not until May 2022 that Human Rights Watch published a comprehensive report on Wagner’s crimes in the Central African Republic.
Similarly, before the group’s military operations and war crimes in Ukraine began to draw international attention, little attention was paid to its close ties to Putin. Until February 24, 2022, anyone who denounced the terrorist methods of the Putin regime was dismissed as alarmist or even dangerous. The highest priority was, and to some extent still is, avoid “provoking” Putin or “crossing any red lines” that could lead to an “escalation”.
(Read more: I left my country and my son: he could not flee because they needed him for the war)
But Putin’s personal ties to the Wagner Group were already well known, thanks to investigations by Russian journalists. Putin awarded medals to Wagner’s commanders, including Uktin, during an official ceremony in 2016. At the time, the fontanka.ru news agency had already reported that the group was led by Prigozhin, an ex-convict who received a 12-year prison sentence in 1981 on charges of robbery and assault.
Prigozhin has long been known for overseeing a transnational operation with business not only in the Central African Republic but also in Syria and Sudan. According to Novaya Gazeta, the Wagner Group is financed by the budgetary funds of these countriesand the value of government tenders received by their companies doubled, between 2020 and 2022, to US$1.1 billion.
Restalinization
Like the war in Ukraine and Putin’s previous imperial adventures in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, the rise of the Wagner Group and its role in the commission of terrorism by commercial power, it is consistent with the political development of Russia under Putin. The regime is based on the corrupt control of privatized capital and commercial interests, and Wagner’s operations embody the two trends that have come to define it: restalinization and neo-medievalism.
(Also: Ukraine: chronicle of an announced war that is far from seeing an end)
Re-Stalinization has been a cornerstone of Putin’s propaganda from the beginning of his administration. He has always tried to exalt his regime around the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in the “Great Patriotic War.”
This ultra-patriotic propaganda has become increasingly important as Russia’s economy has deteriorated. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Putin has had to deflect public complaints about the difficulties created by his own mismanagement by appealing to an idealized past and trying to reignite imperial ambitions. In the process, he has ordered an ever deeper militarization of society.
Over the years, monuments to Stalin have been erected throughout Russia. Recently, to commemorate the 1942-1943 Battle of Stalingrad, the city unveiled a bust and temporarily restored the wartime name of Volgograd. In his speech at the ceremony, Putin brought up his usual arguments about the importance of historical memory.
The Putin regime has relied on such demonstrations for 20 years. Numerous state-sponsored movies and productions have glorified the Great Patriotic War and personally praised Stalin. For example, the primetime television series Smersh celebrates Stalin’s secret police and his “heroism” during World War II. Created in 1942 to “kill spies,” SMERSH terrorized soldiers and civilians alike, especially in occupied eastern Europe.
(More: Why Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine Hit His Pocket in Colombia?)
war prisons
Prigozhin’s recruitment of Russian prisoners convicted of violent crimes is another throwback to the golden age of Stalinism. The use of prisoners as cannon fodder dates back to World War IIwhen the Red Army formed penal military units (Shtafbaty) from Gulag detainees.
One of the jobs of SMERSH, an umbrella organization of three counterintelligence agencies, was to take up positions behind these unreliable regiments and shoot the “fleeing cowards.” Then, after Stalin signed his infamous “Not a Step Back” decree on July 28, 1942, the regular regiments were treated in the same way. Anyone deemed a “panic monger” was to be shot.
Russian human rights activists have confirmed that the Wagner Group is copying the same strategy in Ukraine. Andrei Medvedev, a recently defected Wagner Group commander, reported that conscripts and prisoners who refuse to fight are being executed in front of the new arrivals, a tactic straight out of the Stalinist Red Army playbook.
According to a Ukrainian commander, Wagner’s soldiers use prisoners to “advance under fire littering the ground with their bodies.” To distract from Russian war crimes, Putin blames the Ukrainians and accused them of shooting “their own people in the back.”
(Keep reading: ‘Ukraine has been able to resist thanks to international aid’)
Soviet security authorities have always viewed criminals as objects that could be used to suppress political dissent. Putin and his cronies (many of whom served in the KGB) are no different. In the recruitment of prisoners, the Wagner Group has searched for career criminals, offering a presidential pardon to those who survive six months on the front lines.
According to Russian human rights activists, most of the convicts who appeared in a recent photo with Prigozhin they are felons convicted of murder and other violent crimes. But these do not pose a threat to Russian society. General Andrei Gurulev of the State Duma Defense Committee has expressed confidence that the convicted ex-mercenaries will make good politicians. If some win seats in parliament, they will simply join the ranks of those with a record.
The ease with which Russian society has accepted the war in Ukraine (and the return of inhumane methods) testifies to the success of re-Stalinization. If a considerable part of the population did not yet support the regime, it would not have been possible to mobilize 300,000 more recruits for an absurd war that has already generated 200,000 Russian casualties.
neo-medieval villains
Re-Stalinization takes us to the other end of Putin’s political project: neo-medievalism. Putin has increasingly mined the Russian Middle Ages to offer the closest he has to a vision of the future. Despite the fact that the Russian Constitution and Criminal Code criminalize the participation in or financing of mercenary forces (abroad and in Russia), neo-medieval private armies, such as the Wagner Group, fight for the interests of their warlords and they ignore the Constitution.
(Also: ‘Situation in Ukraine is a manifestation of the European security crisis’)
By putting criminals above the law, as Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina did, these structures embody a special legal regime that denigrates individual rights of ordinary citizens and shows the arbitrary government that has existed in Russia for more than 20 years.
While in modern states the authority to punish belongs to public institutions, the Putin regime privatizes it, allowing warlords to use their armies for whatever purposes they see fit and giving them political muscle.
The question is, of course, how long Putin will be able to control his villains. Given Prigozhin’s increasing attacks on military officials, including his recent accusation of “treason” against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, this may be quite an urgent matter.
After all, Prigozhin is not alone. Besides Wagner, Russia’s private armies include teams like Putin’s semi-private National Guard and Kadyrov’s Chechen National Guard, as well as the military wings of various agencies, such as the GRU’s private army, “Redut”. In Moscow, the so-called Sobyanin regiment (named after the mayor, Sergei Sobyanin) began recruiting mercenaries in July 2022.
While US critics have tried to compare the Wagner Group to US private military contractors such as Academi (formerly Blackwater), the Wagner Group’s enthusiastic involvement in carrying out atrocities against Ukrainian civilians It clearly puts it in a league of its own.
Prigozhin himself has contributed to this impression with an “unverified video” of a “traitor” being executed with a sledgehammer, an obvious imitation of public executions recorded and broadcast by Islamic State. In another video, Prigozhin offers the European Parliament a bloodstained mallet with the Wagner logo as a “gift” to the European Parliament. Sergei Mironov of the Just Russia-For Truth party recently announced that he had received a similar gavel.
(Also read: ‘I see no signs that the conflict in Ukraine could end anytime soon’)
Definitely, the growth of mercenary armies is a serious problem for any democracy. But groups like Academi do not exist to terrorize civilians or shoot army recruits in the back, and US politicians do not endorse any alleged abuses they may have committed in war zones.
After a year of war and atrocities, the Western sanctions against the Wagner Group are still, unfortunately, not too harsh. The days of worrying about “provoking” Putin are long gone, however. Putinism is a criminal enterprise that poses a great threat to world peace and democracy. The international community must put an end to it, which will ultimately require defeating all of Russia’s armies.
#Vladimir #Putins #Dogs #War