The offensive intensifies. On the seventh day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, deadly strikes followed one another on Kharkiv, the country’s second city. President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced “a war crime” and stressed that the defense of Kiev, around which Vladimir Putin’s armed forces are massed, was “the priority”. The likelihood of a major assault on the capital, which the head of state refuses to leave, seemed to increase hour by hour.
For the Kremlin, Zelensky is today the man to kill. Thus, 400 mercenaries of the Wagner force would have been sent to Kiev, reports our British colleagues from Times, with the mission to eliminate Volodymyr Zelensky, his government, his cabinet, as well as the ex-boxer and mayor of the capital, Vitali Klitschko, and his brother Vladimir. But who is hiding behind the Wagner force? If it does not have an official existence, it is the unofficial armed wing of the Kremlin: it was founded and is directed by a former member of the Russian special forces, and is financed by an oligarch ultra-close to Putin.
The Kremlin Phantom Militia
No registration, no taxes, no organization chart: officially, the Wagner force does not exist. This private paramilitary company, one of Russia’s security and defense services companies (ESSD), is as powerful as it is opaque. “The Wagner group today represents the emblematic case of the Russian ESSD by its “hybrid” structure, at the crossroads of an illegal entity and associated with the Russian State”, analyzes the Foundation for Strategic Research. A term taken up by the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who declared last December that the Wagner group was an “instrument of hybrid warfare led by Russia”. The EU accuses Wagner of having “recruited, trained and dispatched private military agents to conflict zones around the world in order to fuel violence, loot natural resources and intimidate civilians in violation of international law, including international human rights law.
An obscure CV that this group of mercenaries began to fill precisely in Ukraine. Because it is there that the Wagner force was born in 2014, during the conflict launched by Putin… against Ukraine. Its fighters were deployed there and participated in the annexation of Crimea. “Ukraine is the founding act of the Wagner group,” said Sergey Sukhankin, a researcher at the Jamestown Foundation, in an interview with Foreign Policy. If Moscow denies any link, this phantom and predatory militia is the unofficial armed wing, and intervenes in many conflict zones. The EU and France in particular thus accuse him of acting on behalf of the Kremlin where he does not want to appear. Wagner thus operated in the Donbass, but also in Syria, where his mercenaries formed the army of Bashar al-Assad. In recent years, while maintaining a presence in Ukraine, it has deployed to several African countries, including Mali, to carry out what the EU has described as “destabilizing actions”.
At the head of Wagner, a former member of the Russian forces, nostalgic for the Third Reich
At the command of this force, Dimitri Outkin, a former officer of the Russian military intelligence service (GRU), decorated by Vladimir Putin in person, who gave him the Order of Courage for his “feats of arms” in Syria. Utkin not only leads this militia but he is its founder, and baptized it with his own nickname. Because the man is nostalgic for the Third Reich. Recognizable by his shaved head and his Nazi tattoos, Utkin took “Wagner” as his nom de guerre while still serving in the Russian army, in direct reference to Hitler’s favorite composer. Before assigning it to his militia.
From now on, the veteran responds to the nickname of “his black Majesty”, rather fitting with the disastrous missions of his group. Last December, the Council of the EU imposed several restrictive measures against Utkin and several of his Wagner collaborators. He was thus accused of being “responsible for serious human rights violations committed by the group, including acts of torture, as well as extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and assassinations”, reports the Official Journal of the European Union.
Prigozhin’s cash machine, “Putin’s cook”
According to Ifri, the Wagner force had 2,500 mercenaries at the end of 2020, ten times more than when it was created, and could have up to 5,000 today. And to finance this force which would pay each of its men around 3,500 euros per month, the cash machine would be powered by the billionaire Evgueni Prigojine, who does not really have the profile of the ideal son-in-law. Before amassing the billions, Prigojine first spent his youth living off petty theft, before receiving a twelve-year prison sentence in 1981 for “robbery, fraud and incitement of minors to prostitution”. On his release, the man who would become an oligarch launched himself into the restaurant business and took the path of fortune and influence by opening the New Island at the end of the 1990s, a discotheque restaurant boat for well-stocked wallets, which welcomes the elite of Saint-Petersburg. This is where, once elected to lead Russia, Vladimir Putin, conquered by the place, will take his counterparts, the Frenchman Jacques Chirac, then the American George W. Bush to dinner.
Nicknamed “Putin’s cook”, Evgueni Prigojine has made a place for himself in the circle of those very close to the Russian president. Prigojine serves, with its catering company, the meals of the Kremlin, but also those of the schools and the Russian army. Juicy contracts which made his fortune, of which he devoted a portion to the financing of the Wagner force. Although he denies any connection with this group, he has been subject to sanctions imposed by the EU.
And that’s not all: the oligarch was also implicated in the United States for having financed “the troll factory”, a company which carried out propaganda campaigns on the Internet, for which he was charged by Prosecutor Mueller as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential campaign, won by Donald Trump. Prigozhin is also on the list of people suspected of being involved in the poisoning in Russia of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny.