Intelligence

Wagner Group
Private Military Company ‘Wagner’, a.k.a.
Chastnaya Voennaya Kompaniya ‘Vagner’, a.k.a.
Chvk Vagner, a.k.a.
PMC Wagner, a.k.a.

Vagner Group in Ukraine

It was supposed to be Russia’s secret weapon for a swift and efficient victory in Ukraine. But in the year since Wagner Group mercenaries were dispatched to Kyiv to hunt down Ukraine’s president, what was once an elite murder squad has become a group of mostly ill-trained and unequipped convicts who today serve as “cannon fodder”.

On February 27, 2022, just four days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian intelligence services said they had uncovered an unnerving plot. A special operations unit, consisting of some 400 mercenaries belonging to private Russian military company the Wagner Group, had been deployed to Kyiv to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his cabinet. In all, 23 names were on the hit list, including Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko.

“The mercenaries were very dangerous at that point in time because they were very well equipped, skilled and experienced, with most of them having been flown in from the group’s other missions in Syria and Mali and so on,” explained Karen Philippa Larsen, a global security researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and one of the few academic experts in the world dedicated to studying the Wagner Group.

Although the group had remained in Ukraine after 2014, Russia’s invasion of the country last year marked a huge influx of the specially trained mercenaries. According to Ukraine intelligence, between 2,000 and 3,000 Wagner contractors entered the country in January 2022 – some two months before Russia launched its invasion, on February 24. “A month before that, in December, we had started seeing on different channels that the Wagner Group was recruiting again. Back then, no one really knew what the recruitments were for, but then the invasion came,” Larsen recalled.

Since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict, Prigozhin publicly feuded with generals and Kremlin officials, accusing them of insufficient zeal in prosecuting the campaign against Kyiv. He reserved his harshest criticism for Russia’s Ministry of Defence, which he accused of trying to take credit for Wagner’s achievements on the battlefield. Prigozhin was one of Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu’s most fiery critics, insisting that his own men are far more effective than the regular army.

In 2014, as Moscow was annexing Ukraine's Crimea region and stoking a separatist war in eastern Ukraine, a Soviet and Russian army officer named Dmitry Utkin and others began forming paramilitary units to fight in Ukraine's Donbas. PMC Wagner recruited and sent soldiers to fight alongside separatists in eastern Ukraine. When fighting broke out in 2014 in eastern Ukraine between the pro-Moscow separatists and Ukrainian government forces, Russia limited its presence there to clandestine troop deployments and funding and training for the rebels. Former Russian soldiers were recruited to join the separatists by a shadowy company called the Wagner Group, whose founder, Lt. Col. Dmitriy Utkin, came under US Treasury Department sanctions for the firm's actions in Ukraine.

The mercenary groups worked hand-in-hand with the Russian military. They trained at a military facility near Rostov-on-Don and were commanded by experienced officers from the special services and the Defense Ministry. By June 2014, the first groups of about 250 mercenaries each had crossed the border into Ukraine. "They were basically company-sized tactical groups," one commander said. "There were no private military contractors then, but people were paid on time."

The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on 20 June 2017 reinforced existing sanctions on Russia by designating or identifying a range of individuals and entities involved in the ongoing conflict under four Executive orders (E.O.s) related to Russia and Ukraine. As a result of these action, any property or interest in property of the designated persons in the possession or control of U.S. persons or within the United States must be blocked. Additionally, transactions by U.S. persons involving these persons were generally prohibited.

PMC Wagner was being designated for being responsible for or complicit in, or having engaged in, directly or indirectly, actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine. Utkin is being designated for being responsible for or complicit in, or having engaged in, directly or indirectly, actions or policies that threaten the peace, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine; and for acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, PMC Wagner. Prigozhin was sanctioned in 2016 by the US, which cited his companies' Defense Ministry contracts related to the conflict in Ukraine.

On 01 April 2022, horrifying images started to emerge from the small city of Bucha, some 25 kilometres northwest of Kyiv. Russian forces had retreated from Bucha a day earlier, after an almost month-long occupation, and after they left, bodies of unarmed civilians were found strewn across the city. Many of them were found with their hands bound behind their backs, while others had been either mutilated or burnt. According to local authorities, 419 people, including nine children, were killed during the occupation. Residents have since also recounted harrowing accounts of both torture and rape. Although Russian troops were quickly pegged as the main culprits, members of the Wagner Group played a key role in the atrocities too. They weren’t alone in committing them, but they were there as well, and it definitely shows how brutal they can be.

Shortly after Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, Syrian mercenaries went there. Up to 20,000 mercenaries from the Wagner Group, as well as from Syria and Libya, have fought alongside Moscow's forces in Ukraine, a European official said in April. Many Syrians did not have a say in where they were sent and received only a fraction of the money promised by recruiters, according to data from the Center for Justice and Responsibility in Syria, together with Syrians for Truth and Justice, in May 2019. Observers learned of cases of non-payment of compensation following the deaths of Syrian mercenaries in Libya and the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan.

The Wagner Group's recruiting methods have been compared to those of the Islamic State (IS) , which included using money to lure impoverished recruits and searching for recruitable youth online. Initially, the main means of ISIS were promises of adventure and utopian visions. But after the fall of the IS "caliphate" in March 2019, the group, like the Wagnerites, took advantage of the desperate situation of their recruits. In both cases, these unfortunate recruits were immediately sent to the front, where they were threatened with death every minute.

Volunteers weere recruited in Russian prisons. In addition to money, Wagner promised freedom and the removal of a criminal record upon returning home. In the beginning of the summer 2022, those watching the group suddenly noticed a remarkable shift in its recruitment strategy. Instead of posting its usual social media ads targeting former military professionals, it had started recruiting in Russian prisons.

In a video leaked on the Telegram messaging app, Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close Putin ally who had long been rumoured to be the de facto leader of the Wagner Group, was seen addressing inmates and offering them a pardon in exchange for six months of service with the company in Ukraine – if, of course, they managed to survive. “This marked a big shift and really affected the group’s make-up,” Larsen said, pointing to the fact that out of 50,000 Wagner fighters estimated to have been deployed to Ukraine since the start of the war, at least 40,000 have come from Russian prisons.

"PMC Wagner" declares that it does not take drug addicts, however, it takes people convicted of crimes related to drug trafficking. Well, where to go - this is a third of the prisoners in Russia. And it doesn't take people convicted of crimes against sexual integrity and pedophilia. And this is also understandable why: not in order to prevent outrages in Bucha, but because these are articles stigmatized in a Russian prison. People who have committed crimes that fall under these criminal articles are also considered separated among Russian prisoners and convicts.

Wagnerites were trying to recruit those who have a sentence of up to 10 years or parole is approaching. These are mainly those convicted of robbery, theft, robbery, armed robbery and causing grievous bodily harm.

In contrast to original Wagner Group members, these convicts were just given a few weeks of training – which barely gives you enough time to familiarise yourself with a gun – and they were not at all as well equipped. The convicts – viewed by more experienced mercenaries as underdogs – were then sent on the “most dangerous missions in the most dangerous places” of Ukraine, in particular to the frontline in Ukraine’s east, in places like Bakhmut, which has widely been described as a “meat grinder”. They started sending them out on the field to see where the Ukrainians were shooting from, using them as cannon fodder.

At the end of September 2022, Prigozhin, who had long denied his ties to the group and even sued journalists for reporting such claims, finally acknowledged he was indeed the original founder and owner of the Wagner Group. Prigozhin’s sudden change of heart might be explained by the fact that he wanted to give the Wagner Group an official voice – helping to claim its proper recognition – but also as a way to position himself on the Russian political scene as a “can-do” military strongman. By then, the Wagner Group had started collecting a growing number of victories, while the Russian army was doing the exact opposite. A bitter rivalry began to take shape, in which Prigozhin and his men openly, and more and more fervently, accused the army and its Moscow leadership of incompetence.

In November 2022, the group’s ruthless culture was underscored even further when a video emerged showing Wagner fighters executing a deserter with a sledgehammer. Commenting on the brutal video, Prigozhin called the man a traitor and said: "a dog receives a dog's death".

In December and January, the Wagner Group’s growing rivalry with the Russian army came to head in the battle for Soledar. This is where the group is believed to have lost the bulk of its force after staging several of its now notorious human wave attacks. “A suicide mission,” Larsen said, noting that it was the sheer number of fighters running into the line of fire, rather than any military skill, which finally resulted in the city finally falling into Russian hands.

On January 11, the Wagner Group was first to claim it had captured Soledar, but the statement received no support from Moscow. A day later, the Russian defence ministry claimed its forces had taken the city, without mentioning the involvement of the Wagner mercenaries who had spearheaded the assault and broken through enemy lines. The move infuriated Prigozhin who publicly lashed out against the Russian defence ministry, accusing it of trying to "steal the victory".

But the Wagner Group was paying a steep price for its battleground successes: as many as 40,000, or 80 percent, of its fighters in Ukraine have either been killed, deserted or surrendered – most of them in the first months of 2023. There were only around 10,000 of them still fighting. Wagner deaths are conveniently not included in Russia’s official statistics on losses because the fighters are not part of "the official structure".

At the beginning of February 2022, the Wagner Group announced – despite its huge shortage of fighters – that it had stopped its prison recruiting. According to Larsen, this may have come on the direct orders of the defence ministry, which is the group’s main supplier and therefore has the power to squeeze its resources should it see fit. Russian laws were changed recently to allow the army to recruit people with criminal records. Now that the Russian army itself had started recruiting former and even current prisoners, its need for the Wagner Group’s convict fighters was much less acute.

In a seven-minute audio message published on 20 February 2023 by his press service, an apparently angry and emotional Prigozhin said he was required to “apologise and obey” to secure ammunition for his fighters. Speaking at times with a raised voice and occasionally swearing, he said: “I’m unable to solve this problem despite all my connections and contacts.” Prigozhin said Russia’s military production was now sufficient to supply the forces fighting at the front and the supply difficulties his fighters were experiencing were the result of conscious decisions. “Those who interfere with us trying to win this war are absolutely, directly working for the enemy,” he said.

“This is one of the places where the bodies of those who have died are gathered,” Prigozhin told a prominent Russian military blogger in an interview. “These are guys who died yesterday because of so-called [artillery] ‘shell hunger’. Mothers, wives and children will get their bodies. There should be five times less [dead]. Who is guilty that they died? The guilty ones are those who should have resolved the question of us getting enough ammo.”

In his audio message, Wagner’s chief repeatedly accused the Russian defence ministry this week of deliberately starving his fighters of munitions in what he called a treasonous attempt to destroy the mercenary group. Prigozhin said the unspecified individuals he blamed for the shortage of ammunition were “eating breakfast, lunch and dinner off golden plates” and sending their relatives on holiday to Dubai, a popular destination for the Russian elite.

"The Russian Defense Ministry commented on the excited statements that appeared on certain information resources about allegedly blocking the supply of ammunition to volunteers of assault detachments performing combat missions to liberate the city of Artemovsk in the Donetsk People's Republic," the military department noted. As specified in the Ministry of Defense, the command of the joint group of forces within the framework of the special operation pays "special constant and priority attention to providing volunteers and military personnel of assault units with everything necessary."

A Wagner-linked source reportedly quoted a senior Wagner commander with the callsign “Marx,” who stated that 78,000 Wagner fighters fought in Ukraine (49,000 of whom were convicts), and that that Wagner had suffered 22,000 killed-in-action and 40,000 wounded-in-action as of Wagner’s capture of Bakhmut on 20 May 2023. These figures — if accurate — indicate that the Wagner Group was likely combat ineffective after fighting in Bakhmut and that the force suffered a 79.5 percent overall casualty rate and a 28.2 percent death rate. Marx reportedly stated that 25,000 Wagner fighters are currently alive and that 10,000 of them are in Belarus and the remaining 15,000 are resting, presumably in Russia.