Today, Explained - Russia’s mercenary army

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

The Wagner Group, a superviolent (and supersecretive) team of Kremlin-aligned mercenaries, is doing Vladimir Putin’s dirty work in Ukraine and around the world. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and edited by Matt Collette (who also did the fact-check) and Noel King (who also hosted). Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Remember the day Russia invaded Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky held a press conference? There was a rumor he'd fled Ukraine. Not true, he said. I'm here. My kids are here. Then he said this. The enemy has marked me as target number one, my family as target number two. Now this raised a question that has gone mostly unanswered. Who exactly was trying to kill Volodymyr Zelensky?

We know who is rumored to be attempting to assassinate him. We do. We know that early on at the start of the invasion of Ukraine, there was talk that a group of Russian mercenaries known as the Wagner Group had been assigned to take him out and to take out others in his government in Kiev. Coming up, a mercenary force more dangerous than the Russian army and a woman who has spent years tracking them. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Mercenaries, not an easy group to report on. Candace Rondeau likes a challenge. She's the director of the Future Frontlines program at New America, a public intelligence service for democratic resilience and next-gen security. And she's a professor at Arizona State. And she has answers about the mysterious Wagner Group. Who or what exactly is the Wagner Group? The Wagner Group is an amalgam of contingent, contract soldiers of fortune who operate out of Russia. They have tampered with Western democracies, conducted high-profile assassinations,

taken over strategic lands, and won wars. They're often thought of as a sort of unitary body, just one company, kind of like Blackwater. But the reality is they're actually different contingents that operate on different contracts for different parts of the Ministry of Defense and different parts of the Emergency Services Ministry of Russia. And they've been around for a really long time. Russia's had some semblance of a private military security industry

for the better part of 30 years. But what's new about the way the Wagner Group is formed is they're more mobile. They're on these short-term contracts. They rotate on and off of their official duties in the military. And they are now notorious for being involved in a lot of war crimes around the world, including in Ukraine. The group's methods have alarmed the U.N. and several NGOs, with Wagner contractors accused of carrying out executions,

rapes and torture in the course of their missions. And in Syria. Syria is where Russia boasted about testing more than 300 types of weapons. And Libya. The Wagner Group has enabled Haftar to seize control of the country's biggest oil field, which produces 300,000 barrels a day. And Central African Republic. Including mass shootings, torture, and the burning of villages.

They're thought to be run by a man named Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is very close to Vladimir Putin. But there are still some unknown facts about how they actually operate and for whom and why. You said they're often compared to Blackwater, which is a private company that protects U.S. business and military interests throughout the world. Actually, they don't sound like Blackwater at all, based on what you're telling me. It sounds more like it's a hydra. There's a bunch of different heads coming off of the body. That's totally right. Okay. Okay. This is very interesting. So that I imagine makes them even harder to identify. It's not like there's a Wagner Group uniform.

Right. There is no Wagner Group uniform. That's right. You know, there are patches, you know, that have been seen. And, you know, there are lots of social media accounts with these big bulky Russian guys sporting the kind of special forces uniforms and then a Wagner patch with the skull and crossbones slapped onto the side of their uniforms. But that's right, that it is really a Hydra-headed entity that has multiple different firms and multiple different contracts that it operates under. One very central part of how they work, though, is the Ministry of Defense, just like any other Ministry of Defense in the world, has a procurement arm that's responsible for providing logistics and support to forward troops in the field, actual official military forces. That subsidiary, that procurement arm, is responsible for hiring logistics fulfillment.

These are the folks who make sure that there's everything in place in terms of electronic warfare, everything in place in terms of long-range missiles. They're the ones who pick out targets. They're the scouts. They're the secret kind of espionage spies that are there, oftentimes not in uniform, right? They're there incognito. They like to refer to themselves even as tourists. There's a whole kind of mythology around them. So they have a lot of

culture that seems to unify them. But in actual fact, they are, you know, independent contractors that mostly work for state enterprises that are hired by the Ministry of Defense. The vast majority of the Wagner forces, as far as we know, come from smaller cities across Russia, where times are hard, where times are tough, and people are looking for money. And Wagner pays pretty handsomely. Okay, this is the organization that analysts suspect was dispatched to Ukraine to kill Volodymyr Zelensky. In early March, the UK government sanctioned the Wagner Group. Now, you've said it's speculation they're involved in an assassination plot. Do the UK sanctions convince you that it is something more than just speculation?

What it suggests to me is that the UK, like the United States, is struggling to understand what the Wagner Group is. You know, if you're going to sanction an entity, you should know what its organizational structure is. And it's pretty clear to me that if you're sanctioning the Wagner Group, you don't really fully understand how the business of contract soldiers works in Russia. I think what the West is missing is that there is literally no legal entity called the Wagner Group. There is a group of companies that are very well known to be associated with Russian mercenary operations. One very famous one, Evropolis. That company is one of several shell companies that has been used to provide salaries and travel

and airplane travel for Russian mercenaries, as well as equipment. So that has been well documented. And that, you know, that particular company, Evropolis, has been the subject of a great deal of scrutiny from U.S. authorities and has been properly sanctioned because it is an entity that does exist legally in St. Petersburg, Russia. There are lots of other companies affiliated with Evropolis, or at least believed to be linked to the Evgeny Prigozhin's empire. However, there is no Wagner Group company. There is no LLC Wagner Group, right? And so to sanction it is to kind of suggest you don't really know exactly how to get your arms around the problem. Where did this group get their name? Because based on everything you've told me,

there is not some dude named Wagner running around. This is something a little different's going on. The name came from a man named Dmitry Utkin, who is a airborne paratrooper veteran. He actually was a veteran of the Afghanistan war in the Soviet times in the late 80s. So Dmitry Utkin is sort of this legendary helicopter pilot who, you know, fought in Afghanistan, fought in Chechnya. He's like, you know, hard as nails. And there's all this mythology around him. And sometime, you know, in his his career early on he adopted the call sign

wagner now here's why i mean this is kind of weird but if you ever remember the movie apocalypse now i love the smell of napalm in the morning smells like victory there's this like really famous scene where all these American helicopters are swooping down on this open beach in Vietnam. They're getting ready to attack, right? Yes. And there's this huge kind of crushing sound of helicopters. And suddenly one of the, I think the lead helicopter pilots flips on the switch and out comes Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries really loud. Right. Right.

Sing it. It's like. Right. So this scene, you know, is kind of like the call and response of this guy, Dimitri Utkin. It's the scene that inspired his call sign and his nickname. And it also obviously speaks to this idea that he's a killer right and that he's a machine that's out to mow down whatever gets in his way so Wagner starts there it starts with this one guy who had kind of an obsession with Apocalypse Now and adopted this nickname. There seem to be suggestions that Utkin has either Nazi sympathies or Nazi leanings. Well, that's actually a really important part of why the

Rite of the Valkyries and that scene from Apocalypse Now is so important to understanding the Wagner Group mythology. Because the Rite of the Valkyries, of course, was composed by Richard Wagner, who was Hitler's favorite composer. Oh, Wagner. Yeah. Oh. That guy.

Come on, Charlie! Tell me about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who's believed to run them, own them, operate them. I mean, all of these words seem rather useless if we don't truly understand the inner workings. But who is this man who they might answer to in some sense? Yevgeny Prigozhin is a St. Petersburg native who came of age around the same time as Vladimir Putin. In fact, they came up together. He's been at Vladimir Putin's side for years. Prigozhin ended up in prison for about nine years early in the 1990s. And when he got out, he and his father launched a sausage business. They were selling hot dogs, basically sausages

in St. Petersburg. That was a very, very successful business. And were selling hot dogs, basically sausages, in St. Petersburg. It was a very, very successful business. And over time, he became a pretty good restaurateur. He went on to run a catering company servicing schools, the military, the Kremlin, and dinners for visiting U.S. presidents. And so he became very close to Putin over time and also became his personal chef. Wow. Sometime around 2008, 2009, this guy who was just a caterer basically started to win a lot of military contracts.

And it was at that point that he also started to kind of expand his logistics operations. And so some of these companies that are now associated with the Wagner Group and its operations started around that time. And that's really Yevgeny Prigozhin's origin story. And since then, he's become famously associated with all kinds of things, including the Internet Research Agency. The Mueller indictment also linked Prigozhin to a Russian disinformation campaign to discredit Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump in the 2016 election. OK, they are adjacent to lots of types of corruption. What distinguishes them as fighters? What are they known for? One thing that they're very well known for is long-range artillery operations. And so that's why they're

sometimes called the muzikanti, that is the musicians. They are essentially the orchestrators of the great thunderous artillery war that Russia has been conducting in all kinds of places, including Ukraine, but also in Syria. So that's one of the big things that they're known for, is operating these large-scale anti-Air Force missile batteries, as well as long-range military operations for artillery missiles and so forth. So they're really very key for reconnaissance missions as well. They often go undercover. They scope out locations that are important for targeting.

They are really important for assassination coups, as well as all kinds of information operations. They are essentially the kind of spooky soldiers of forward operations for Russia. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great Thank you. directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate.

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gambling or someone close to you please contact connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario hydra died with the red skull cut off head, two more shall take its place. Back with Candace Rondeau, who has spent years researching the Wagner Group. The region in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has an offensive underway, the Donbass, that was one of the places that first drew attention to Russia's mercenaries. Now, this is eight years ago. Russia invaded the Donbass, and these guys showed up to fight, but they were not wearing military uniforms. Little green men, everyone started calling, is to look at Syria. Ukraine was the

first laboratory for this kind of experimentation using Russian mercenary forces, and then Syria was the second one. And we know that there was already a presence there of Russian contract soldiers who were guarding Bashar al-Assad's regime, especially VIPs. And then, of course, the military base at Tartu, they had a presence there. So we know even before Russia became officially involved in the Syrian war in 2015, that there was already a Russian mercenary presence inside the country. But what happened after 2015 is that that presence expanded. And they became the kind of tip of the spear for training and equipping local Syrian militias to assault ISIS forces, but also rebel forces operating against the Bashar al-Assad regime. But they were much, much more important. And this is the key piece, they were very key for securing strategic oil and gas

resources in Syria. This was the centerpiece of Russia's strategy for making sure that Assad would stay in power. It's not that Syria is a big exporter of oil and gas, but the kind of oil and gas that they export is very big for Europe. And it's also really important in terms of where it sits just geographically relative to Europe, which, of course, is the biggest client and the biggest buyer of Russian oil and gas. And so that was a really important part of the Wagner Group's operations is to capture these different oil and gas fields. And you may remember this. In February 2018, Russian mercenaries tried to take over a gas field that was owned by ConocoPhillips, an American firm. Yes, I do remember that. We drove to the Conoco Oil and Gas Refinery, now a U.S. base. It's the first time reporters have been here since American

troops came under attack on this spot last month by 500 fighters, including Russian mercenaries, an international incident shrouded in secrecy. There was a big clash there between U.S. forces that were fighting ISIS on the other side of the Euphrates River, and had actually been occupying that ConocoPhillips plant. And that clash led to an estimated 200 Russian mercenary deaths just that one night in February, 2018. And that's really when the world started to wake up to this problem posed by Russian mercenaries

for the challenge to US power. And most importantly, for the risk that they might escalate conflict between Russia and the United States in a very direct way. Candace, the Russian army is being criticized right now for brutality against civilians. Wagner is kind of an elite fighting force. Are they more disciplined? By no means. These are very undisciplined soldiers. And we know that because we know more about them than

we should simply from their social media accounts. We also know more about their war crimes in the Syrian context and in the Central African Republic context and in Libya because they're big fans of posting their war crimes online. A series of videos emerged beginning in 2017, revealing one of the most disturbing incidents of the war in Syria. An unarmed man taunted and tortured by four Russian-speaking men in military fatigues. They pin him down and with a sledgehammer, they repeatedly strike his feet and his hands. There's a very famous case in 2017 involving the beheading of a Syrian national by the name of Hamdi Buta, who had come home from Lebanon, where apparently he was working as a bricklayer,

and returned to his native Syria, but got caught along the way and was press ganged into service into a Russian-run militia in Syria. He escaped but not for long. He was recaptured and that recapturing led to his on-camera torturing and dismemberment and then burning and that became a viral clip it's a four minute video clip of one of the worst crimes against humanity that I've ever seen I think most of the world would be shocked if they'd seen seen that video and weirdly that video became a meme, became literally a meme and a profile picture adopted by thousands and thousands of soldiers of fortune online, almost like a badge of honor. They're putting it online because it's sort of, to them, it's proof that they are bringing it to the enemy. You know, it's kind of like a trophy.

You know, the old days, in these really brutal wars, almost medieval, right? Somebody would lob off an ear or take a finger and then sling it around their neck like a necklace. Well, instead, they just create these viral videos and post it online and then adopt it as their profile picture. Candace, do we know who is paying these guys? The Russian state. The Russian state, not the Syrian government. It's the Russian state. Well, there are some very creative arrangements. I should say that, you know, at the bottom line, it's the Russian state because for the most part, they work on contracting for the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Emergency Services,

or for a state-run enterprise that is somehow protected by the MOD or protected by the emergency services through a legislation. And so the reality is that's the bottom line payer, but these front companies, these shell companies that I mentioned that Prigogine has contacts with and is believed to be the main owner of, they're the real payer, right, on paper. But the reality is the banker is Gazprom, the banker is, you know, Rostec, which is, of course, the arms maker for Russia. You know, the banker is, you know, all these other large scale state enterprises that the Kremlin relies on for hard currency,

for real dollars to come into the country. Let me ask you for a 3000 foot view. Vladimir Putin is trying to reclaim country. Let me ask you for a 3,000-foot view. Vladimir Putin is trying to reclaim Ukraine. He says it's part of Russia, it belongs to Russia. Is there evidence that this group is operating on Putin's behalf, on Russia's behalf, in the Middle East and Africa on the same kind of principle? Like they're there to exert Russian influence? There's no question that they're operating on Putin's behalf, on the Kremlin's behalf, and that they are doing so to project power beyond Russia's borders and to give the world the sense that Russia is everywhere and can do anything at any time and pose a threat. In some ways, the Wagner Group, even as an idea, is a

deception operation because it's not a real entity. Yet now the US, the EU, other countries around the world are chasing this fictional group that doesn't exist on paper and isn't really a legal entity. And they're throwing a lot of resources at a fiction. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Matthew Collette, and edited by Matthew Collette and me. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.