The Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian company engaged in the thriving mercenary business, is perhaps the leading private enterprise partner in global military ventures. Employing as many as 10,000 military personnel, it is headquartered in the Russian town of Molkino, right beside a military base run by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. It relies heavily on the Russian government’s approval and military infrastructure for its far-flung operations. The Wagner Group was reportedly founded in 2014 by Dmitri Utkin, a Russian military veteran who so admired Hitler that he named the mercenary organization after the führer’s favorite composer. The financial backing for the Wagner Group, however, came from Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin.
The Wagner Group provided two major advantages to the Russian government. The first was deniability. The Kremlin could deny that it was staging a military attack upon another nation. Furthermore, if anything went wrong with an operation―for example, if there were significant casualties among Russian soldiers―the Kremlin could avoid domestic political repercussions.
The Wagner Group’s armed forces have been particularly active in Africa.
In the Central African Republic, UN investigators reported that the Wagner Group’s forces tortured, raped, and murdered civilians, forcibly recruited child soldiers, and engaged in widespread looting.
In Libya, Wagner mercenaries reportedly booby-trapped civilian homes with explosives attached to toilet seats and teddy bears. According to Human Rights Watch, between 800 and 1,200 Wagner Group operatives in that country, working to install a friendly warlord in power, planted antipersonnel landmines in the suburbs of Tripoli that killed or maimed large numbers of civilians.
They have also been operating in Mozambique, Sudan, and Mali.
In Mali, where the ruling military junta employed Wagner’s armed forces to fight rebels, they swooped down in helicopters on a crowded marketplace in Moura in late March 2022, and―in command of the junta’s soldiers―seized large numbers of civilians. Over the next five days, they looted houses, held villagers captive, and executed masses of them. According to the Times, the Russians “marauded through the town, indiscriminately killing people in houses, stealing jewellery, and confiscating cellphones to eliminate any visual evidence.” Witnesses and analysts said that, by conservative estimates, the death toll in Moura was between 300 and 400 people, mostly civilians. According to a French senior diplomat in Mali, about a thousand Wagner mercenaries are stationed there in at least 15 military bases, security outposts, and checkpoints.
Mercenaries Today: The Wagner Group - CounterPunch.org
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