Before threatening Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin splurged cash on mercenary recruits
Russian private military contractor Wagner Group has been in business with the Kremlin for almost a decade now. As the mercenary unit became more prominent on the battleground in Ukraine, so did its chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s criticism of Russia’s military leadership.
The growing tensions reached a climax over the weekend when president Vladimir Putin’s once trusted ally dramatically decided to order his fighters to turn their sights and weapons towards Moscow—just to halt the advance before reaching a critical point of confrontation with the Russian army just 200 kilometers from the capital. A deal announced by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Prigozhin would move to Belarus and no one involved in the armed rebellion would face charges.
Private military companies (PMCs) are technically illegal under the Russian constitution. This means the group, sanctioned by the US, the EU, Australia, Canada, Japan, and the UK, allows the Kremlin plausible deniability. Wagner casualties don’t have to be formally acknowledged, their torture tactics can fly under the radar, and foreign states can contribute to their coffers to support their operations in various conflicts. Wagner has grown into a behemoth while operating in the shadows, brokering big money deals in poor conflict-ridden nations, and it’s splurging the cash on thousands of recruits.
200,000 rubles (around $3,500): How much former prisoners were promised for six months of service by Wagner, before it apparently stopped recruiting from prisons in January. The median salary offered to Russia’s military personnel ranges from 70,000 to 100,000 thousand rubles ($930-1330)
30,000: Fighters the prison recruitment campaign earned Wagner last year
5 million rubles (about $60,000): How much Wagner soldiers’ families receive when a relative is killed
500-800: How many soldiers Wagner recruits per day on average, according to Prigozhin
1,000 to 20,000: How much Wagner’s pool of soldiers in Ukraine has ballooned since the start of the invasion in February 2022
$250 million: How much companies linked to Wagner Group chief Prigozhin amassed from natural resources it got in exchange for providing security services to scores of weak and war-torn countries in Africa and the Middle East in the four years before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as per a Financial Times investigation
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal and Wagner’s millionaire owner, started the private military back in 2014. At this point, the former hot dog seller and restaurant owner, had known president Vladimir Putin for decades, even catering food for various Kremlin events.
His mercenary force has been pivotal in Russia exerting its influence around the world with fighters allegedly provide security for national leaders or warlords in exchange for lucrative payments, often including a share of gold or other natural resources.
Prigozhin, who is wanted in the US for meddling in the 2016 elections via his role as head of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, denied involvement in the group until September last year. In November, Wagner opened an office in St Petersburg. It’s been advertising jobs online—on Twitter $TWTR and Facebook $META even— looking to fill a wide array of positions, including seeking gamers who fly drones.
“Prigozhin is still there. Wagner still exists. They have a lot of arms. They’ve shown themselves to be highly capable, and the Russian Ministry of Defense have shown themselves to be incapable of defending Russian territory...It’s really important for us to reserve our judgment and see how things play out over the coming days, and in particular to watch what Prigozhin is going to say and where he’s going to pop up in the coming days.”—Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank, to NPR
2014: The Wagner Group is formed. Since the beginning, it maintains a low-key presence in eastern Ukraine.
December 2017: Wagner Group deploys hundreds of its men to put down local uprisings against the government of Sudan’s dictator Omar al-Bashir. As payment, Prigozhin-controlled M-Invest received exclusive rights to gold mining in Sudan.
February 2018: Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group attack American Special Operations troops and their Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) allies, and seize oil and gas fields in Syria to protect them for Putin’s ally Bashar Al-Assad’s government, with mercenaries earning a share of production proceeds. Prigozhin-connected oil companies like Evro Polis were offered a 25% cut of any earnings from oil and gas fields that the group freed from the Islamic State (ISIS), according to the US Treasury.
August 2018: The Central African Republic (CAR)and Russian authorities signed an agreement under which “primarily former military officers” from Russia, also called “specialists”, would train Central African Republic forces. Wagner Group arrives in the Central African Republic, trading diamond and gold mining licenses in exchange for propping up the weak Faustin-Archange Touadéra government. That month, three Russian journalists who arrived in CAR to investigated the Wagner forces are ambushed and killed.
April 2019: General Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army, wages a fight against Libya’s internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA). Hundreds of Wagner mercenaries come to back him. The group also played a part in grooming the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam as a potential candidate to run the country.
October 2019: The Mozambique government hires the Wagner Group to counter the al-Shabab insurgency. It won’t quite work out.
December 2021: The EU accuses Wagner of “serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,” and of carrying out “destabilizing activities” in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
April 2022: Frances accuses Wagner Group recruits of staging the burying of bodies in Mali to fabricate evidence of French atrocity. Hundreds of Wagner soldiers have apparently made their way intopoor and unstable west African nation as Paris winds down its nine-year-long military operation there. Wagner, is reportedly committing human rights abuses there.
January 2023: The US names the “Russian proxy” group a “transnational criminal organization.”
May 2023: Regular Russian troops replace Wagner units in the suburbs of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, but the mercenary fighters remained inside the city
June 10: Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu announces that Wagner soldiers would have to sign contracts with his ministry, effectively rendering Wagner obsolete. Obviously, that doesn’t settle well with Prigozhin, who’s been quietly preparing to push back.
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