Uncertainty and confusion over Putin's authority now
front and center following this weekend of
rebellion in Russia.
Putin had one of his worst weekends ever.
This act, one of a five act play.
And is there more to come?
The future of Wagner Group and its mercenary leader,
Yevgeny Prigozhin, remains murky following
the armed mutiny against the Russian state.
Until recently, Russia denied the existence of
Wagner. There was an.
Incentive to not make the footprint of the
organization too big.
But over time, that sort of went out of the window.
The Wagner Group's activity isn't limited to
war torn Ukraine.
These are.
Mercenaries. And, you know, they sell their
services to people who are willing and able to
pay them.
So the big countries where they're operating today
are Mali and Central African Republic.
They also operate in Libya and Sudan.
But those are kind of smaller deployments.
Securing access to lucrative resources
appeared to be a key motivator of Wagner Group
business operations there.
In diamonds, gold, forestry, coffee and
alcohol and probably other sectors that we
don't know about yet.
If we're talking about Syria.
There was certainly other business related things,
such as agreements to liberate oil fields, quote
unquote, in exchange for revenue cuts.
Once the war in Ukraine reached a new stage with
the full on invasion by Russia in 2022, Vladimir
Putin's failure to rapidly take over the
country led to a need for more troops.
He tried to outsource a lot of the burden of
fighting the war to Wagner, but.
Heavy losses led to a drop in recruiting standards.
What was once an organization made up of
former Russian military members started to take on
more employees without a military background,
including convicts.
Heavy fighting continued to take its toll, and
Wagner's leader bemoaned the lack of support from
the Russian state on the front lines in Ukraine.
The military increasingly saw the Wagner group of
mercenaries as a threat.
Questions remain If Wagner started the armed mutiny
as a way to force a contract negotiation with
the Kremlin, or if this was a desperate ploy by
Prigozhin to stay relevant in the world of
Russian power politics.
But whatever happens next could have big
implications for Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.
How did it get to this point?
Right. Months of tension between the head of
Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the Russian
military came to a head in late June.
A private Russian military organization is accusing
the Russian military of launching strikes on its
training camps and killing troops.
After marching on Rostov on Don.
He sent an armed convoy towards Moscow that caused
Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare
an armed mutiny was underway in a video
statement. The mercenary force ended its rebellion
after the leader of Belarus, Alexander
Lukashenko, brokered a deal with Yevgeny
Prigozhin. The details of this deal and the long
term effects remain unknown.
Over the longer term.
I think that this probably has done some
damage to Putin politically.
And the murky missions Wagner is involved in
across the globe are likely another factor in
this brokered deal. These operations bring in huge
sums of money.
It's in the millions and billions of dollars
definitely moving towards the billions.
The issue is that it's it's very hard to kind of
kind of get an exact idea just because of the
illicit channels that that Wagner is using in
order to export things.
And also the number the sheer number of shell
companies that they use, because not only do they
change their names in the businesses that they're
running, but all of the companies that they then
export out of also have shell names and then they
use a variety of middle traders.
A camp has been reportedly laid out in Belarus, which
could end up housing Wagner members who are not
absorbed into the Russian military. But what comes
next for the group and its leaders has yet to
play out. Private military companies are
nothing new. Governments have hired mercenaries
throughout history to provide security guard
elites and fight in wars during the global war on
terror. The US used private military companies
and security contractors extensively.
Blackwater was sent in to fulfill specialist
functions. It wasn't set in to just become a force
multiplier, you know.
Yes, to some degree.
Russia was imitating a phenomenon that it first
saw in the West.
It did so in a in a highly distorted, much
more disorganized, much more unscrupulous way.
Hal Wagner operates in countries such as the
Central African Republic are what sets it apart
from other modern PMCs.
Wagner group will get involved in these
countries at the same time that the Russian
state is involved in large kind of military
assistance programs.
Often they kind of get into these side operations
that are more building their own business.
So basically a lot of resource extraction
projects, which is often how they finance
themselves or how they kind of make economic
agreements with the with the state in order to stay
in these countries.
Having an organization that isn't officially
under Russian government control has open doors to
agreements that otherwise would likely remain
closed.
The resources that they generally go after are
precious metals.
That's that's the biggest one because it's
relatively easy to export and relatively easy to
smuggle. We can surmise that a lot of it is in
fact going back to the Russian state.
So in that way it's it's helping the Russian state
at a time where their precious metal reserves
are incredibly low.
The core of Wagner's troops included the battle
hardened personnel who gained their expertise by
serving in the Russian military. As the war in
Ukraine wore on, Wagner losses began to mount, and
the group was forced to turn to convicts to
bolster numbers. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin
found himself with a manpower shortage in the
regular Russian military.
He did not want to impose martial law.
He did not want to impose a widespread conscription
on the Russian people.
So he tried to wage this war on the cheap, so to
speak.
The combination of well-trained soldiers and
convicts with nothing to lose created an
organization that at times was effective on the
battlefield. But high losses and a new strategy
by Russia changed the dynamic for Wagner.
Late last summer, early last fall, Putin bit the
bullet, so to speak, and imposed a partial
conscription.
This new wave of mobilization and a change
to Russian strategy made Wagner less critical to
Putin's war in Ukraine.
And I think that's part of the reason why the regular
Russian military finally said to Wagner, okay,
enough. Your fighters are going to have to sign
contracts with us because they weren't as dependent
on Wagner today as they were a year ago.
Wagner's mutiny may stand out as a warning to other
countries that outsource war fighting to private
companies. But it's also possible that Wagner
emerges from this critical juncture in an
entirely new position than before.
One of the challenges that the Russian government has
is that you don't build up an organization like
Wagner overnight. So if they do plan to liquidate
the whole organization, which I'm skeptical of, it
would be a very costly, cumbersome process that
I'm not sure the Russian state wants to take on
right now.
As for Prigozhin and his senior commanders, my
guess is no.
They are not willing to be subordinate to the
regular Russian military.
There's no love between them and the Russian high
command. There's a great deal of of animosity.
Whatever happens to Wagner, it's unlikely that
there will be a decrease in demand for mercenaries
around the globe.
You're going to have a scenario where you see a
lot more of these groups popping up that look like
Wagner. They could be state sponsored.
They could not be. But sort of the expansion of
of the the mercenary phenomenon on the African
continent, it could be very problematic because
they tend to commit a lot of human rights
violations.
As immune as Vladimir Putin has seen during his
time in power. It's possible this armed mutiny
could create cracks in the facade.
Putin is scheduled to face a presidential election in
March of 2024.
That's only a few months from now.
And I'm relatively certain that at least some
Russian elites are wondering whether he is
the horse to back in that election campaign or not.
I think a lot of this is going to depend on what
happens in the battlefield.