Wagner Group: The Private Army Fighting Putin’s War

GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, turning now to the war in Ukraine. There are new signs that the battle is creeping across the border into Russian territory. The Kremlin is calling the situation in the Belgorod region, alarming after a “massive strike wounded four people.” Now, it comes just a day after drone attacks damaged civilian buildings in the heart of Moscow. So far, Russia has relied heavily on the Wagner Group in their war efforts. But who are they and what is their relationship exactly with the Kremlin? Professor Candace Rondeaux is an expert on Putin’s so-called private army, and she joins Walter Isaacson to discuss its influence.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And Candace Rondeaux, welcome to the show.

CANDACE RONDEAUX, SENIOR DIRECTOR OF FUTURE FRONTLINES AND PLANETARY POLITICS NEW AMERICA AND PROFESSOR, CENTER ON THE FUTURE OF WAR, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY: Thanks. It’s good to be here.

ISAACSON: Let’s start with the news. There have been drone attacks in Moscow this week. Are those done by the Ukrainian military? And likewise, are the drone attacks in Kyiv being directly done directly by the Russian military?

RONDEAUX: Well, there’s a lot we don’t know about the recent drone attacks in Moscow and around that area. Certainly, there is reason to suspect Ukrainian forces of some sort are behind these attacks. Good reason to believe that, of course, is the attacks that we saw in the town of Belgorod on the border of Ukraine and Russia just recently. So, there seems to be kind of a dual track approach, which is penetrating beyond Russia’s borders deep inside as it means of sending a message to the population as well as the politicians who are responsible for the war in the Kremlin. I think we have still more to learn about exactly what happened there. There are, of course, questions about whether this is some sort of false flag operation that the Kremlin has dished up as a means of previewing or laying the political groundwork for a major mobilization. We’ve been hearing these rumors that Putin may be considering something much grander than we’ve seen in the past year, a full-scale open mobilization where conscripts as well as officers and active reservists would be called into force. This is a sign, I think, perhaps either way that there are some serious challenges for Russia in terms of their own internal security and that’s increasingly becoming a problem for the Kremlin.

ISAACSON: You are an expert on the Wagner Group, the somewhat private paramilitary group run by Yevgeny Prigozhin who seems to be allied with Putin sometimes but now breaking with Putin. Explain what that group is and what the situation is as they pull out of parts of Ukraine.

RONDEAUX: Well, the Wagner Group is, in fact, that’s right, the best way to describe them is quasi-private. They’re not really private in the kind of classic sense. A lot of people have tried to compare them to Blackwater, the American private military security company that famously acted in Iraq during the Nasiriyah (ph) Square’s crisis way back in 2007. They’re very different in the sense that they get their supplies from the ministry of defense. They get their contracts from the ministry of defense. And they mostly serve state enterprises like Gazprom, Ross-Tech, the big arm dealers. Most of the kind of flow of weapons and man and material from their missions comes from the Russian state. So, to call them private isn’t really the best way to describe them.

ISAACSON: But isn’t it true that Putin has control over them or not?

RONDEAUX: Well, certainly, Putin has control over them in the sense that the minute that the ministry of defense decides that they no longer want to supply Yevgeny Prigozhin’s forces with weapons and ammunition is the minute that the Wagner Group becomes an interoperable force basically. So, there is an interdependency between the ministry of defense and the Wagner Group.

But your question about Yevgeny Prigozhin is an important one. I think that it really requires thinking about and addressing. Is this gentleman becoming some sort of rogue force within Russia? Certainly, his very loud critiques of Sergei Shoigu, the ministry of defense, as well as Valery Gerasimov, the chief of army staff, that criticism about the lack of ammunition, the lack of support, the lack of men, the inability of the entire country to mobilize behind this war effort, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s complaints about that are in some ways well founded, I think probably from his perspective and from the soldier’s perspective.

But at the same time, he’s voicing something that Putin also would like to be able to say but is politically constrained, right? We can’t very well have the president of Russia saying, this war effort is going terrible. Who is responsible? Who is in charge of this war, when, in fact, we all know that he isn’t?

And so, Prigozhin, in a way, he aligned with what Putin would like to be on the say openly. And I think that we should always be thinking and hearing when we’re listening to Prigozhin’s critiques a little of Putin there. But I will say that his more recent comments about the risks of sort of revolutionary movement in response to the poor coordination of this war, the poor handling of this war, those warnings should be taken seriously.

We have never seen, at least, not in the last 30 years or so since the end of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan back in 1979, we will not have seen a moment in Russian history where we have potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Russian men coming back from the front broken, wounded, in some cases addicted. I think this is kind of a repeat of history and we’re in a very dangerous point in terms of the trajectory of stability in Russia going forward.

ISAACSON: There was a statement this week by him that, no, he wouldn’t participate in a coup against Putin. But instead of a strong denial he said he didn’t think he’d be able to pull it off. That seems like a frightening thing to say and he even suggested that the Russian military might do a coup against Putin. If I were Putin, I wouldn’t be feeling so comfortable with this guy anymore.

RONDEAUX: Well, that’s interesting. I have a slightly different interpretation that’s a bit counterintuitive. My sense is that that’s a warning to anybody who is thinking about trying to pull it off from Putin directly. Anybody who is thinking that maybe this is an opportune moment to come at the Kremlin with a coup with some sort of internal kind of push either from inside Moscow or outside Moscow, perhaps in St. Petersburg, I actually think that Prigozhin is basically wagging his finger and saying, don’t even think about it. And he’s saying that on behalf of Putin.

ISAACSON: You say that Prigozhin is sometimes just channeling Putin. He’s saying what Putin wishes Putin could say in public. He said, somehow nothing is working out for us in Ukraine. He said, one of the strongest in the world militaries, meaning the Russian military, has been transformed and weakened. He said that, we’re unable to defend the country and that the generals were trying to deceive Putin. Do you think that Putin believes all of that?

RONDEAUX: I think that there is a good logic for Putin now to kind of start listening to different types of messages. OK. I think the most important thing to understand is that Prigozhin is not wrong. Unfortunately, and he’s not the only one on the far-right in Russia today who is making the assessment that Russia was ill prepared for this war, that the military generals who assured Putin ahead of the invasion that everything would be

OK, somehow, they may be — misled Putin on some level. I mean, I think that assessment seems to be correct. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything to contradict that evidence right now. At the same time, you know, I think it is possible to consider that the inter factional rivalry has gotten to the point where some elements within the military and within the intelligence services feel that it is now time to express extremes. That the only way to get out of this logjam with this war, turn things around, get some sort of secured victory, whatever, even if it’s a pirate victory, you know, politically, over Ukraine, that is really critical for the psychology of the country. And I think that is what Prigozhin is messaging. He’s not the only one on the far-right who is saying these things, he is saying them louder. He is saying them more effectively. He has been, I think, a very conscientious student of sort of media relations and he understands how to plant a message and how to capture of people’s imagination. That has been his great success. And to some degree, that’s why Putin chose him in some ways as this kind of new spokesman or interlocutor for being the kind of marshal general for the war.

At the same time, it is worrying that the script, you know, that we are hearing from Prigozhin and the far-right is becoming increasingly more shrill. And that the criticism of the generals of Putin is starting to actually bite. And what that says, I think, is a certain faction, a very extreme ultranationalist faction within Russia is starting to gain the political upper hand. This doesn’t mean that Putin will suddenly now encounter a coup necessarily, but it does mean that he is deeply constrained by that element. That is to say he has to answer to those critiques and he has to find a way to counter them before the narrative gets ahead of him.

ISAACSON: If Putin has to counter the narrative of these ultranationalist, those who expressed real dismay at the Russian military, what could it — what would that mean, a full mobilization, a full invasion of Ukraine, use of tactical nuclear weapons? How far do you think they could go?

RONDEAUX: Well, unfortunately, Putin is a no-win situation. I think he was in a no-win situation before he even started this war and that’s why he started the war. Unfortunately, for — you know, I think for global stability, unfortunately, there really isn’t an offramp, right? There isn’t really a quick path to victory here. We probably won’t see the full outcome of a mobilization until sometimes next year. So, what that should tell everybody who is watching in what’s happening with Russia, with Ukraine, who’s wondering what is the impact on energy prices, inflation, everybody should be very clear that this war will not be over tomorrow, it won’t be over next year, it won’t be over, really, until there is true resolution to put down the weapons and stop the fight. And we don’t see any signs of that anytime soon. And I think whatever happens, we are very much on an escalatory path right now.

ISAACSON: The Wagner Group was founded by a soldier who had, you know, swastikas and Nazi tattoos on. And it’s often been claimed that it’s a neo-Nazi group. Is that true?

RONDEAUX: There is a very large contingent within the Wagner Group that seems to be very attracted to the idea of white supremacy. And that is a very troubling part of kind of their organizational drive. Many people have described the Wagner Group as a paramilitary, and that is true, they are paramilitary, but they are also increasingly a social movement that represents a very extreme white nationalist Panslavist mentality and ideology that Putin and others would like to see spread across Europe.

And we’ve seen in Spain, for instance, there were a few letter bombs earlier in 2022 that were attributed to the Russian imperialism (ph), which is another kind of linked to the Wagner Group. That is a very frightening pattern. In some ways, this may seem extreme now but in maybe a years’ time or two years’ time, we are looking at the early progenitor of an almost the al-Qaeda or ISIS like force in the sense of their extreme positions on social cohesion and their extreme positions on what it takes to kind of run a society. An extremely frightening prospect is the idea that that social movement would start to seep out of Russia.

And we also know that there are a lot of fans of the Wagner Group online. We’ve track that for the last several years and seen how the Wagner Group brand on social media has grown overtime largely because of that used of neo-fascist symbolism and culture that they invoke when they try and kind of bring people on board.

ISAACSON: You say the Wagner Group is somewhat like al-Qaeda in a way, that it’s a big social movement and that it is seeping out of just Ukraine and Russia into the rest of Europe. Tell me what that portends and whether or not the U.S. should therefore label it as a terrorist organization and treat it (INAUDIBLE).

RONDEAUX: Well, this has been a big debate in the White House and in Washington. I’ve been, you know, president in many of these conversations. How do we deal with the Wagner Group? If we can’t categorize them as one thing or another, what’s the best way to approach them? The one thing that’s been very encouraging, at least to me, has been that that debate has become more nuanced. There’s a recognition, certainly, within the White House and I think even other parts of Congress that declaring the Wagner Group a foreign terrorist organization will only take the United States so far in terms of policy effects.

The biggest risk there is essentially treating what is essentially an arm of the Russian state as if it wasn’t an arm of the Russian state. And that, obviously, has complications for things like war crimes accountability, for reparation, for reconstruction. If you were to treat them just as sort of just like al-Qaeda, then you would not expect al-Qaeda, of course, to own their war crimes, right, or to be responsible, you know, for destruction in a given place and time.

The reality is, the Wagner Group is a state sponsored paramilitary cartel. And so, the White House, I think rightly, has come down with the decision of categorizing them as an organized transnational crime group, right? So, basically, a mafia that’s on international steroids that operates from around the world. And I think that is probably the most appropriate way to go largely because it makes it less controversial for partner states that maybe have issues around the way we fought the war on terrorism the last 20 years, it makes it less controversial for them to go after organized crime figures or entities that help and support the Wagner Group in that context. So, at the end of the day, the best approach is to really enhance the ability of many partners around the world, beyond, you know, Russia and Ukraine and in places in Africa where we see them to really go after those supply channels, to go after those internal intermediary hubs where we know that they are very important for the deployment of weapon and men to do bad things in countries where there’s great instability.

ISAACSON: You’ve written about and described the horrible sort of war crimes and torture that the Wagner Group does, sometimes of a mayor and his whole family in Ukraine. And we also see that around the world where the Wagner Group operates. In Mali, in other places in Africa. Tell me about that and to the extent to which they are using these terrorist tactics in places like Africa.

RONDEAUX: Yes. Well, this is, of course, one of the saddest parts of this entire situation, I think. We’ve just seen countless victims of the Wagner Group in all the places that you’ve just named, especially Mali. I think that’s one that — where you just, you know, have large-scale, you know, extrajudicial killings of sometimes hundreds of people, mass graves, right? This has also been true in Ukraine for many years now, not just in this particular phase of the war that we know that Russian irregulars have been important for the use of torture, you know, illegal detention and so forth and so on.

You know, the psychology here at work, you know, it is important to remember that many of the commanders in the Wagner Group, in Russia’s irregular military forces, come from a long line of engagements where special forces, Spetsnaz, were deployed to handle problems that the conventional military couldn’t.

All of these, you know, commanders have at some on stage in their career spent, you know, years and years and years on the front lines deploying again and again to extreme crisis situations. They come back. Nobody knows what their mission is. They can’t talk about it. And in some ways, they’re social outcasts. And so, in many ways, they’re suffering from a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder. That is the reality. And I think what we are seeing in terms of the torture of civilians is not only just about sort of the indiscipline of this group but also something deeper here in terms of the psychology of the commanders. But it does also reflect on the idea of Russian military doctrine, that, you know, civilians just don’t matter. I mean, it’s just not as important as, you know, territorial control. That is where they sort of start to privilege most of their missions is going to set on what can we control, how can we control it, whatever the cost, we’re going to get it done.

ISAACSON: Candace Rondeaux, thank you so much we joining us.

RONDEAUX: Thank you.

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