Inside Russia’s Wagner Group: “Maximum Horror”

WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you. And Joshua Yaffa, welcome to the show.

JOSHUA YAFFA, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, THE NEW YORKER: Thanks for having me.

ISAACSON: You got this great piece in the New Yorker about the Wagner Group, the mercenary army that was sort of loyal to Putin, but then helped lead a rebellion against him. Kind of unclear where their loyalties are, but there’s been big news this week that both the Lithuanian president and the Polish Prime Minister are worried that the Wagner Group is now trying to destabilize NATO by going to the border of Poland. Let me read you something that the Polish Prime Minister said. “The Wagner Group is extremely dangerous, and units of this group are deployed on NATO’s Eastern Flank to destabilize it.” What is the Wagner Group doing and why?

YAFFA: I think it’s important to remember that the Wagner Group owing to its leader Yevgeni Prigozhin, is oftentimes as much an information or PR operation as it is a military one. We saw that at certain points in the war in Ukraine over the winter and spring. And really that is intrinsically tied to Prigozhin’s own biography. He, after all, among other things, was the creator of the internet research agency, the so-called St. Petersburg Troll Farm, that among other things caused mischief online and was part of the Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election. So, trolling both metaphorically – in some ways, quite literally – the West is very much part of Prigozhin’s MO and getting Western leaders societies’ militaries upset, worried, guessing about what Wagner might do, is exactly part of Prigozhin’s larger game. I don’t necessarily think a Wagner incursion into Europe, especially into NATO territory, is all that likely in the near term.

By most estimates, there are several thousand, at most, Wagner fighters who have now relocated to bases in Belarus. I don’t think that’s a realistic contingent, just given their size and their armaments that could take on NATO forces in the Baltic states, in Poland or elsewhere, that would essentially be a suicide mission for Wagner were they actually to engage NATO forces, but keeping NATO on edge, keeping NATO countries guessing, worried, having to devote their own resources to preemptively protecting against what might be a Wagner threat, even an unlikely one. All of that very much fits with Prigozhin and Russia’s own strategy of behavior over the years.

ISAACSON: You say Prigozhin’s strategy and Russia’s strategy, are they still aligned?

YAFFA: That’s one of the many million dollar questions surrounding Wagner. I’d say. There’s not just just one of those, but several are trying to understand the relationship between Wagner and the Russian state, past, present, and future. It – even with the hindsight with, with the help of hindsight, looking back at Wagner operations in Syria, Africa, and of course in Ukraine over the last year, it’s not even always clear when we actually have some data to look at how exactly Wagner is connected to the Russian state. How exactly are they carrying out Kremlin orders, or are they following their own interests and imperatives, especially say, commercial ones and how that might work in the future, I think is even more of a mystery.

Clearly, Putin was displeased, to put it mildly by the mutiny or insurrection – whatever term you, you might prefer – that Wagner mounted, and Prigozhin specifically, in late June, would like to put Wagner on a tighter leash, have a little more hierarchical control, bring them into the so-called vertical of power as the Putin-era hierarchy of centralized power is often referred to. But that’s tricky because in Wagner’s very DNA is an element of autonomy and deniability. What made Wagner Wagner was the ability for the Kremlin to both winkingly, but with some seriousness, keep the group at arm’s length —, say ‘those aren’t our guys, what they’re doing in Syria, what they’re doing in Africa, it’s not our business.’
Of course, it always matched up with larger Kremlin geopolitical interests, but it was very convenient to have this deniable shadow force. And that’s a paradox now that the Kremlin is gonna have trouble solving.

ISAACSON: One of the amazing things in your piece is the description of the brutality of the Wagner group. We all kind of knew it, but you really brought it home to us. Describe that and how you got that in your piece.

YAFFA: Ever since Wagner entered the war in Ukraine last spring, we began to hear information trickling out about that kind of brutality that you mentioned. A practice, for example, known as “obnuleniye,” which is Russian for zeroing out, a really macabre and awful euphemism for battlefield execution. The killing of those who Wagner fighters, mainly recruits from Russian prisons, who refused to march forward, who tried to retreat, who ran away from training bases. They were rounded up by Wagner security and in front of other Wagner fighters, publicly executed. And that’s a degree of brutality we don’t find even in the Russian armed forces, by and large, which we know from this year and a half of war has its own share of brutality and war crimes, the massacre and butcher of many others. There, there are too many to name. But this practice seems specific to Wagner, the use of human waves the use of human wave attacks, a style of fighting we haven’t seen, perhaps since World War II, in which one wave of another, largely of these convict recruits recruited out of Russian prisons, were sent into the fight, not even so much to advance or seize territory, but the first waves were sent just to draw fire, to be attacked so that other waves behind them could identify Ukrainian positions and then fire upon them.

The survival rate from these human wave attacks was absolutely dreadful, bodies piling up. I was able to speak to some of these prison recruit fighters who were then injured or captured on the battlefield in Ukraine, and are located in or held in Ukrainian custody. And inside Ukraine I was able to speak with some of these fighters with their permission, and they described an incredibly gruesome difficult, traumatic detail, just how they and their comrades were used in these human wave attacks with death all around them. One wave, one wave after another, being mowed down by machine gun fire, targeted with artillery. And what I heard from Ukrainian military commanders was, especially at the beginning, a sense of shock and disorientation at just how irrational Wagner fought. Wagner just kept pushing on…no matter how many losses they took, they just kept pushing forward one wave after another. And for Ukrainian military units, this was a difficult tactic to defend against. And that in some measure is – explains why Wagner was one meter after another with extraordinary losses on its own side, able to push forward, take territory in Eastern Ukraine across the portion of the front where Wagner was most active, all the way up to the city of Bakhmut, the signal battle for Wagner, and one of the signal battles of the war in Ukraine which Wagner was able to capture in late May.

ISAACSON: One of those recruits that you talked to, prisoner, I think was named Alexei. Is that right? And I think he helped describe what you just described as a meat storm, but then he said it was “a giant mistake.” Get me into the mind of a person like that.

YAFFA: The person you mentioned, Alex Alexei was recruited out of Russian prison. Initially he received a prison sentence of almost 20 years for murder. He was only a few years into that sentence when the war on Ukraine started, and when Prigozhin personally arrived by helicopter in the prison yard to make his pitch was, was essentially joined Wagner, come fight in Ukraine. You might die. Prigozhin, by the way, was very direct and honest about that. He didn’t hide the cost of the war and that, and that gave him a kind of appeal among certain segments of Russian society. But if you survive again, which I don’t guarantee, then after six months, you’ll have your freedom. And for someone like Alexei who was desperate, who saw no future for himself, who had children on the outside that he thought he might never see again, or would be an old man when he got out of prison, this gamble seemed worth it.

And no matter how much Prigozhin indeed explained and didn’t hide the horrors of war, impossible to imagine the true nature of these so-called meat storms. As, as you said, the use of these human wave attacks, the use of the practice of zeroing out that I referred to, and the actual visceral real experience for someone like Alexei, once they ended up in as a participant in one of these meet storms, was far more awful and terrifying than anything that they had allowed for. And, and, and for that reason, Alexei believed, at least as he told me, his participation in Wagner’s war effort was a mistake also, because it became clear to Alexei again as he narrated to me from Ukrainian custody. I think it’s important to note that caveat. I wasn’t able to independently verify many of the details of his story, let alone how he related to them, let’s say kind of emotionally or intellectually. But the recruiting pitch that Prigozhin made was very much centered on Russia under attack, on foreign western NATO armies fighting Russia, the use of foreign mercenaries. And that’s who Alexei thought he was going to Ukraine to fight. And so he – when he was ultimately captured by a Ukrainian military unit by guys who he said were more or less just like himself, that also came as a shock, at least as Alexei narrated it to me, and was further reason for him to believe his participation in the war to be a mistake.

ISAACSON: One of the original commanders of the Wagner group was Dmitry Utkin, is that how you say it?  And a very much of a Nazi sympathizer. How much is that infused into the Wagner Group and even the name of the Wagner group?

YAFFA: Well, you’re right in that the, the name itself comes from Utkin’s own professed proclivity for the German composer, Richard Wagner, who himself was a very celebrated figure in the Third Reich and said to be among Hitler’s favorite composers. I’ve heard from a number of people, and there’s wide reporting on this from Russian colleagues and just open source about Utkin’s, let’s say Nazi or pro fascist proclivities. There are documents circulating, published by a Russian investigative outlet dossier center, that show Utkin’s signature on internal documents in the form of two lightning bolts, the insignia of the SS, and whether for that reason or just a general climate of total brutality, cruelty, sadism, the internal culture of Wagner, as we’ve talked about with the practice, for example, of zeroing out, the use of these meat storms is incredibly brutal. There’s another moment in the piece I describe from Syria where Wagner was active over the course of many years and still has a presence that a video surfaced at a certain point, showing fighters who were later determined to be attached to a Wagner unit, torturing a Syrian captive, beating him with sledgehammers, trying to cut off his head with a knife, ultimately decapitating him with a shovel.

And that when I asked another member of Wagner’s team, or when I asked another fighter who was in Syria for Wagner, who was horrified by this video, who was disgusted by the behavior shown on it, but asked where, where this came from, why it happened, you know, he, he said that this was an extreme example of essentially Wagner tactics to try and cause maximum terror, maximum horror as a way of frightening the enemy. I heard something similar from a Wagner fighter I spoke to who had fought in Ukraine, where he led a detachment of prisoner fighters. And this commander also witnessed a scene of so-called zeroing out where a number of Wagner fighters were publicly executed after they apparently tried to retreat from the battlefield. And this Wagner commander said something to me that this stems from Prigozhin’s own philosophy, if you will, Prigozhin’s own understanding of war and how to carry it out of causing maximum fear, not just to the enemy, but within one’s own ranks as a way of maintaining discipline. Why do those Wagner fighters keep pushing forward in a way that I described having heard about from the Ukrainian commanders in a way that most other military units would not behave? It’s because they were afraid if they didn’t move forward, that they would be met with certain death on the backend if they came back without having achieved their objective or having been seen to, to retreat. So it was through these terrible methods that Prigozhin believed he was achieving a certain effectiveness on the battlefield.

ISAACSON: You end your piece with some reporting from a camp in Belarus where this founder of the Prigozhin’s Wagner Group Dmitry Utkin tells a crowd, and let me quote from your piece. This is what he says. “This is not the end, but just the beginning of the biggest job in the world, which will be carried out very soon.” That’s pretty ominous. What’d he mean by that?

YAFFA: I agree. It’s, it’s ominous and that’s, again, part and parcel of the Wagner brand, if you will to project an air of, of maximum menace. I, what I think is really going on, as we’ve talked about earlier in our conversation, is that Wagner, specifically Prigozhin, but also people like Utkin are still negotiating with the Kremlin as to what their future role will be, where will they be deployed and how they seem to be largely off the battlefield for now in Ukraine, but still very present in places like Africa, Syria as well. And I think what we’re seeing is the evolution into something we might call Wagner 2.0 and then that’s happening in real time. I think it’s too early to say exactly how this group will operate and where going forward, but what’s clear is, and, and again this returns to some themes we’ve talked about so far, is that Prigozhin’s wings are much less clipped than we might have thought a month ago. That he has much more freedom to act and pursue his ambitions than we might have thought was the case, say on the day of June 24th. And, and the mere fact that Utkin was able to give this speech alluding to future work and expansion of work shows how much the Wagner story is still not over.

ISAACSON: Joshua Yaffa, thank you so much for your reporting and for joining us.

YAFFA: Thank you.