There were about 40 American soldiers left at the dusty outpost in eastern Syria, and, with every hour, they were watching the enemy advance. These were pro-Assad forces on the horizon, hundreds of them, here to seize territory from US-backed Kurdish fighters. And yet, when the Americans embedded with the Kurds eavesdropped on the enemy’s radio waves that day in February 2018, they heard Russian voices.

As the troops attacked, unleashing a fierce barrage of gun and tank fire, US military command called the Kremlin, urging them to call off the assault. The US and Russia had long avoided direct combat and there were fears this could spark a major diplomatic crisis, with both powers helping different sides in the Syrian civil war. But Moscow assured their US counterparts no Russians were in the area. So who was attacking?

That battle ended in a devastating air raid by the US to protect their men. About 200 attacking troops were killed in the strikes, many of them Russian mercenaries. When the dust cleared, neither the US nor Russia were in a hurry to admit they’d just attacked one another. After all, the mercenaries were not renegades working for just anyone. They were the Wagner Group, a shadowy network of former Russian soldiers that has served as an unofficial arm of the Kremlin since it first invaded Crimea in Ukraine in 2014.

From seizing diamond mines in Africa to prowling the streets of Kyiv with alleged orders to murder Ukraine’s president, Wagner has been turning up more and more in conflicts across the globe as Russia seeks to expand its influence. Then in 2022, the group began propping up Vladimir Putin’s bloody and costly war in Ukraine, recruiting from Russian prisons to continue “meat grinder” campaigns in the east. Wagner fighters were among the first charged with war crimes there, and an ex-commander who fled through Arctic ice and barbed wire to seek asylum in Norway claims to have witnessed executions by the group.

Now, Wagner’s financier, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the oligarch known as “Putin’s chef”, has stepped up from warring with Russian generals over who should take credit for wins on the field to actual rebellion: launching a coup attempt against Kremlin defence chiefs on June 23 that threatened to plunge Russia into civil war. Russian and Wagner forces fired on one another over a chaotic 24 hours before, just as suddenly, the coup was called off – Wagner tanks rolling towards Moscow turned around and Prigozhin himself took a deal for exile in neighbouring Belarus, to avoid criminal prosecution back home.

So what do we know about “Putin’s shadow army” – from their skull logo and coded recruitment to their neo-Nazi leanings? And how did they step out into the spotlight in the Ukraine war?

This explainer was originally published on Oct 9 2022 and has been updated to reflect developments. It contains graphic content.

What is Wagner Group?

Officially, Wagner doesn’t exist. Mercenaries – contractors who fight wars for money rather than as part of an army – aren’t legal in Russia (nor in most countries, including the US and Australia, in light of international bans). But private groups of this kind still operate all around the world, including America’s Blackwater (now known as Academi), whose staff were convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in 2007.

Wagner has left its own (much larger) trail of war crimes across the globe, says the chair of the UN working group on mercenaries, Dr Sorcha MacLeod. “Russia is not the only country with a mercenary group,” she says. “We know Turkey has one too, but Wagner, based on what we know about where it’s been and where it operates, seems to be the biggest. It’s really a proxy force of the Russian state.”

Wagner is pronounced “Vagner” for Hitler’s favourite composer. It’s also the call sign of the group’s unconfirmed leader, Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence lieutenant, Wagner fan and suspected neo-Nazi. Wagner emerged in 2014 as Russia seized Crimea, part of the “little green men” (soldiers in unmarked green uniforms) sent in to take Ukrainian territory. Utkin himself was wounded in the fighting that became the long-running war of the Donbas.

“It’s about plausible deniability ... Russia says mercenaries aren’t permitted under law, so they can’t be doing that.”

Unofficially, Wagner mercenaries are sometimes called “the cleaners” or “the orchestra”, known for “making noise” with brutal onslaughts. In Syria, they’ve backed Bashar al-Assad’s regime and guarded lucrative oil fields; in Libya, they joined the forces of rebel general Khalifa Haftar in 2019 after he attacked the UN-backed government in the capital, Tripoli. And across Africa, they’ve been brought in to help military governments crack down on rebellion and terrorist cells (and seize diamond mines).

In Ukraine, they had been fighting in large numbers, reportedly “rented out” as a strike team by Russian army units and even acting as a regular part of the military. Using mercenaries means Russia can distance itself from Wagner atrocities – the group often do the Kremlin’s dirty work – and it helps quell fears at home of Russian soldiers returning in body bags.

“It’s about plausible deniability,” says MacLeod. “Russia says – and has said when we’ve sent them allegation letters [over Wagner] human rights violations – that mercenaries aren’t permitted under Russian law, so they can’t be doing that.”

Hired guns are not new – popes and kings have used them – and, historically, they’ve been known for brutality. They do not have the same chain of command and oversight that regular armies do. But, in modern times, Wagner has taken that to a new level, says MacLeod. “There’s no ID numbers, or uniforms, no accountability. Locals might recognise them as the white guys, or the Russians, even as Wagner, but usually that’s as far as it goes.”

Fighters are made to sign non-disclosure agreements and are hired through a complex web of shell companies. In fact, many experts now understand the group as more of a network of Russian military contractors – code for the Kremlin outsourcing – rather than one single business entity.

“Of course, for an organisation like this that operates in the shadows, it suits them for there to be speculation about who they are, their size, where they are,” MacLeod says. “That adds to the mystique.”

Still, journalists and international investigators such as MacLeod have pieced together a picture of how Wagner operates.

Who (and how) does Wagner recruit?

The group typically recruits in code, says researcher Isabella Currie at La Trobe University, offering spots to “musicians on tour for the Wagner Conservatory” or, more recently, for “a picnic in Ukraine”. Sometimes they will pose with violins or other musical instruments in photos from the battlefield. “It’s a joke and everyone’s in on it,” Currie says. “It’s just that the joke is terrifying.”

Recruits tend to be ex-military personnel, in their 30s and 40s, often with criminal histories or hailing from small Russian towns without much work. They have a reputation as elite fighters, more seasoned (and better paid) than the typical Russian soldier. The bar for selection and training, though, has been lowered more and more as they take big losses in Ukraine. Before the war, Wagner personnel were thought to number around 10,000. As of December, US intelligence estimated Wagner had about 50,000 fighters in Ukraine – 40,000 of them convicts freshly recruited from Russian prisons.

Its casualties in combat are not recorded publicly and so, as researcher Dr Joana de Deus Pereira writes, mercenaries can “vanish without a name”. Sometimes bodies of slain soldiers are not recovered or their families are denied agreed compensation, told their loved one wasn’t a soldier at all but was working for a gas company or some other front.

When Prigozhin launched his attempted coup in 2023, he claimed he had 25,000 men ready to die to “save Russia” and another 25,000 after that, but the exact number of their forces now is unclear.

Who runs Wagner?

Western intelligence agencies have long known Wagner is financed by Prigozhin, often called “Putin’s chef” for his lucrative catering contracts with the Kremlin and close ties to the Russian president. (Prigozhin is also wanted by the United States for funding the state-backed troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, which is accused of influencing the 2016 US presidential election in favour of Donald Trump.)

But for years, Prigozhin (who turned a hotdog stand into a food empire after serving serious prison time) vehemently denied the Wagner connection. He sued journalists who made the link, even as he raked in wealth from the group’s deployments overseas in Syria and Africa. Then, in September 2022, Prigozhin finally admitted he owned Wagner, having been filmed touring prisons to offer convicts early release in exchange for six months fighting alongside Wagner in Ukraine. “I cleaned the old weapons myself, sorted out the bulletproof vests myself,” Prigozhin said in a statement. “From that moment, on May 1, 2014, a group of patriots was born, which later came to be called the Wagner Battalion. I am proud that I was able to defend their right to protect the interests of their country.”

Experts suspect the Russian state has directly bankrolled parts of Wagner too, supplying them with weapons, aircraft and training. The French government has accused the Kremlin of “providing material support” to Wagner where it operates in Mali, West Africa, for example. Back home, Wagner’s training base is next door to that of the Russian army, although officially the site is listed as a children’s holiday camp. And there have been cases of Wagner troops evacuated from conflict zones to Russian military hospitals, Currie says, including after that 2018 US air strike on attacking Wagner forces in Syria. “Generally, private military companies would not receive such benefits, specialised military health care, from the state.”

In 2021, Russian journalist Ilya Barabanov, along with Nader Ibrahim at the BBC, stumbled upon a discarded Wagner tablet and uncovered a “shopping list” of weapons and equipment the organisation had sent Russian authorities directly.

It’s not the only time the group has been careless. In August, a pro-Kremlin war blogger inadvertently revealed the location of Wagner’s main base in eastern Luhansk, Ukraine, when he posted a photo with fighters there. Within days, Ukrainian rockets had reduced it to rubble. Currie recalls seeing the image pop up on open-source intelligence channels, as investigators around the world scrambled to identify its location. “There were clues like a sign on a building we were looking at. Then I woke up the next day and someone had cracked it. The Ukrainians had taken it out.”

The casualties for Wagner were reportedly grave. Prigozhin himself had been photographed at the base hours earlier, but he soon resurfaced at a high-profile funeral elsewhere, disproving rumours he’d been killed.

Russian media reports that, before the invasion, Prigozhin had somewhat fallen out of favour with the Kremlin, publicly feuding with many of its high-ranking officials and other oligarchs. A large Wagner force was not deployed to Ukraine until the end of the war’s first month.

Since then, Wagner succeeded on some eastern fronts where the Russian army has failed, helping take Popasna and Lysychansk, for example, and extending the grinding campaign for Bakhmut, though with heavy losses. Prigozhin was brought back into Putin’s inner wartime circle, awarded a Hero of Russia medal last June, and now appears on Wagner promotional posters himself, “looking like Voldemort”, quips La Trobe University Russia expert Dr Robert Horvath, and urging Russians to join the “elite protecting Russia’s interests”.

“This war has signified Wagner moving out of the shadows and becoming a kind of a force in the Russian public consciousness.”

Indeed, by late 2022, Wagner was everywhere, even on Russian state television, where Horvath says its members were lauded as heroes supposedly “helping de-Nazify Ukraine”. “This war has signified Wagner moving out of the shadows and becoming a kind of force in the Russian public consciousness.”

In late 2022, the group opened its first official headquarters in St Petersburg. There are even Wagner action films now depicting the mercenaries as patriotic heroes (from Prigozhin-linked production companies). Marat Gabidullin, one of the only ex-Wagner fighters to speak openly of his time in the group, gave a succinct review: “Trash.”

What has been Wagner’s role in the war?

As the first Russian missiles fell on Kyiv, Wagner mercenaries were reportedly already prowling its streets with orders to hunt down Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. (Ukraine’s military later posted photos of dog tags it said belonged to the dead “Wagnerists” whose assassination plots it foiled.) After Ukraine has won back considerable ground, Russia began turning to Wagner in tight spots.

The private army was allocated entire sections of the frontline like a normal military unit, at times helping command squads. But, while the mercenaries had greater success against Ukraine’s seasoned fighters of the Donbas (compared to a Russian army beset by low morale and inexperience) the group, and the other rag-tag mix of “volunteers” the Kremlin has deployed to Ukraine, was still unlikely to win the war for Russia.

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Even Wagner felt the pinch of poor co-ordination across the wider Russian military machine. Its commanders (and Prigozhin) sparred publicly with the Kremlin’s generals, and not just over tactics. When the key town of Soledar fell in Ukraine’s east in early 2023, both Wagner and the Russian army claimed sole credit.

In late 2022, Currie was still seeing strong support for Putin across Wagner channels, but frustration too. “There’s been a lot of casualties. Enough to generate frustration. And there’s quite a legacy of Wagner mercenaries feeling abandoned to an extent by Russia, [like] during the Syria strike.”

The former Wagner commander who defected to Norway this year has said the mercenaries are being increasingly treated as cannon fodder, claiming prisoners newly recruited who refused to fight have been mistreated and even executed. In November, video surfaced appearing to show an ex-Wagner mercenary being executed by the group with a sledgehammer for allegedly changing sides.

Much may depend on the loyalties of Putin’s security services and national guard – as well as outfits such as Wagner.

Still, in 2022, as the group grew in stature back home, Horvath wondered what role it might play in any future unrest. Putin’s war and nuclear sabre-rattling has put him in a precarious position for the first time in his 20-year reign. Sanctions are no longer just biting; Russia is a pariah and there is disquiet among its elites. Much may depend on the loyalties of Putin’s security services and national guard – as well as outfits such as Wagner.

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“They’ve been touted as Putin’s private army and that’s not half wrong,” said Currie then, noting Prigozhin’s close ties to the president and large trolling apparatus. While it’s hard to predict what role Wagner might play in the event of a now feverishly speculated coup, Currie said that the group has certainly been sent in by the Kremlin to prop up autocrats in other contexts, such as in backing Syria’s Assad regime.

It’s a disturbing thing, added Horvath, to consider the criminal network Wagner and its ex-criminal founder Prigozhin in any way tipping the scales of Russian politics.

So, what about the coup?

By June 2023, speculation over Putin’s hold on power dramatically boiled over, and it was Prigozhin himself leading the rebellion. He accused his “enemies” in the Russian military of bombing a Wagner base, and, even more dangerously for Putin, said the whole invasion was based on lies by Russian defence chiefs – Russia had never been under threat from Ukraine, Moscow’s elites just wanted to get rich off its resources and so had deceived Putin.

Prigozhin called on Russia’s army (and National Guard) to join a “march for justice” on Moscow, seizing the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and shooting down Russian aircraft, even as he insisted the rebellion was not a coup against Putin himself. The FSB opened a criminal case against Prigozhin and Putin accused him of treason and “a stab in the back”, vowing rebels would be punished.

Russian forces fired on the Wagner convoy advancing on Russia even as Putin turned to long-time ally Belarus to broker a deal with the Wagner boss. Within hours, the criminal case against Prigozhin had been dropped and he was ordering Wagner mercenaries to turn around, agreeing to stay in Belarus to avoid civil war.

What is Wagner doing in Africa? And what war crimes is it accused of?

Meanwhile, even as Wagner has exploded into the spotlight via Ukraine, much of their operations in Africa and elsewhere around the world have been going dark. “They’re becoming more secretive online,” Currie says.

It is unclear what the future holds for the group after its attempted coup.

But, in the Central African Republic (known as CAR), where Russia is authorised by the UN to provide training and weapons to government forces as part of a peacekeeping mission, for example, “there have been reports of mercenaries confiscating phones so people can’t record them,” Currie says.

When Russia has sent Wagner in to act the “peacekeeper” in unstable African republics such as CAR, Sudan and Mali, violence has often surged. In CAR, MacLeod says Wagner mercenaries are known to be fighting, not just “training” as officially reported. “And, in some cases, that violence rises to the level of war crimes, like the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.”

Between 1500 and 3000 Wagner mercenaries are thought to be active in CAR and sexual violence in particular has been widespread. Currie points to reports of Wagner mercenaries “requesting” female officers from police stations and army barracks. “It speaks to the control that this group has over security forces in foreign countries,” she says. “Women had to sleep beside their commanding officers to be safe.”

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The brutality of Wagner has become part of its brand, Currie says. In Syria in 2017, some of its mercenaries were filmed torturing a prisoner with a sledgehammer before beheading him. Wagner fighters now regularly post photos with sledgehammers. Even musical instruments can be code for terror with Wagner’s “orchestra”, Horvath says. “If you see an armoured personnel carrier coming towards you, and it has violins on it … it can be a kind of warning to [locals] that Wagner are here, Wagner don’t obey the laws of war. And you have to be scared.”

In late 2022, Wagner sent an apparently bloodied sledgehammer in a violin case to the European Parliament, which had just labelled the group a terrorist organisation. After Wagner took Ukraine’s eastern city of Popasna, videos surfaced appearing to show a Ukrainian soldier’s head and hands stuck on spikes. Wagner’s openly neo-Nazi offshoot, Task Force Rusich, meanwhile, has been advising its fighters not to report Ukrainian prisoners to Russian commanders as it commits atrocities. A message on Rusich’s Telegram channel from September 22 advocates the “destruction of prisoners on the spot”.

“If someone went down to their local police station to report, there would literally be Wagner operatives in the station.”

Indeed, for all Russia’s (false) claims to be driving out Nazism from Ukraine, Wagner itself has strong neo-Nazi links. At an anti-colonialism rally organised by Wagner in Mali, Horvath points to “the weird moment” they unfurled a poster of racist composer Richard Wagner. Prigozhin celebrates military coups in Africa, Horvath says, as “great strikes against European imperialism when his thugs are committing crimes against Africans that are reminiscent of the worst moments of European imperialism”.

Though Prigozhin and many in Wagner have been hit with personal financial sanctions, Currie says it hasn’t stopped business. “Prigozhin still flies his jet to and fro certain countries, he’s still making money.”

And, while some Wagner soldiers have already been arrested for war crimes in Ukraine, previous attempts at accountability have largely gone nowhere. That includes a push for Russian courts to investigate the Wagner fighters who beheaded the Syrian man, and an investigatory panel in CAR to deal with human rights abuse complaints there. “The CAR government claimed they hadn’t received any,” says MacLeod.

The reason? A campaign of intimidation and attacks on victims and their families, as well as advocates, journalists, “anyone who’d make those complaints,” she says. “If someone went down to their local police station to report, there would literally be Wagner operatives in the station.” Then came stories of witnesses being detained, tortured, even disappearing. In April, a Human Rights Watch report called on the International Criminal Court to investigate brutal massacres it linked to Wagner in CAR.

Meanwhile, leaked documents suggest Wagner’s contracts in Africa have allowed Russia to expand its business interests and influence across the continent. Wagner has been guarding diamond mines in rebel-held territory in CAR, for example, and, at times, it has been paid with shares in them. Three Russian journalists investigating such Wagner links to the mines were murdered in CAR in 2018.

“There are links to companies registered in CAR but wholly Russian-owned,” says MacLeod. “And an [expert] report last year indicated that diamonds turning up in Cameroon, for example, had come out of Central African Republic. So there’s certainly credible information there’s a connection to the exploitation of natural resources.” A more recent report by international investigators has accused Wagner of using violence to help Russia corner Africa’s lucrative diamond market, tracing the group to a shell company selling the gems in CAR.

In Syria too, where Wagner worked directly for the Assad regime, part of the deal included a stake in the oil fields it seized. This kind of compensation, to Horvath, “exemplifies how Putin’s kleptocratic regime” works. “It rewards those who are loyal with resources.”

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It’s also been part of Russia’s plan to turn its eye to Africa as European relations sour in the wake of Ukraine. In Mali, in particular, it has gained a foothold. Now France has withdrawn its peacekeeping troops, the country is once again descending into lawlessness and terror attacks. “Wagner thrive off instability,” says Currie.

Indeed, as MacLeod points out, it is not in the interest of mercenaries for conflicts to end. “They often have the effect of prolonging them.”

She fears that the Wagner model – of secretive mercenaries as unofficial extensions of the state – could be taken up by more countries down the line too. That would change the nature of war.

“They’re still in the shadows. We’re trying to turn the light on.”

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