What is the Wagner group really? Before the war in Ukraine broke out, the organization still looked like an occult group. A few men, mostly Russians, armed, organized, violent, present in Ukraine, the Central African Republic, or even Mali, who mix paramilitary activities and relatively conventional business. The rest was just extrapolation.
New documents, on the basis of a computer hack, leafed through in recent weeks, draw a completely different reality, and a true multinational crime. A form of state within a state, whose many branches, or departments, cover every conceivable field of nuisance against the West, from murder to disinformation. A total work, whose links with the Russian regime now appear in broad daylight.
Where does this new information come from?
These leaks come from the computer systems of the companies of the Wagner group. These are invoices, internal exchanges, extracts from agents, paperwork, as any company can have. Hackers whose identity remains secret transmitted these millions of documents to the media, in particular to Die WeltGerman daily newspaper.
From, Die Weltbut also art, Paris MatchInsider, or Center Folder, a Russian opposition media, founded by the dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a businessman formerly imprisoned in Putin’s jails, regularly publish their findings. To verify their authenticity, they cross-check them with various other sources: other leaks, former US intelligence chiefs, or international expert groups.
What do these leaks reveal?
These leaks, called Wagnerleaks, illustrate the links maintained with Vladimir Poutine and the Russian State, its participation in other activities on behalf of Moscow, and the width of the structure, and its capacity of nuisance… Last publication in date? A report of about forty pages, published by Dossier Center, on March 18th. We discover the links between the various subsidiaries of the Wagner group, and how this organization serves the war aims of what seems close to a parastatal empire.
These revelations also complement what Wagner has undertaken to make public in recent weeks. In conflict with Vladimir Poutine on the means which are granted to him by the Russian State, the founder of the group with the multiple activities of nuisance, Evgueni Prigojine from now on makes public the activities of his troops, until announcing this Monday that he controls 70 % of Bakhmout, the most disputed city of the conflict. Before this winter, all of this was opaque, kept secret.
How does Wagner work?
In appearance, the Wagner group operates like a classic industrial group, a myriad of companies divided into sectors of activity. First there is the parent company, Concord Group, launched by Evgueni Prigojine, in 1995. The man is then a hot dog seller, and will meet Putin in the 2000s, who will choose him for certain public contracts. , in the restoration, but also the building, making part of his fortune. The group is also known for its mining activities, particularly in Africa.
In reality, the Wagnerleaks above all make it possible to link Evgueni Progojine to his various parastatal activities, and to the Russian State, by means of financial payments and exchanged communications. As summarized by journalists Ksenia Bolchakova and Alexandra Jousset, for Arte, they are based on three pillars, within which multiple companies work.
First: paramilitary activities, whose work is now explicit. Also: disinformation, like Lakhta, a fake news factory based in Saint Petersburg, in a district of the same name and in which Prigozhin is said to have invested more than 1.6 million in November 2019 alone. And also : a militia, in charge of supervising these various activities, called SB. The latter tries to silence the occult activities and the crimes of the employees, estimated at several thousand, often recruited in Russian prisons.
How do these occult companies recruit?
Dossier Center reveals, for example, that a two-hour interrogation, assisted by a lie detector, is carried out at each “job interview”. “It is a question of eliminating all candidates with a weakness for the opposition, all those who may have contact with the media and the police, drug addicts and people in debt”, details the media. Since he is in conflict with Vladimir Poutin, Prigojine does not have any more the right to recruit in the prisons. He then announced that he would open around forty recruitment centers across Russia.
How to qualify the activities of Evgueni Prigojine?
A police, an army, intelligence, according to these documents, and the various elements collected before these revelations, Wagner therefore seems to operate like a state within a state, which frees itself from the law, with complete impunity. According to Dossier Center, Wagner’s various infrastructures are even thinking in synergy: “Wagner’s wounded soldiers come to their senses at a recreation center in Gelendzhik, Ministry of Defense officials receive discount cards at the Eliseevsky store, Lakhta “trolls” gather in a building built by Prigozhin’s enterprises”