Whether or not Prigozhin survives his new home in Belarus, few have doubts that the Wagner Group will endure this latest crisis. Wagner continues to be an invaluable ‘proxy actor’ for the Russian state, furthering the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals in Europe and Africa.
LONDON
‘The Wagnerites are beginning to stretch us”, said Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to his host President Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg last week. “I ask: ‘Why do you need to go to the West’, and they reply: ‘We want to go on an excursion to Warsaw’”. During this piece of theatre in front of journalists, Lukashenko presented Putin with a map which he claimed was Poland’s plan to attack Belarus. “As we can see, the ground is being prepared”, said the Belarusian authoritarian, to which his Russian counterpart responded that an attack on Belarus was an attack on Russia. The two then toured the Cathedral in the naval port city of Kronstadt near St Petersburg, posing for photographs with seemingly adoring bystanders.
Paranoia has always occupied a major portion of Lukashenko’s brain since becoming the President of Belarus twenty-nine years ago. In the real world, of course, NATO is not actually preparing to invade Belarus, but fear of such an invasion has caused Lukashenko to resort to all kinds of desperate measures, from hosting Russian nuclear weapons to welcoming the infamous Wagner mercenary army into the country.
When it learned that Wagner fighters had been training Belarusian Special Forces on its border with Belarus, Warsaw unsurprisingly rushed extra soldiers to its border. Polish authorities hinted that they had been monitoring Wagner forces since they moved into Belarus in large numbers earlier this month. It was from a newly set-up tent camp near the Belarusian village of Tsel that a video was posted in mid-July showing a blurry image of Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, addressing a crowd of several hundred men dressed in military fatigues, vowing to turn the military of Belarus, his new host country, into the ‘second army in the world’. “Congratulations on the arrival to the Belarusian land”, Prigozhin was heard saying. “We fought well. You have done a lot for Russia. Now what is happening on the front line is a disgrace in which we do not need to participate, and now we need to wait for the moment when we can prove ourselves in full”.
Large convoys of military personnel, accompanied by construction equipment including civilian excavators and bulldozers, have been seen moving from the Russian border towards the camp at Tsel, leading some experts to believe that Wagner is moving all its property from Russian-controlled territory to prevent it being seized by the Kremlin. Wagner’s main training camp in the village of Molkino in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region is scheduled to be shut down today.
All this activity in Belarus helps to explain the mystery of what happened to Prigozhin and Wagner after the failed coup on 24 June when, after his months-long feud with senior Russian Defence Ministry officials whom he accused of incompetence, Prigozhin’s irregular troops seized military installations in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia and began to march on Moscow. The mutiny ended abruptly when Putin announced that his ally, Lukashenko, had talked Prigozhin out of continuing his journey to Moscow and that he would let Prigozhin and his Wagner troops move to Belarus.
Before the war in Ukraine, Wagner was believed to have about 5,000 fighters on its books, mostly veterans from Russia’s elite regiments and Special Forces. Russia’s setbacks in the early part of the war led the Kremlin to depend more and more on Prigozhin’s fighters, whose number expanded rapidly, trading quality for quantity. Many new recruits were convicts from Russian prisons who in return for serving six months on the front line, were paid and would have their sentences commuted if, of course, they survived. According to a statement on the Wagner Telegram channel on 20 May this year, “a total of 78,000 Wagner fighters participated in the Ukrainian mission, 49,000 of whom were prisoners from the camps. At the time of the capture of Bakhmut on 20 May, 22,000 fighters had been killed and 40,000 wounded”. Most of those killed are believed to have been recruited convicts who were involved in the fiercest fighting.
Wagner’s statement on Telegram also indicated the numbers of its fighters who decided on the various options allowed by the Kremlin after the failed mutiny in June: “…25,000 are currently alive and healthy, plus the wounded in treatment. Of those, up to 10,000 have left or are leaving for Belarus, and 15,000 have already gone on leave”. Wagner fighters were also given the option of joining Russia’s regular army, but the number choosing this path is unknown.
So what next for Prigozhin and Wagner?
For someone whose actions were described as “treasonous” and “a stab in the back” by Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin is extremely fortunate to be alive and well, albeit now living in Belarus. Others who were far less a threat to the ruling cabal in the Kremlin were either poisoned, shot or killed after “accidentally” falling out of the window of a high-rise apartment. To date, the worst that has happened to Prigozhin, other than exile to Belarus, is a period of demonisation by state media.
So that’s it. Or is it? Just days after the coup, Russian authorities announced that they had closed a criminal investigation into the uprising and would press no charges against Prigozhin or his troops. But as CIA head William Burns warned last week at the Aspen Security Forum in the US State of Colorado, “Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold. In my experience, Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback, so I would be surprised if Prigozhin escapes further retribution. Vladimir Putin has projected an image of himself as the arbiter of order in Russia, and so the 36 hours of the mutiny will have left many in the country with the question of whether the emperor had no clothes, or at least why it is taking him so long to get dressed,’’ continued Burns. President Biden had earlier offered some simple advice to Yevgeny Prigozhin—“don’t sack your food taster”.
Whether or not Prigozhin survives his new home in Belarus, few have doubts that the Wagner Group will endure this latest crisis. Wagner has been and continues to be, an invaluable “proxy actor” for the Russian state, serving and furthering the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals in Europe (Ukraine and Syria) and Africa (the Central African Republic, Sudan, Libya, Mozambique, Madagascar and Mali). Unconfirmed rumours have been swirling about Wagner’s presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wagner is simply too important to the Kremlin for it to be disbanded. Even though it is primarily state-funded and operates with a high level of support from, and cooperation with, the Russian Ministry of Defence, it continues to provide “plausible deniability” for the Russian Government.
Only days after the aborted coup, Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, reassured allies in Africa that the thousands of Wagner fighters deployed to the continent will not be withdrawn. The Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali are two countries in sub-Saharan Africa where Wagner has the biggest presence and both are considered strategic prizes for the Kremlin, which sees them as a springboard to greater influence on the continent and a source of lucrative natural resources. Wagner also runs a large gold mine among a variety of business adventures in the CAR, which the Kremlin will be reluctant to abandon. The same for the United Arab Emirates where Wagner maintains logistical support, smuggling and money laundering affiliates, of huge value to the Kremlin.
The disastrous war in Ukraine has exposed Putin’s inability to deliver the vision of a “Greater Russia”, and Prigozhin’s actions have given voice to many who are concerned about the management of the war. Putin’s public responses, other than his initial outburst, have been restrained so far, projecting an image of calm. But even if he is able to neutralise Prigozhin and bring Wagner under his control, Kremlin watchers look back to the events on 24 June 2023 wondering if, far from an aberration, it was a turning point.
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office
between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.