By John Lyons, ABC global affairs editor
The Wagner Group is the creation of Yegveny Prigozhin (right), a Russian oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin (left). Photo: AFP
Analysis - The Wagner Group has been called everything from "Putin's ghost army" to "hired killers".
But perhaps the most brutal description comes from Ukraine's Ambassador to Australia: "Wagner can be considered the gangster contract killers of Putin's mafia state."
The ambassador, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, does not hold back: "Justice awaits Wagner if its members survive the battlefield."
These days few subjects will elicit as strong a response from Ukrainians as the Wagner Group - Russia's mercenary group which does things that even the feared Russian special forces, the Spetsnaz, won't do.
They're considered among the most ruthless mercenaries in the world. And as Russia's conventional army has reeled under pressure from a more motivated Ukrainian army, the Wagner Group has been enlisted by the Kremlin to try to turn the tide.
Secret no more
The Wagner Group is the creation of Yegveny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin, who was known in the 2000s as "Putin's chef".
For many years Putin would not acknowledge Wagner, or even utter its name.
In recent years, however, he has mentioned it, acknowledging something that Russia analysts knew. Likewise, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, Prigozhin has become more open about the group - even openly visiting prisons in Russia to recruit criminals to join Wagner and try to wrest the military momentum from Ukraine.
This week the BBC quoted British officials as saying that the number of Wagner fighters in Ukraine had increased from about 1000 in February to 20,000 as a sign of Russia's growing reliance on the mercenary group.
As Russia's conventional military has struggled against a more determined, better-motivated Ukrainian army, Russia has increasingly relied on the dark arts of the Wagner Group - a group used by the Putin regime to be able to commit atrocities or war crimes with Moscow able to claim they were not authorised Russian soldiers.
The Wagner Group has been engaged by various parties in central Africa, Libya and Syria to do the sort of work that conventional armies either can't do or won't do. While these contracts have been financial, Ukraine is a different contract for them. Not only are they earning money but the effort also accords with Moscow's desperation for battlefield success.
Members of Wagner Group stand outside its new headquarters in St Petersburg on 4 November 2022. Photo: AFP/ Olga Maltseva
Putin's three missteps
It's now clear that when Putin amassed 100,000 or so Russian troops on Ukraine's eastern border in January that he expected Kyiv would fall within days.
Putin didn't count on three things: that the Ukrainians would be extraordinary fighters; that the West would quickly galvanise behind Ukraine and, perhaps most importantly, that Volodymyr Zelensky would emerge as a unifying and inspirational leader.
The more that Russia's conventional army has been forced to retreat under pressure from Ukrainian forces the more the Wagner Group has been built up in Russia's media.
Along with some of Russia's other mercenary groups - referred to in the Russian media not as mercenary groups but as private military companies (PMCs) - the Kremlin-controlled media has been attempting to glorify these groups. This has all come despite the fact that, technically, PMCs are illegal in Russia.
Radio France Internationale reported on 9 December that the Russian RT media group released a 26-minute documentary called PMC Wagner - Contract with the Homeland which glorified the "warriors" of Wagner. It said Prigozhin was gaining weight in the Russian media and that "the image of noble mercenary-patriots is necessary for the authorities to draw more and more men into the machine."
'Better than cannon fodder but probably not much'
Vasyl Myroshnychenko says the Wagner Group provides Putin's administration with plausible deniability, including in the context of war crimes such as the intentional destruction of hospitals and schools.
"Wagner is formally outside the Russian military's chain of command; this is an intentional manoeuvre that allows Wagner to undertake illegal and malicious acts," he says.
Ian Parmeter, a research fellow at the Australian National University and former counsellor at the Australian embassy in Moscow, says Wagner was used in the Donbas in 2014 and Syria in 2015.
"Wagner mercenaries include some former Spetsnaz personnel, but have characteristics that differentiate them from Spetsnaz. They are more deniable from Russia's perspective. They were first deployed in Donbas in 2014 at a time when Russia wanted to fight a covert war, blunting international criticism of the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, and hide Russian casualties from the Russian public, he says.
"One Ukrainian estimate is that perhaps a third of the mercenaries did not speak Russian, which would mean fewer body bags going back to Russia. Similarly in Syria, though the main Russian intervention in 2015 was through air power, Wagner mercenaries were inserted on the ground as force multipliers for Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah ground offensives and to act as spotters and targeters for Russian air strikes and artillery fire from naval forces off the Syrian coast."
Parmeter says the other major factor differentiating Wagner and Spetsnaz is that Prigozhin wants Wagner to be a money-making enterprise, doing "dirty work for unsavoury regimes such those in Syria, Libya and various sub-Saharan African countries".
He says the Wagner Group has its own training facility near Krasnodar, but its operatives would not be as well trained as the Spetsnaz.
"Reports that Prigozhin is recruiting from prisons suggest a lower talent base than would be acceptable for Spetsnaz entry," he says.
"The debacle suffered by the Wagner Group near Deir al-Zor on 7-8 February 2018, when they came up against US-trained anti-Assad forces, indicates they are not nearly at the fighting level of Spetsnaz forces."
Parmeter says recent reports concerning fighting around Bakhmut indicated that Wagner mercenaries were "better than cannon fodder but probably not much better."
"Russian propaganda efforts to encourage a mystique around Wagner are clearly aimed at boosting recruitment to the force," he says.
"Success in increasing volunteers to Wagner would reduce the Putin administration's need for forced mobilisation, which is obviously unpopular with Russians.
"Clearly, a major factor in Ukraine's success in pushing back Russian forces has been the stronger motivation of Ukrainian fighters boosted by the military, logistical and training assistance provided by the US and other NATO states."
Parmeter says the poor performance of Russian forces cannot be attributed to any one factor.
"Low morale would obviously be part of it, and that would impact ordinary Russian soldiers as well as Wagner operatives. Poor planning, and presumably overconfidence of Russian military strategists in the early stages of the war, would also be important factors. I think the Russian problem in Ukraine has been much more about the ill-conceived nature of the operation itself."
A de facto member of Putin's inner circle
Are there any limits to what Wagner mercenaries will do?
"I think the answer is that they are completely ruthless," Parmeter says.
"They operate outside Russian law, so there are virtually no accountability mechanisms unless some of them can be indicted at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. That's even more unlikely given that Russia has withdrawn from the court's jurisdiction."
Parmeter referenced a BBC report which quoted former Wagner members saying they killed prisoners and intentionally killed civilians, used torture, and mined and booby-trapped civilian areas.
In The Oxford Middle East Review in June, Parmeter wrote: "Wagner's origins, like much of its structure and financing, are shadowy. It is not a registered company in Russia, where mercenary groups are illegal. According to an analysis by the New America think tank and the Center on the Future of War, it was originally registered in Hong Kong in 2012 as Slavonic Corps Ltd by the Moran Group, a company formed by Russian military veterans to provide international security services."
Parmeter continued: "Prigozhin appears now to be a de facto member of Putin's inner circle. However, he is not a member of the siloviki, the elite current and former senior intelligence and military officers who control the instruments of the state's hard power or the oligarchs ... Prigozhin is a level below them. He has no separate power base and strives for influence and financial rewards by pleasing Putin.
"Putin argued in a 2018 interview that Russia has no responsibility for Prigozhin because Prigozhin has no official position. However, it can be assumed that Wagner cannot exist without Putin's blessing, and Prigozhin needs Putin's approval for strategic-level decisions, such as where and when Wagner is deployed. If he falls out of favour with Putin, he will be back to running restaurants."
Former Australian Ambassador to Moscow, Peter Tesch, says the Wagner Group clearly has sufficient presidential imprimatur to insert itself into the war. He says the notion Russia had private armies was derided by official Russian sources when word first starting emerging about Wagner's operations in central Africa in recent years.
He says that, implicitly, Wagner is a rebuke to the professional military and its conduct of the Ukraine war.
"Lost upon the Kremlin and its mouthpieces, of course, is the reality that having to scrape convicts out of prisons with monetary and other bribes to become cannon fodder with little prospect of survival or real redemption speaks volumes about the dire straits in which Russia finds itself in the war," Tesch says.
He says Wagner's importance in Ukraine is hard to assess from a military perspective because of uncertainty about the real numbers involved.
"Assessments of these vary, but, in any case, the fiction that others have so-called mercenaries and Russia has loyalists is eviscerated by the empowerment, or perhaps grudging tolerance, of Evgeny Prigozhin's private army," Tesch says.
"Also, I am unaware that Wagner is having measurably greater success than the so-called professional Russian military. They would seem from open-source reporting to be vying with the Kadyrovtsy, the Chechens, in the brutality stakes, at least."
Tesch says the willingness of the Kremlin to at least acquiesce in both the acknowledgement and the practical inescapability of Wagner's role speaks to the overall debacle that has been Russia's prosecution of the war.
"The Kremlin's resort to mercenaries - no matter what they claim - differentiates paid Russian cons from any other nationalities volunteering to fight alongside Ukrainians," he says.
"That also ought to be thrown squarely in their face, together with an oft-repeated invitation to reconcile this aggression with Russia's privileges and special responsibilities as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and thus both an architect and a guarantor of the system of international security which its actions undermine."
- ABC