They’re accused of human rights violations around the world. Now, Ukraine’s government claims they are on a mission to kill President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This is the Wagner group, Putin’s brutal shadow army.
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00:00On March 8th, we met in Palmyra.
00:31It helps the Kremlin to execute on its foreign policy objectives at a lower cost and with a greater degree of deniability than if regular Russian forces were being used.
00:48I really focus on those where they have an active military presence and active sort of political interference presence.
00:54Those include Syria, Central African Republic, Madagascar, Mozambique, Mali, as well as Libya.
01:02They've been active in other places and then they claim to have activity and a few others.
01:07Ukraine is also important. Historically, that is really sort of the genesis of the Wagner Group is in Ukraine.
01:18The Wagner Group has been accused of a wide variety of different human rights abuses.
01:22Some of those are better documented than others in Syria.
01:25We know specifically from video evidence that the Wagner Group was involved in the torture and execution of a deserter from the Syrian military.
01:35Those individuals have never faced justice.
01:37That court case is ongoing in Russia, but the Russian authorities have demonstrated no real interest in pursuing it in places like Sudan and the Central African Republic.
01:45There are widespread reports of violence against civilians, all of which become more and more consistent with each other.
01:52And I think point to a broader sort of pattern of abuse, particularly in their approach to counterinsurgency.
01:58The result of that is that there's arbitrary detention, summary execution, torture, general abuse of the civilian population.
02:16Evgeny Prigozhin is a Russian businessman.
02:32He got his start in the food industry and he made his fortune basically doing major catering contracts for the Kremlin and the military.
02:42Prigozhin is alleged by folks, including the U.S. Treasury, to be basically the patron behind the Wagner Group, as well as a series of sort of interrelated political influence operations.
02:52Most infamously, the troll farm, as it's known, the Internet Research Agency, which is famous for its involvement in U.S. election interference.
03:01Private military companies are not legal in the Russian Federation, which means that there is no specific entity that is the Wagner Group LLC.
03:23Because of that, because of the sort of murky legal status of the employees of the Wagner Group and the Wagner Group as an entity overall, it's really hard for there to be any kind of legal accountability.
03:33We have information that sabotage groups of the enemy have entered Kyiv.
03:48With the Wagner Group, there's always a lot that's uncertain, and I tend to be really skeptical of most claims.
03:54Writing about the Wagner Group, reporting on them, researching them is really hard because they actively misrepresent what they're doing.
04:00They will say that there are places they're not. They will attempt to inflate their own capabilities and the size of their forces.
04:07I do believe that the Wagner Group is present in Ukraine right now, even if it's there under a different name.
04:13The Times report indicated that there were Russian mercenaries that were active in Kyiv who were basically attempting to kill Zelensky and a number of different other high-ranking Ukrainian officials.
04:24To me, that is plausible. We've also seen reports, I think originally from the New York Times, that there were Wagner combatants active in eastern Ukraine.
04:33That is a little bit more consistent with their normal activity, where they'd be working alongside proxy forces.