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Times: Who are the Russian Wagner mercenaries sent to kill Zelensky?

A man indifferently plunges a knife into a woman’s hand, pinning her to the table as a prelude to rape. Another assailant kills her baby. These atrocities belong to a war in Ukraine, but not to the one that is being waged now.

These are sadistic, horrifying images from President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine. Solntsepyok – roughly translated as “sunburned” and named after a system of multiple rocket launchers – is a film depicting a fictional Ukrainian Russian massacre in 2014 and the subsequent revenge taken by a group of Russian mercenaries portrayed as or.

Starring well-known actors, Solntsepyok premiered on Russian television in August, one of many propaganda films funded by a billionaire known as “Putin’s chef.”

According to the Times, Yevgeny Prigozhin is a former convict who made a fortune in the catering industry and now heads the Wagner Group, a private military company whose mercenaries have been wreaking havoc around the world for years.

In Ukraine, as reported by the Times of London last week, they had undertaken to assassinate President Zelensky. But their attempts to assassinate him and other officials, including the mayor of Kiev, have failed, and like many in Russia’s main offensive force, mercenaries are beginning to worry.

“They thought this murder would be an easy affair, but they have mourned the victims and are now worried that they might be trapped in Kyiv,” said a source close to the group.

Wagner’s mercenaries have been active in Ukraine since 2014, when thousands were sent to the east of the country to help foment war against the West and establish Russian separatist “democratic democracies” following Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

In addition to his specific operations, the 60-year-old Prigozhin is also the mastermind of the Kremlin’s misinformation, whose bloody action films portray Russian “dogs of war” as sympathetic swindlers and selfless heroes, as in Solntsepyok.

A Russian website described the film as a parody and “xenophobic mess”, noting that in fact Russian mercenaries are often accused of murder and rape.

“Undoubtedly, they are good company in a bar, with many stories to tell, but in general, they are a bunch of killers,” said General Sir Richard Barrons, the former commander of the British Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The idea is that by doing terribly violent things and terrorizing people, they can crush any resistance. They are not accountable, they can act with impunity.”

While his soldiers are acting in the shadows, Prigozhin has been in the spotlight. He has been accused in the US of waging an “information war” from a “troll factory” in St. Petersburg and of disrupting the 2016 US presidential election, an example of Putin’s preference for outsourcing some of his dirtiest and most sensitive projects. his close associates.

“Prigozhin has his fingers in a lot of pies,” said Valeriy Akimenko of the Conflict Studies Research Center. 2018.

The big breakthrough for Prigozhin came in 2001, when Putin began eating at his luxury restaurant in St. Petersburg, New Island. The former hot dog vendor was at Putin’s favorite table as a good host.

Despite his “shadowy” interests stretching from Libya to Sudan, Prigozhin is still involved in the Russian president’s food preparation.

In fact, an event organizer was surprised to learn this when she recently visited St. Petersburg, to be informed by the mayor that there was only one company to cater for her international event: Prigozhin.

“It was not a proposal,” said a friend of the organizer. “It was not negotiable. Prigozhin would take over the contract or there would be no event.”

While Prigozhin flies in his private jets, the leadership of the Kremlin’s private army (Wagner) has been assigned to Dmitri Utkin, a former member of the Russian special forces Spetsnaz, whose call sign was “W” from Wagner, the German. composer admired by Adolf Hitler.

“Utkin seems to have a preference for anything to do with the Third Reich,” Akimenko explained.

Acting in areas from Africa to the Middle East, his men have left behind a river of blood. Videos have surfaced on the internet with six Russian-speaking men breaking the arms and legs of a Syrian rebel army with a hammer, before beheading and dismembering him and burning his body in 2017.

The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta (one of the newspapers forced to lock up “false information” about the war in Ukraine) has identified one of the perpetrators as a member of Wagner. But the killers have never been prosecuted for complex mercenary problems with the jurisdictional part.

“It is almost impossible to be accountable,” said Sorcha MacLeod, who chairs the UN Human Rights Council’s working group on mercenaries. “In the Central African Republic we have seen the most serious human rights violations and possible war crimes go unpunished. Many who protested have disappeared and been tortured.”

Putin insisted that the mercenaries had nothing to do with the Russian state. “This is a blatant lie,” said Keir Giles, a senior Russian military expert at the Chatham House think tank. “They are training with the Russian army, working closely with it and receiving Russian military medals.”

He added: “It’s a tool (the Wagner group) used by the Russian state to explore the limits of ‘acceptable behavior’, it is refutable, it can be developed more easily by the Russian military and it is also more expendable. “The last few days have shown how indifferent the Russians are to the deaths of their soldiers. They care even less about the mercenaries.”

Some of the mercenaries are former convicts, such as Prigozhin, others are officers of the GRU military intelligence service. This is the same group of agents accused by Britain of trying to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a GRU insurgent, with the deadly neuroparalytic agent novichok in Salisbury in 2018. The Russians have denied any involvement in the incident.

The training is said to be taking place at a military base in the Krasnodar region, near the site of the GRU 10th Special Operations Brigade. Some experts believe that the mercenary force belongs to the GRU.

Its fighters are equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, including Mi-24 helicopter gunships, fighter jets, transport aircraft and anti-aircraft missile systems.

However, they are not “invulnerable” on the battlefield. On a mission to Mozambique in 2019, when Wagner’s 200 mercenaries were recruited to face Islamist insurgents in exchange for Russian access to natural resources, they suffered heavy losses in various ambushes and left the following year. “The jihadists knew the ground better,” said a source close to Wagner’s associates. “The Russians had never tried in the jungle again, they could not manage it.”

Wagner’s mercenaries had also suffered casualties in Syria, with dozens killed in a four-hour battle with US troops in 2018. Russian commanders insisted her men had nothing to do with them when US officers wirelessly urged them to stop her. attack.

The mercenaries also operated in Sudan, training a warlord’s troops in exchange for access to gold mines.

“Wagner is really good at locating gaps and creating openings for the Kremlin, especially in Africa,” said Paul Stronsky of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In the Central African Republic, in addition to providing military force to fight the rebels and protect the president, Prigozhin sought to forge friendships with the Kremlin. He has sponsored a soccer tournament and a Miss Centrafrique pageant.

The most striking piece of his propaganda, however, was Tourist, a war film that glorified the “Wagner men” as they are known in the area. Translated into Sango, it was shown in a packed stadium in Bangui, the capital, last year.

Since then, Prigozhin’s public relations efforts have shifted from movies to statues. One of them appeared near Bangui Stadium and shows Russian soldiers defending women and children. Monuments to the mercenaries have also appeared in Syria and Ukraine.

With information from thetimes

Source: Capital

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