Putin’s shadow warriors come to light – on the trail of feared Wagner group rights Giorgia Meloni sworn in as Italy’s new head of government

The drone of cannons can be heard from afar. Both warring sides have hidden their weapons in the hills surrounding the heavily disputed city of Bakhmut. On a hilltop, an American Himars rocket launcher fires its GPS-guided missiles into the sky.

A Ukrainian articulated truck unloads a Soviet-era self-propelled howitzer into the street. The driver immediately brings the heavy vehicle into position in a field next door – hidden behind some trees. “We can fire our grenades for up to ten minutes before we risk being seen and then answered,” explains a Ukrainian gunner.

Once a turret fires, it can be spotted by enemy drones, or an artillery reconnaissance radar on the far side of the front, which determines the trajectory of the projectiles and calculates the exact location of the turret.

The Kremlin wants to conquer Bakhmut at any cost

Bachmut has a small, reasonably developed train station and is not unimportant from a military point of view, because from here an important connecting road leads to villages that are also fought over. The Kremlin looks set to conquer Bakhmut at any cost. The town is part of the Donetsk Oblast in Donbass, one of four Ukrainian regions that President Putin has annexed to Russia, although his forces control only part of it.

The spearheads of the attackers are often mercenaries of the so-called Wagner Group, a private army of Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. He is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s cook” because he has often entertained the former Secret Service lieutenant colonel. Prigozhin’s mercenaries repeatedly attacked the well-defended and fortified Bakhmut head-on. They suffered great losses, but eventually managed to get closer and closer to the city. The front section in Donetsk Oblast is one of the few where Moscow’s troops are still making progress.

We are by the river, barely 100 feet wide, which cuts the city in two. The western side with the city center is under Ukrainian control, but in the east it is not so clear. The eastern quarters belong to the “grey zone”, ie to the disputed area.

A pedestrian bridge crosses the river, but the Ukrainians blew up the crossing just to be safe. Citizens who have shopped in the west now use a half-submerged boardwalk to get to their homes on the east side with food and bottled water.

On the far eastern edge is Art Winery, a sparkling wine factory that dates back to the post-war Soviet era. The Communists in the Kremlin also wanted to pop the champagne corks as victors against Hitler, so a winery had to be established. The ideal production and storage location was found in a former plaster mine, in which the Germans shot and buried an estimated 3,000 Jews during the war.

Wagner boss with SS runes and other Nazi tattoos

Although Bakhmut is about 400 kilometers from the Crimean peninsula, the well-known Crimean sparkling wine was also produced here. According to company records, there are several million bottles of sparkling wine in the caves of the old gypsum mine, and against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that some locals accuse the Wagner mercenaries of repeatedly making claims to the Art Winery to produce sparkling wine there.

Other Ukrainians, on the other hand, believe that their own army has nestled in the winery’s underground facilities. However, on the Ukrainian side there is a strict ban on alcohol. The rumors cannot be verified because it is too dangerous for a journalist to visit the eastern part of the city.

The Wagner group had its first mercenary use not far from Bakhmut, when Moscow sparked an uprising in the Donbass in 2014 and the pro-Russian separatists began to enrich and fight each other. Wagner soldiers didn’t just fight against the Ukrainians, they just killed those pro-Russian militia leaders who wouldn’t bow to Moscow’s dictates without ifs and buts. Then and now the military leader of the mercenary group is called Dmitri Utkin.

He is a bald neo-Nazi who has SS runes and other Nazi tattoos on his torso. The 52-year-old goes by the battle name Wagner because he admires not only Adolf Hitler, but also his favorite composer, Richard Wagner. Utkin grew up in central Ukraine and later became a lieutenant colonel in the Russian military intelligence service GRU.

After the first operations in Donbass, Utkin led his mercenaries into Syria to support the brutal regime of dictator Assad. In 2015, Russia intervened, mainly with the air force. The Wagner mercenaries did the dirty work on the ground, even though they didn’t even officially exist. Entrepreneur Prigozhin, to whose Konkord group the Wagner Group belongs, for years vehemently denied having anything to do with this group.

But since the Wagner group fought in Isium, which has since been recaptured by the Ukrainians and deployed to Bakhmut, Prigozhin’s likeness has also appeared on flyers for the private army. The businessman is considered to be close to Putin, and his mercenaries are deployed where the interests of the Kremlin’s foreign policy require it.

Such actions do not always end successfully. In Syria, the regime promised one of Prigozhin’s companies a share of the proceeds from oil fields as the mercenaries recapture areas for Damascus. In February 2018, Russian mercenaries, along with Syrian troops, attempted to capture an oil field from US-backed Kurdish militias in the northeast of the country.

Because American special forces were also stationed there, the attack ended in a debacle. Himar missiles and US Air Force attacks pulverized the attackers, also killing an unknown number of Russians. In addition, the Wagner group became known outwardly for their brutality in Syria.

In front of mobile phone cameras, Russian mercenaries killed a captured Syrian with a sledgehammer. They chopped off his hands and head with a shovel before dousing the body with gasoline and burning it.

Prisoners recruited for deployment in Ukraine

Libya, where the Wagner Group mainly provided logistical support to an attack by an anti-government militia on the capital Tripoli, was also defeated in 2020 after Turkish drones fired on the attackers. In Mali, on the other hand, the Wagner Group is now dealing with gold mine revenues and in the Central African Republic for access to diamond mines.

However, the Wagner Group is now experiencing by far the largest and most expensive operation in Ukraine. Company boss Prigozhin, who spent nine years in prison in the Soviet Union for, among other things, a robbery, was filmed in a Russian penal colony in the summer while recruiting prisoners for his company. If the convicts survive their deployment in Ukraine, they can expect freedom and a handsome reward.

In the propaganda of the Wagner group, the mercenaries are often referred to as musicians who have come to know the whole world during their international concert tours. Almost all Wagner fighters operating in Ukraine come from parts of the former Soviet Union.

In addition to deployment at the front, they are now also working on the construction of the so-called Wagner Line. This is a system of anti-tank obstacles and defense positions. These are intended to stop a future attack by Ukrainian tanks far behind the current front in Donbass. (aargauerzeitung.ch)