In the Ukraine war, a shadowy key player emerges: Russia’s army of mercenaries

BERLIN — As Russia suffers one devastating military setback after another in Ukraine, a key player in the conflict is stepping out of the shadows: the private army known as the Wagner Group.

Despite the Kremlin’s longtime practice of publicly distancing itself from the paramilitary organization, Wagner mercenaries — who first emerged during Russia’s 2014 conquest of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula — have taken part in some of the most consequential battles of the 7-month-old war, according to Western military analysts.

Now, at a potentially fateful juncture in the fighting, experts say Russia is likely to become even more dependent on the private army, which has been implicated in human rights abuses in Ukraine as well as other conflict zones, including Syria, Libya, Mali and Central African Republic.

“The more dire the situation gets for the regular (Russian) army, the more it will be required to lean on private mercenaries like the Wagner Group,” said Christopher Faulkner, an assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

As finger-pointing has intensified over recent battlefield losses in Ukraine’s south and east, the group’s self-declared chieftain, oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, has become increasingly virulent in his criticism of the Russian war effort.

“Send all these bastards to the front, barefoot and with machine guns,” a Wagner-linked Telegram channel quoted him as saying in an apparent reference to the senior military leadership.

Prigozhin, who only last month publicly claimed to be the head of what is formally called PMC Wagner, for private military company, unleashed his critique after Russian forces fled or were wiped out in the eastern Ukrainian city of Lyman, a key operations hub.

The city was recaptured last week by Ukrainian troops a day after Putin declared the province in which it is located to be part of Russia — an annexation that most of the outside world, and of course Ukraine, rejected as illegal. Russia’s most hawkish commentators, who champion the war on Telegram channels and state television, reacted with fury to the loss of Lyman, but 61-yearold Prigozhin went further than most.

Prigozhin’s comments came on the heels of another eye-catching recent episode: the surfacing in September of video, widely shared online, which showed him at a Russian state-run prison recruiting inmates to fight in Ukraine.

Previously, convicted rapists and murderers were not accepted as volunteers, but according to the group Russia Behind Bars, which works to support prisoners’ families, Wagner is throwing open its doors to anyone willing to risk service on the front lines, no matter their crimes.