Here we see a family completely oblivious to the world of humankind, apparently used to visitations from a member of that tribe and carrying on as usual:
But then reality must intrude, as we see this “visitor” from another world on a Metro bus:
One may wonder why the city of Norfolk, Virginia, all the way on the other side of the country, is looking for mercenaries here to sign-up to serve on their police force. I mean, the guy on the poster sure looks like he’s ready for hardcore “action.” I did a little research and discovered that there has been discord between local police and (of course) the black community there. Frankly, I think that a community police force “approved” by the locals who only have authority within that community would be best suited to deal with crime within that jurisdiction, because then the people complaining the loudest about police behavior would have only themselves to blame.
Not all "mercenaries" for questionable causes are men of course:
And then there is the government “sanctioned” mercenary group, which basically says “OK, we’ll allow your ‘recruiters’ to enter prisons and offer inmates pardons in return for fighting in Syria, Africa and Ukraine,” presuming that they will be more “motivated” to fight and die than the typical unwilling recruit. Not that this kind of "recruiting" is really "new" in Russia; more than one million men in prison for various crimes were given a "choice" to fight the Germans in World War II.
Thus the Wagner Group’s various atrocities and war crimes committed under the cover of being a “private” military force not beholden to any country’s laws, let alone Russia's, was seen as a “necessary evil” to Putin to propagate a war that this his “regular” forces didn’t seem to have the necessary stomach for.
But Yevgeny Prigozhin, the “leader” of Wagner, seemed to believe "his" army was not receiving sufficient material and arms from the government, due mainly to his rivalries and shared insults with various government and military officials. This all culminated in Prigozhin’s “mutiny” in which he expected disaffected regular army generals and soldiers to abandon Putin and join him in what amounted to a “Beer Hall Putsch,” with the same result, with even his “allies” demanding that he stand down.
The fact that the most recent information reveals that Prigozhin’s mutineers got as close as 100 miles (the gray circle) from Moscow indicates that their march was mostly unimpeded for over 500 miles after advancing from Rostov…
…makes one wonder what would have happened if the mutineers had actually entered Moscow; maybe we would have seen scenes like we saw on January 6, this time in the Kremlin. We are hearing that the mutineers feel “betrayed” by Prigozhin’s agreement to stand down and exile himself to Belarus, suggesting they were itching for a fight after months of being told that they were being used as cannon fodder by Putin and his treacherous generals. The government needed to be “overthrown” and converted to what Prigozhin called a “North Korea-style” dictatorship where the death penalty would be freely handed out to anyone who looked the wrong way (in North Korea, young people have been publicly executed for watching or listening to South Korean television shows or music).
The activities of the Wagner Group didn’t start out this way. It’s real “founder” and defacto “commander,” Dmitry Utkin, decided to set-up his own warrior-for-hire after a less than honorable stint in the Slavonic Corps, whose “religion” was some pagan-oriented rites and borrowed from Nazi cult worship.
It was sent out to Syria to aid the Assad regime with the “blessing” of a Russian intelligence, but quickly became an embarrassment and the Russian government denied sanctioning their activities. In a 2013 report by Foreign Policy entitled “The Case of the Keystone Kossacks,” Oleg Krinitsyn, who was “the head of RSB Group, Russia’s largest private military company,” said the Slavonic Corps “was a shambles from the start”:
Among those guys, photographed against a backdrop of Syrian equipment, festooned with weapons, I noticed a few of our former employees who had been dismissed because of their poor moral character. I saw guys with criminal records amongst them. This once again confirms that the aim of the recruiters was not to attract high-quality professionals, but just to plug a ‘hole’ with cannon fodder, and fast. And the boys were sent on contracts that resembled contracts for suicide missions. Right away, people signed a contract that included a will to bury their remains in their homeland or, if that proved impossible, in the nation where they died, and then be reburied in Russia. Dreadful.
Once in Syria, the recruits discovered that their “mission” was not in the service of official Russian policy or even the Syrian government, but in fact they were in the “pay” of local “warlords” fighting their own private war; according to one:
When they spoke to us in Russia, they explained that we were going on a contract with the Syrian government; they convinced us that everything was legal and in order. Like, our government and the FSB were on board and involved in the project. When we arrived there, it turned out that we were sent as gladiators, under a contract with some Syrian or other, who may or may not have a relationship with the government.… That meant that we were the private army of a local kingpin. But there was no turning back. As they said, a return ticket costs money, and we’ll work it off, whether we like it or not.
These “soldiers” principle occupation was to stay alive, which many failed to do, and when the survivors escaped back to Russia they found that they were regarded as little more than criminals breaking a law which had targeted jihadists in Muslim-majority parts of the Russian Federation. Utkin then decided to form his own mercenary organization; although some have expressed “confusion” about the origin of the naming of his new outfit, it has been asserted that Utkin had an “interest” in Nazi history, and Utkin named his group “Wagner” in honor of the German composer.
Utkin, as the defacto military commander, led the Wagner Group to fight as Russian proxies in the Donbas region in the years before the invasion of Ukraine, as well as in Africa and Syria, where Wagner’s activities put on them on the U.S. terrorist list (and those paying them as sponsors of terrorism). According to a 2016 Sky News report
For the equivalent of £3,000 a month, they say they were thrown into pitch battles and firefights with rebel factions - including Islamic State. Two of the group, Alexander and Dmitry, told Sky News they felt lucky to be alive. "It's 50-50," said Alexander (not his real name). "Most people who go there for the money end up dead. Those who fight for ideals, to fight against the Americans, American special-forces, some ideology - they have a better chance of survival. Approximately 500 to 600 people have died there," claimed Dmitry. "No one will ever find out about them…. that's the scariest thing. No one will ever know."
(Russia’s) Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned in February that the deployment of ground troops by foreign powers could result in a "world war".He seems to have excluded the use of Russian mercenaries from that calculation, however - although analysts are not surprised. The deployment of military contractors is consistent with the Russian take on 'hybrid-war', according to military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. He said: "Obviously (Wagner) does exist. These kind of 'volunteers' do appear in different war zones, where the Russian government wants them to appear. So first in Crimea, then in Donbass, now in Syria. But they have not been legalized up till now."
Alright, you say, but what about this other character, Prigozhin? A recent story in The New Yorker provides a “revised” explanation about how the Wagner Group came into being:
The precise origin of Wagner remains little more than a myth—a tale with more innuendo than hard facts—but it appears that Prigozhin offered himself as the moneyman and C.E.O. of a new mercenary outfit. Its military commander would be Dmitry Utkin, a former lieutenant colonel in the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence agency. Utkin’s alleged proclivities for Nazi ideology and cultural ephemera gave the group its name: “Wagner” was once Utkin’s call sign, apparently in a nod to Hitler’s favorite composer. (Wagner members and supporters often refer to the group as the “orchestra” and its fighters as “musicians.”)
In fact Prigozhin’s name only came up as a “co-founder” of the group after years of denying that he had any connection to Wagner until late last year. Prigozhin spent his whole life as a man on the make, spending nearly a decade in prison as a young man for committing robberies in high-rent neighborhoods. The New Yorker tells us that
He turned his past as a small-time bandit into a successful restaurant and catering business—in the early two-thousands, he hosted Putin and high-profile guests at his St. Petersburg establishments—which grew into a business empire that earned millions on contracts to provide meals to the Russian military and public schools. He was clever, nasty, boorish, with a shade more personality and spunk than most operators who nurtured their fiefdoms in the shadows of the Putin system. In 2013, he launched the Internet Research Agency otherwise known as the St. Petersburg troll farm, which came to employ hundreds of young people who spread propaganda, engaged in influence operations, and otherwise caused mischief on social networks, including in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential election in the U.S.
Prigozhin apparently hoped to use his private army in much the same that U.S. Marine Gen. Smedley Butler claimed he was used for in a 1933 speech:
I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism… I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.
According to Fortune, Prigozhin also sees deploying the Wagner Group as a money-making operation, most notably in Africa:
Overall, Wagner has done nearly nothing to make life better for Africans: its activities have served to entrench dictators and undermine democracies; to extend and deepen civil conflicts; to murder innocent civilians; to exploit natural resources for Russia’s gain; and to vilify the only alternative that Africans have to China for investment… Everywhere it goes, Wagner has been indifferent to human life, indiscriminately killing civilians as well as Islamic militants and other insurgents… Aside from the government payments it receives, Wagner has negotiated agreements for exclusive access to gold, diamonds and uranium resources in several places it operates in. These include the CAR, Mali and Sudan.
Why was Prigozhin so keen on sending his troops into the meat-grinder that was the battle for Bahhmut? Because he saw an opportunity to gain control of the salt and gypsum mines near the city as “payment” for his “services.”
Here we see a man who “rose” from common, ordinary thief to “Putin’s Chef” to operator of an armed gangster outfit to nearly untouchable status in a country for whom similar activities would lead to imprisonment or “mysterious” death. Prigozhin is still acting as if he is “untouchable” and boasting of “plans” to overthrow the Russian military leadership. Putin can make speeches denouncing threats to his own control, but he clearly is losing control of the “information war” that Prigozhin was “winning” insofar as his criticisms of the Russian war effort is concerned.
Unfortunately for Prigozhin, his time may be running out. One apparent ally, General Sergei Surovikin who knew of his plans and remained silent, has been arrested. Wagner forces have been “advised” to either be absorbed into the Russian regular military, go to Belarus and join their “leader” to be penned-up like cattle, or go home, where there are reports that former prison inmate recruits have re-offended with crimes like murder and rape. Many in Belarus have criticized its dictator and Putin puppet, Alexander Lukashenko, for allowing “criminals” safe haven in their country.
Meanwhile, a "high-ranking" Russian politician has called for the formation of a 7 million-man professional army to avoid relying on "private" armies, more than the combined number in the West, and indicative of how far Russia has removed itself from civilized society. Why would it need such an army against a West that only wants peaceful relations with a peaceful Russia? The only people "benefiting" from the war in Ukraine are those who like playing "war games" and seeing how Western arms stand-up to the "enemy's" military technology.
And now Putin—who has admitted that Prigozhin has been paid by the Russian government to deploy the Wagner Group, as well as his Concord “catering service” receiving government contracts to supply food to Russian forces—announced that there will be an investigation into Prigozhin's handling of the funds and if he pocketed more than his share of the money. He no doubt did, but Putin and the rest of his oligarch friends are also corrupt to the bone, and Putin was willing to overlook this “fault” until Prigozhin's mutiny.
As we have seen in the past, oligarchs accused of corruption or criticizing
Putin have died under those “mysterious” circumstances, and many have wondered
why Prigozhin was allowed to survive this long. If he is not "punished" in the "usual" way, then Putin's position will likely be seen as weakening even more. He's put himself between a rock and a hard place: he permitted a mercenary army to be a threat to his regime, but if he antagonizes it with threats or punishment, it may yet turn against him, and if there is a "war" going on inside the country, it will certainly cause people to wonder who the real "enemy" is.
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