In 2016, they posed proudly in the Kremlin alongside Vladimir Putin, their chests covered with medals received for the capture of Palmyra, in Syria. Today, twelve days after the brief mutiny of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s lieutenants have once again become pariahs. Dmitry Outkin (aka “Wagner”), Alexander Kuznetsov (“Ratibor”), Andrei Bogatov (“Brodiaga”) and Andrei Trochev (“Sedoi”) keep a low profile. As their boss flies his personal plane back and forth between Russia and Belarus in an attempt to salvage scraps of his media, restaurant and mercenary empire, his henchmen face a complex choice.
Will they also take refuge in Belarus, at the invitation of dictator Alexander Lukashenko, while waiting for the storm to pass? While qualifying the June 24 mutiny as “treachery” and of “stab in the back”Vladimir Putin thanked “Wagner’s soldiers and commanders for not shedding blood”. “You can sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense [russe] or move to Belarus », he had indicated the day after the events which nevertheless cost the lives of a dozen Russian soldiers and shook power. For the head of the Kremlin, who was careful not to mention a name, or even to draw a line between traitors and heroes, “the vast majority” Wagner mercenaries remain “Patriots of Russia”.
“The army disgusts them”
The evaporation of Yevgueni Prigojine’s henchmen parallels that of a handful of Russian generals known to be close to the Wagner Group. Neither Sergei Surovikin, commander-in-chief of the aerospace forces, nor Vladimir Alexeïev, deputy director of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, have reappeared in public since June 24, when rumors of the arrest of the first circulated.
Wagner’s Commanders “will never join the army”says categorically Marat Gabidullin, who knows them personally for having himself been one of them until 2019. “From Syria [où le Groupe Wagner a combattu à partir de 2015], contempt for the army is too strong, pursues the former mercenary, author of the book Me, Marat, ex-commander of the Wagner army (Michel Lafon, 2022). Regular army commanders arrogated to themselves awards and medals that rest on nothing, while the crucial battles on the ground were carried out by the Wagners. » After a year and a half of war in Ukraine, during which the group boasts of having succeeded in the crucial breakthrough of Popasna (in the oblast of Luhansk, in May 2022) and of having conquered Bakhmout, in June, “the gap has only widened, he assures. The army disgusts them even more today”.
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