Remember. On June 23, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, rebelled against the military command in Moscow. His troops then headed straight towards the Russian capital. Called a few months earlier to Ukraine to support the conflict led by Vladimir Putin, the militia and its main leaders turned against the authority of the Russian president.
This march towards the Kremlin, then in a state of alert, will however be short-lived. Warlord Prigojine – a former criminal who converted to catering before embarking on dubious financial affairs – begins an about-face in less than 24 hours that is as spectacular as it is unexpected. Two months to the day after his aborted mutiny, the 62-year-old billionaire who became an outcast was the victim of a mysterious plane crash, which also took away numbers 2 and 3 of the organization.
But what remains today of Wagner, this ultraviolent private military company with a strong presence in Africa, but whose ambitions in Russia ended up damaging the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, to the point of making the pillars tremble of the power of Vladimir Putin himself?
If we are to believe the in-depth and very well documented investigation by Lou Osborn, investigator for the British NGO Center for Information Resilience, and Dimitri Zufferey, research journalist at Radio Télévision Suisse, the paramilitary group is a lever of influence and a diplomatic instrument too important for the Kremlin to let go. As Vitali Perfilev, formerly of the Foreign Legion and representative of Wagner in the Central African Republic, points out: “You can call us Wagner, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Stravinsky, that doesn’t change the meaning of our activity. »
Wagner should therefore most likely survive on the ashes of Prigozhin’s organization, which leaves behind an enormous economic empire with multiple ramifications. It is these still functional links that the book meticulously dissects page after page. Thus, the Wagnerian nebula, described as a sprawling mafia organization, is like the Lernaean hydra, the authors note. The group continues to be connected to hundreds of more or less legal entities, which operate in finance, IT, the oil industry or in arms trafficking.
“The group is present on all fronts: military, political, strategic and economic. It is there to allow Russia to gain ground and wage wars where it is not officially present,” underline the authors, members of All Eyes on Wagner, a collective specializing in open source research. , composed of lawyers, academics, journalists and cybersecurity experts.
We also learn that the organization, far from being content with its military activities alone, exploits the raw materials of several countries under its control, such as Syrian oil, the forests of the Central African Republic or the mines of Sudan.