{"id":42089,"date":"2023-02-26T15:54:24","date_gmt":"2023-02-26T16:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/?p=42089"},"modified":"2023-02-26T17:37:26","modified_gmt":"2023-02-26T17:37:26","slug":"vladimir-putins-dogs-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peymantaeidi.net\/stem-cell\/2023\/02\/26\/vladimir-putins-dogs-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Vladimir Putin\u2019s dogs of war"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Wagner Group embodies the trends that have come to define the Russian president\u2019s regime, which involve a deepening militarization of society and a world were criminals are above the law<\/h3>\n

For Russians, the name Wagner no longer calls to mind the famous 19th-century composer of Der Ring des Nibelungen \u2014 at least not directly. Instead, Russians associate the name with the Wagner Group, a company of mercenaries that has committed some of the worst atrocities in Ukraine and elsewhere.\n<\/p>\n

The company is now so bound up with Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s neo-imperial ambitions that it fancies itself as a rival to the Russian army \u2014 an institution that Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin openly mocks for its myriad failures in Ukraine.\n<\/p>\n

The Wagner Group has its origins in the \u201cSlavonic Corps,\u201d a Russian private mercenary unit that was formed in 2013 as part of Russia\u2019s intervention in Syria\u2019s civil war. In those days, its battlefield effectiveness was so poor that when it encountered the Islamic State, it was crushed and forced to retreat to Russia.\n<\/p>\n

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\n \"image\"\n <\/div>\n

Illustration: Mountain People<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

However members of the group were soon recruited to serve as the \u201clittle green men\u201d who invaded and helped annex Crimea in 2014.\n<\/p>\n

That was the year Prigozhin formally incorporated the Wagner Group, deriving its name from the call sign of one of its commanders, former GRU lieutenant-colonel Dmitry Utkin.\n<\/p>\n

Rumor has it that Utkin himself chose the name as an homage to Adolf Hitler\u2019s admiration for Richard Wagner.\n<\/p>\n

In any case, the Slavonic Corps was rebranded as \u201cPrivate Military Company Wagner\u201d in time for the group to participate in the opening assault on Ukraine.\n<\/p>\n

After committing mass atrocities in several African countries, including Mali and the Central African Republic, where it funded itself by exploiting the continent\u2019s natural resources, the Wagner Group managed to lower its profile for a brief period. In the years leading up to Putin\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, hardly anyone was monitoring the group\u2019s behavior.\n<\/p>\n

It was not until May last year that Human Rights Watch published a comprehensive report on Wagner\u2019s crimes in the Central African Republic.\n<\/p>\n

Likewise, before the group\u2019s military operations and war crimes in Ukraine began to attract international scrutiny, little attention was given to its close links to Putin. Until Feb. 24 last year, anyone who decried the Putin regime\u2019s terrorist methods was dismissed as alarmist or even dangerous. The higher priority was \u2014 and to some extent still is \u2014 to avoid \u201cprovoking\u201d Putin or \u201ccrossing any red lines\u201d that could lead to \u201cescalation.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

However, Putin\u2019s personal ties to the Wagner Group were already well known, thanks to investigations by Russian journalists. Putin awarded medals to Wagner commanders \u2014 including Uktin \u2014 during an official ceremony in 2016.\n<\/p>\n

By that point, the news agency fontanka.ru had already reported that the group was run by \u201cPutin\u2019s cook,\u201d Prigozhin, himself a former convict who received a 12-year prison term in 1981 on charges of robbery and assault.\n<\/p>\n

Decorated with the Russian Federation\u2019s highest military order, Prigozhin has long been known to oversee a transnational operation with business not only in the Central African Republic, but also in Syria and Sudan.\n<\/p>\n

Novaya Gazeta has reported that Prigozhin finances the Wagner Group from these countries\u2019 budgetary funds, with the value of government tenders received by his companies doubling between 2020 and last year to 83.4 billion rubles (US$1.1 billion).\n<\/p>\n

MASTER OF VOLGOGRAD<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

Like the war in Ukraine and Putin\u2019s previous imperial adventures in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria, the emergence of the Wagner Group \u2014 and its role in committing terrorism by commercial proxy \u2014 is consistent with Russia\u2019s political development under Putin. The regime rests on the corrupt control of privatized capital and business interests, and Wagner\u2019s operations embody the two trends that have come to define it: re-Stalinization and neomedievalism.\n<\/p>\n

Re-Stalinization has been a cornerstone of Putin\u2019s propaganda since early in his administration. He has consistently sought to exalt his regime in the refracted glory of the Soviet Union\u2019s victory over Nazi Germany in the \u201cGreat Patriotic War.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

This ultra-patriotic propaganda has become increasingly important as Russia\u2019s economy has deteriorated. Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, Putin has had to divert public grievances over the hardships created by his own mismanagement by appealing to an idealized past and seeking to rekindle imperial ambitions. In the process, he has presided over a deepening militarization of society.\n<\/p>\n

For this ideology to work, Stalin \u2014 the Red Army commander in chief \u2014 had to be rehabilitated. Over the years, monuments to Stalin have been erected across Russia.\n<\/p>\n

In preparation for Putin\u2019s visit to Volgograd this month to commemorate the 1942-1943 Battle of Stalingrad, the city unveiled a bust of Stalin and temporarily restored Volgograd\u2019s wartime name. In his speech at the ceremony, Putin trotted out his usual arguments about the importance of historical memory.\n<\/p>\n

The Putin regime has relied on such exhortations for 20 years. Numerous state-sponsored films and cultural productions have glorified the Great Patriotic War and lionized Stalin personally. The primetime TV series Smersh, for example, celebrates Stalin\u2019s secret police and their \u201cheroism\u201d during World War II.\n<\/p>\n

Created in 1942 to \u201ckill spies,\u201d the SMERSH terrorized soldiers and civilians alike, especially in occupied Eastern Europe.\n<\/p>\n

When an earlier version of the series aired in 2013, it provoked a heated response, with opposition politician Leonid Gozman saying that the secret police should be treated as criminals, like the Nazi SS, rather than as heroes.\n<\/p>\n

In response, journalist Ulyana Skoibeda took to the pages of a top pro-Kremlin newspaper to lament \u201cthat the Nazis did not make lampshades out of the ancestors of today\u2019s liberals\u201d \u2014 hinting at Gozman\u2019s Jewish ancestry.\n<\/p>\n

Soon thereafter, Gozman lost his job at the state-owned nanotechnology company Rosnano.\n<\/p>\n

PRISONERS FOR WAR<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

Prigozhin\u2019s recruitment of Russian inmates convicted of violent crimes is another throwback to Stalinism\u2019s golden age. The use of prisoners as cannon fodder dates to World War II, when the Red Army formed penal military units, or Shtafbaty, from Gulag detainees.\n<\/p>\n

One of the jobs of SMERSH, an umbrella organization of three counterintelligence agencies, was to take positions behind these unreliable regiments and shoot \u201cfleeing cowards.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Then, after Stalin signed his infamous \u201cNot a step back\u201d order on July 28, 1942, regular regiments of conscripts were treated the same way. Anyone who was deemed a \u201cpanic-monger\u201d was to be shot.\n<\/p>\n

Russian human rights activists have said that the Wagner Group is serving the same function in Ukraine, as are Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov\u2019s regiments.\n<\/p>\n

Andrei Medvedev, a Wagner Group commander who recently defected to Norway, said that conscripts and prisoners who refuse to fight are being executed in front of newcomers \u2014 a tactic straight out of the Stalinist Red Army playbook.\n<\/p>\n

A Ukrainian commander said that Wagner soldiers use prisoners to \u201cadvance under fire … littering the land with their bodies.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

To distract from Russian war crimes, Putin blames the Ukrainians and accuses them of doing the same, recently saying that Ukrainians are shooting \u201ctheir own people in the back.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

The Soviet security authorities always regarded felons as exploitable proxies who could be used to suppress political dissent. Putin and his cronies \u2014 many of whom, like Putin, served in the KGB \u2014 are no different. In its own recruitment of prisoners, the Wagner Group has sought out career criminals, holding out the promise of a presidential pardon to those who survive six months at the front.\n<\/p>\n

Russian human rights activists say that most of the convicts who appeared in a recent photograph with Prigozhin are felons convicted of murder and other violent crimes. Having returned from Ukraine with their lives, it is assumed that they served as enforcers, rather than as frontline troops.\n<\/p>\n

Addressing these \u201cveterans\u201d on their return home, Prigozhin said: \u201cYou have learned to kill the enemy,\u201d before beseeching them not to \u201cuse this practice in the territories where it is prohibited.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

However, it would be a mistake to say that these trained war criminals pose a new threat to Russian society. After all, the entire power structure that Putin has built, in which the Russian Federal Security Service (the KGB\u2019s successor) and resource mafias have a firm grip on the commanding heights of the economy and politics, follows the criminal customs and rules that emerged from the Soviet and post-Soviet prison camps.\n<\/p>\n

Prigozhin\u2019s pardoned criminals should feel right at home.\n<\/p>\n

General Andrei Gurulev, head of the State Duma Committee on Defense, has said he is confident that the ex-con mercenaries would make good politicians.\n<\/p>\n

If some do secure seats in parliament, they would merely add to the ranks of lawmakers with criminal backgrounds.\n<\/p>\n

The ease with which Russian society has accepted the war in Ukraine and the return of inhumane wartime methods attests to the success of re-Stalinization. If some considerable portion of the population did not still support the regime, it would not have been possible to mobilize 300,000 more conscripts for an absurd war that has already generated 200,000 Russian casualties.\n<\/p>\n

NEOMEDIEVAL VILLAINS<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

The other prong of Putin\u2019s political project is neomedievalism. He has increasingly mined the Russian Middle Ages to offer the closest thing he has to a vision of the future. Even though the Russian Constitution and Russian Penal Code criminalize participation or financing in mercenary forces abroad and in Russia, neomedieval private armies, such as the Wagner Group, fight for their warlords\u2019 interests, and ignore the Constitution.\n<\/p>\n

By putting criminals above the law, as Ivan the Terrible\u2019s oprichnina did, these armies embody a special legal regime that denigrates the individual rights of ordinary citizens and showcases the arbitrary rule that has existed in Russia for more than 20 years.\n<\/p>\n

While the authority to administer punishment in modern states belongs to public institutions, Putin\u2019s regime privatizes it, permitting warlords to use their armies for whatever purposes they see fit, making the individuals who rule them a new political force.\n<\/p>\n

The question is, of course, how long will Putin be able to control his villeins? Given Prigozhin\u2019s escalating attacks on military officials, including his recent accusation of \u201ctreason\u201d against Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, this might be a rather urgent matter for Putin.\n<\/p>\n

After all, Prigozhin is not alone. In addition to Wagner, Russia\u2019s private armies include outfits such as Putin\u2019s semi-private National Guard and Kadyrov\u2019s Chechen National Guard, as well as the military wings of agencies, such as the GRU\u2019s private army \u201cRedut.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

In Moscow, the so-called \u201cSobyanin\u2019s regiment\u201d began recruiting mercenaries in July last year.\n<\/p>\n

While critics of the US have tried to compare the Wagner Group to US private military contractors such as Academi (formerly Blackwater), the Wagner Group\u2019s eager participation in carrying out atrocities against Ukrainian civilians clearly sets it in a league of its own.\n<\/p>\n

Prigozhin himself has contributed to this impression with an \u201cunverified video\u201d of a \u201ctraitor\u201d being executed with a sledgehammer \u2014 an obvious aping of the public executions recorded and broadcast by the Islamic State and other similar groups.\n<\/p>\n

In another, less widely noticed video, Prigozhin offers the European Parliament the \u201cgift\u201d of a blood-stained sledgehammer with the Wagner logo on it.\n<\/p>\n

Sergei Mironov, chairman of the A Just Russia \u2014 For the Truth party, said that he had received a similar sledgehammer from Prigozhin as a gift.\n<\/p>\n

To be sure, the growth of mercenary armies is a serious issue for any democracy, but outfits such as Academi do not exist to terrorize civilians or shoot army conscripts in the back, and US politicians do not endorse any of the alleged abuses that they might have committed in war zones.\n<\/p>\n

After a year of war and atrocities, the West\u2019s sanctions against the Wagner Group remain woefully unimpressive. Yet the days of worrying about \u201cprovoking\u201d Putin are long gone.\n<\/p>\n

Putinism is a criminal enterprise that represents a major threat to world peace and democracy. The international community must put an end to it, which ultimately will require defeating all of Russia\u2019s militaries.\n<\/p>\n

Dina Khapaeva is a professor of Russian at the Georgia Institute of Technology\u2019s School of Modern Languages.<\/i>\n<\/p>\n

Copyright: Project Syndicate<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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