Meduza , a leading Russian opposition website, has reported the Russian military has severely blurred the lines between mercenaries and its regular military in an effort to recover its losses in the middle of the illegal invasion of Ukraine.
The report makes a variety of claims concerning the Russian armed force’s status in Ukraine, including outlining a far larger function of mercenaries than previously believed. It claims the Russian Ministry of Defense has both counted on Russia’s elite mercenary team, Wagner, as its “main strike force” and also as a significant recruiting device since before the fighting started in February.
Wagner is a private military company or ‘PMC’ shrouded in mystery, not dissimilar from Blackwater here in the US, though it is thought to have deep ties to the Kremlin and Russian military, according to the Center for Strategic and International Researches. It is believed to be run and funded by Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch within President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. The team was first seen in Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and has since then taken part in fighting in Syria, Libya, and throughout Africa. Lots of analysts see it as a proxy of the Russian state.
Meduza claims that Wagner just appeared in this year’s Ukraine project in late March, taking a significant part in the battle. “The Russian army and other mercenary groups performed so poorly on the battlefield, however, that Moscow eventually called on Wagner’s regulars,” the publication composed. The initial team of hirelings deployed in February, coming from the firm “Redoubt,” were obviously mostly erased.
Every resource that spoke to Meduza asserted that recruiting for Russia’s mercenary teams has actually acted as a “secret mobilization,” generating a continual stream of soldiers without distressing the residential situation. In return, “the process has completely erased the boundary between mercenary groups, regular troops, and ‘volunteers.'”
In spite of a concern of harming its prestige via the “secret mobilization,” Wagner has verified reliable in battle, obviously being “leased” to front-line units. Most of Wagner’s “nucleus,” from eastern Ukrainian towns currently being contested, joined the war for ideological reasons, with one expert telling Meduza that “they came to crush the Ukes with the idea of settling the score for their own [who were killed in 2014 and 2015].”
The record additionally information troubles within Wagner. One expert claimed that a squad leader was “fragged,” the act of purposefully killing or wounding a premium police officer, after the squad leader bought his soldiers into a fight without air or artillery assistance, while an additional suffered an absence of ammo.
Prigozhin refutes the contents of the report and has declared Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee to seek felony charges against Meduza for spreading out “false info” concerning the Russian army and also treason, according to Meduza.
