Richard Engel's New Documentary on the Wagner Group and Its Threat to the World

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, July 7) at 10 MS-NBC showed an intriguing documentary on Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, the paramilitary organization he assembled in Russia with the support of Vladimir Putin and built up over the years into a huge private army with its own income streams, mainly from taking over gold and precious-gem mines in the Central African Republic and other African countries. The show was called Revolt from Within: The Rise of Wagner, and though this wasn’t mentioned here other sources I’ve read said that “Wagner” was indeed named for the German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner the composer was a musical genius; he was also an anti-Semite who wrote a bizarre essay called “Judaism in Music” in 1850 and was Hitler’s favorite composer. Apparently Hitler’s admiration for him was what led Prigozhin and Wagner’s original founder, Dmitri Utkin, to name their private army after him, whereas those of us who love Wagner’s music but loathe his racism have either to accept or forgive that about him the way Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite figures in American history even though he owned 300 slaves. According to the Wikipedia page on Wagner, it started in 2014 by Utkin and Prigozhin, but Revolt from Within host and NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel traced their origins farther back than that, to the slow disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. According to Engel, by the 1980’s Russian organized crime had essentially taken over St. Petersburg (or, as it was then still called, “Leningrad”), and Prigozhin rose from petty thievery to become an official in the so-called “Russian Mafia.” He also attracted the attention of Vladimir Putin, then a minor official in the Russian intelligence service assigned to his native St. Petersburg.

When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991 Putin rose to mayor of St. Petersburg and then to the presidency of the Russian Federation, and Prigozhin formed a catering company that serviced Putin’s official dinners – an indication of the high level of trust Putin had in Prigozhin that he would eat what Prigozhin and his staff prepared without having it tasted first. This led to Prigozhin acquiring the nickname “Putin’s Chef.” As president of Russia, Putin found the Wagner Group useful, first in carrying out his intervention in the civil war in Syria (2015-2018), where Putin wanted to keep dictator Bashir al-Assad in power (which he did) and he sent Wagner forces to avoid the potential political consequences of using actual Russian military people. Putin’s next assignment for Wagner was the Central African Republic, where they provided security for president Faustin-Archange Touadéra and other top C.A.R. officials. They also took over a flourishing gold mine and drove out or killed the indigenous workers, and Engel interviewed one woman whose husband, along with seven other miners, was killed by Wagner people and buried in a mass grave. Taking over that gold mine and other mining operations in the C.A.R. gave Wagner an independent funding stream, from which they raked in billions of dollars, besides the subsidies they were getting from Putin’s government. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and their advance bogged down in the face of unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance, Putin called in Wagner – which had already fought in Ukraine on Russia’s side in Crimea and the separatist Donbas region in the east – and Wagner agreed. Wagner launched a campaign to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in late September 2022.

According to the Wagner Wikipedia page, before that it had sent in commandos to assassinate Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky and decapitate Ukraine’s leadership, but Zelensky and the other targets survived. Engel said Wagner targeted Bakhmut despite its lack of strategic importance because obliterating it would be a powerful marketing tool for Wagner to ally itself with authoritarian governments around the world. They succeeded in reducing Bakhmut to rubble – the images of the almost totally destroyed Bakhmut, with the dead bodies of children, other innocent civilians and soldiers littering the streets, are some of the most powerful moments in this film – but Prigozhin later claimed that his enemies in the official Russian Ministry of Defense, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, overall commander of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, were deliberately sabotaging Wagner’s forces and getting them killed by refusing to supply them enough ammunition. Prigozhin made this claim on June 23, 2023 and then marched his forces into Russia, taking over the city of Rostov-on-Don where Russia’s general staff is headquartered and from which Russia’s war against Ukraine is being commanded. He then marched his forces towards Moscow, only just days after Prigozhin’s attempted rebellion started, it ended abruptly. The official word was that Alexander Lukashenko, president of neighboring Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) and a hard-core Putin ally, had brokered a deal by which Prigozhin would be given asylum in Belarus and Wagner soldiers would be invited to join the regular Russian military.

At this point no one outside Russia knows just where Prigozhin is, whether Putin is living up to whatever promises were made to Prigozhin to get him to stand down, or whether Prigozhin’s mutiny, coup attempt, rebellion or whatever it was is still going on. Given what we know about how Vladimir Putin treats his real or perceived enemies – including sending assassins to target them wherever they are in the world (he had a dissident scientist fatally poisoned with plutonium after he and his daughter had fled to presumed safety in Britain) – it’s hard to imagine that Prigozhin is long for this world, if indeed he’s still alive as of this writing. But Prigozhin’s brief success at directly challenging Putin has shaken the perception of invincibility on which his power, like that of most dictators, rests. As Russian émigré Masha Gessen wrote in the June 26 New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/prigozhin-showed-russians-that-they-have-a-choice), “Some things that shocked Western observers, such as Prigozhin’s statement that the war in Ukraine was started under false pretenses, will probably easily vanish from consciousness. The specifics of what he said matter little. What’s important is that he tapped into a reservoir of bitter suspicion: Russians always suspect that they are being lied to, yet they have no choice but to support those who lie to them. Prigozhin gave them a choice, by driving tanks through the streets of Rostov.” The good news is that Prigozhin’s bizarre temper tantrum might actually start the unraveling of Putin’s regime; the bad news is it might lead to something even more authoritarian and brutal, either Prigozhin himself (or someone like him) assuming control of Russia and running an even nastier dictatorship than Putin’s, or the entire country degenerating into chaos and civil war, leading to the grim possibility of a nuclear-armed nation with various factions having access to the nukes and threatening to use them.