Wagnerism: what next

2021

The Wagner Group has long benefitted from its sense of ambiguity, enabling its aggressive pursuit of Russian foreign policy interests worldwide. In this thesis, I argue that the Wagner Group is a state actor and should be recognized as such by the West. I present four cases of Wagner involvement in intrastate conflicts. I demonstrate that, across all cases, the Group is fully integrated into Russia's foreign policy infrastructure, benefits from all the resources and privileges of a state actor, closely coordinates with Russian state organs, and exhibits near-ubiquitous coordination with Russian interests. In this thesis, I broadly incorporate evidence derived from Open-Source Russian and English-language primary materials, including leaked video and audio, investigative journalism, interviews, and social media. By labeling Wagner as a Russian state actor in this thesis, I take a critical first step towards dispelling the Group's ambiguity and aim to inform related U.S. polic...

International Theory, 2010

MO Magazine

Two phenomena have been on the rise in recent years: privatised warfare and ultra-nationalist extremism in Russia. Its outflow is the infamous Wagner Group, the private military company that does not even officially exist. In recent years, Wagner has occupied more and more space in Africa.

Asian Blog of International Law, 2023

Recently President Putin officially revealed that the Wagner group had been financed by the Russian State. Specifically, he declared having financed the group for around 1bln dollars between May 2022 and May 2023. With more and more details surfacing regarding the extent of the relationship between the Wagner group and the Russian Federation, the connivance between the two actors never looked so obvious. This is an opportunity to revisit the thorny problem of the attribution of private acts to a State under international law.

The Wagner Group is a Russian private military company that has been active in Ukraine and Syria. In early 2018, reports of the combat deaths of over 200 Wagner personnel in eastern Syria shed an important light on the gray zone of Russian military operations in which such paramilitary forces are deployed. Meanwhile, Wagner's ongoing expansion across the globe is providing key lessons for understanding the evolution and likely transformation of this type of organization in the future. Given Moscow's reliance on non-linear means of warfare and the frequent desire to maintain " plausible deniability " in its operations abroad, exploring and analyzing the Wagner Group offers a deeper insight into Russia's role and modus operandi in conflicts across the world, especially when using Private Military Companies (PMC).

Baku Research Institute, 2023

Private military contractors (PMCs) re-emerged as a popular phenomenon in the post-Cold War era, particularly in the early 2000s, when the exodus of war veterans from Western militaries expanded the pool of PMCs. As of today, PMCs operate in most (about 110) countries. Among the top 30 PMCs in terms of financial resources and recruited mercenaries, most were established or have their headquarters in the US (13) or the UK (6).[i] Traditionally, PMCs operate mainly in active armed conflict zones or areas where the political and social situations are unstable. In this vein, their activities are usually coordinated with the foreign policy aims of the countries where they are headquartered.

An Analysis of Richard Wagner's Political and Religious Views

Cogito, 1994

Two philosophers who – against the background of their agreement, on the one hand, that Wagner is one of the great masters and, on the other, that he is an anti-Semite – discuss the question of whether his operas, in particular The Ring, can be given an anti-Semitic interpretation.