INTERNATIONAL SECURITY The Wagner Group: A terrorist organisation with Russian characteristics

The product of Russian state sponsorship, the Wagner Group has benefitted from the profits of exported violence and the allure of ethno-nationalist extremism, writes Kyrylo Cyril Kutcher.

Private military company (PMC) the Wagner Group is an organisation orchestrated by the Russian foreign military intelligence agency (also known by its Soviet-era abbreviation GRU). The Group has fought on behalf of and acted in the interests of the Russian state since 2014 in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Mali, and the Central African Republic (CAR), among other countries.

For its crimes, Wagner has been formally designated as a terrorist organisation by Estonia, Lithuania, France, the United Kingdom, and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In the United States, a bill has been introduced to Congress to designate the group a foreign terrorist organisation under the HARM Act 2023 , and the US Treasury has already designated it a transnational criminal organisation.

Leading terrorism scholar Katarzyna Maniszewska classifies the Wagner Group’s activities as “mass scale international systemic state supported terrorism”.

Her definition of Wagner as not simply a criminal but a terrorist organisation is based on five conditions: (i) conducting violence (tortures, executions, indiscriminate killings of people and destruction of residential areas) to (ii) have a psychological effect (instilling fear), (iii) intentionally (in a planned and organised manner), (iv) illegally (conducting military operation in a country whose government did not issue an official consent to it), while (v) being ideologically motivated (nationalistic, aligned with Russia’s foreign policy).

This article starts by outlining the Wagner Group’s origins and activities in order to situate an analysis of the motivations behind its terrorist behaviour. My analysis of Wagner’s evolution as a terrorist organisation will draw from theories of state sponsored terrorism, globalisation, and Rapoport’s wave theory.

Sustained through state patronage and a complex web of international corporate structures, illicit commercial deals and obscure financial flows, and motivated by ruthless strains of Russian nationalism, the Wagner Group has become uniquely equipped to conduct international terrorism at the service of the Russian state with impunity. In doing so it far exceeds the scope of operations of conventional private military and security companies (PMSCs).

History

The GRU formally signed the Wagner Group into existence in May 2014 for deployments to the Donbas region of Ukraine as part of its covert armed incursion of the neighbouring state. Initially, it consisted of a few reconnaissance-assault detachments composed mainly of veterans of Russia’s previous wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan, mixed with elements of Russian special forces (Spetznaz).

Many of Wagner’s members had experience as mercenaries in similar military formations (for example, in the Slavonic Corps or Moran Security), saw campaigns in Crimea, Syria or Georgia, and often served in prisons.

The GRU delegated operational control over the organisation to an appointed director and the Council of Commanders. The leading fighting commander, Dmitry Utkin, an ex-Spetznaz officer of neo-Nazi ideology – and an admirer of Hitler’s favourite composer – gave his call sign ‘Wagner’ for the Group’s name.

Yevgeny Prigozhin assumed the role of a director. He was a Soviet convict who rose in Russian business by developing powerful connections through the 1990s and, by 2014, controlled most of the catering business for the Russian military. He also actively promoted state interests abroad through his Internet Research Agency, subsequently infamous for its social troll farms and disinformation campaigns waged during elections in the United States and United Kingdom.

Wagner built a reputation for out-of-battlefield atrocities from its very first campaigns. Engaged in illegal fighting in Ukraine over 201415, which included documented sabotage and harassment operations, Wagner also played a custodian role over Russia’s various proxy forces there, conducting executions of wayward leaders and units who failed to follow orders from Moscow.

Since their first deployment to Syria in September 2015, the Wagnerites were allegedly making money by terrorising the civilian population. The group’s brutality came into the international spotlight after a video emerged of the sledgehammer torture and execution of a Syrian national.

Wagner kicked off commercial relations with the Syrian government by capturing and defending oil and gas fields for a slice of the profits. The Russian state also received its share of revenue from these fields. Over time, Prigozhin registered hundreds of shadowy firms, forming vast and resilient financial arteries facilitating Wagner’s financial transactions.

In 2017, Wagner expanded its military presence and transnational commercial operation into Africa. The Company entered the Central African Republic (CAR) and Sudan alongside Russian diplomatic missions, supplying weapons to warring local parties, establishing business relations and receiving gold and mineral exploration concessions.

Wagner then expanded its commercial activities, propaganda services ,and ‘gloves-off’ terrorisingand-killing force offering to regimes from Libya and Mali to South Africa and Madagascar. The Company secured multiple strongholds across Africa for its permanent military bases and transportation hubs.

As Wagner continued to achieve its goals through indiscriminate violence, the Russian state remained unconcerned. In 2019, the group reportedly mined and drove away civilians from the outskirts of the Libyan capital. One of the Group’s wounded commanders, airlifted to Russia, was cited in a rare interview as describing the action as “fighting international terrorism to protect Moscow’s interests” in Africa.

Various journalists and humanitarian missions reported the company’s involvement in mass killings, tortures, rape, pillage, kidnappings, summary executions and indiscriminate violence in many African countries. Among these crimes were the killing of Russian investigative journalists in the CAR in 2018 and well-documented involvement in a massacre and mass rape in the Mali town of Moura in 2022.

After joining Russia’s overt invasion of Ukraine, Wagner’s massacres of civilians included the infamous Bucha massacre, where more than 1,300 non-combatants were documented as having been killed, with many having also been tortured and raped.

Later, during Wager’s 10-monthlong assault of Bakhmut, the city was shelled indiscriminately to its destruction while hundreds of non-combatant residents were killed. There were multiple reports of the deliberate shooting of civilian survivors, including children, as well as the torture and execution of prisoners of war.

In 2022, the Russian state officially acknowledged fully financing and provisioning the Group over the preceding decade. Managing its own media and recruitment campaigns, Wagner even shared online the execution of an alleged traitor with a sledgehammer, while sending another to the European Parliament as a threat over Europe’s military support of Ukraine.

Shortly after publicly accusing the Russian Ministry of Defence of sabotaging the Group’s war efforts in Ukraine in the spring of 2023, Prigozhin sent the Wagner army on its way to Moscow in an act of open rebellion. For that action, Prigozhin, Utkin and other key leaders of Wagner were assassinated later that year. Wagner was subsequently placed under the direct control of the Russian Ministry of Defence and restructured, but it retained its presence overseas.

State sponsorship of the Wagner Group’s violence

The Cold War era theories of state sponsorship of international terrorism, including schools claiming that most or “all roads lead to Moscow” have proved relevant for the 21st century.

The Kremlin has provided various types of support to such terrorist organisations as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Its most widespread international terrorist project has, however, been the Wagner Group, active in a dozen countries from Venezuela to Africa, Syria to Ukraine.

Private intelligence agency Molfar has catalogued 37 Russian PMCs across 34 countries as far east as India and Sri Lanka and traced their connections to the Kremlin. Under the existing international legal framework, most of these organisations are able to evade accountability and penalties for their criminal activities.

Of these, the Russian state provided Wagner with the most comprehensive support. This has included training grounds, operational intelligence support, money, munitions, weapons, aircraft, logistical aid, and sanctuary and support, including clandestine diplomatic backing.

The Wagner Group’s apotheosis stemmed from the Russian state’s need to destabilise its neighbours –Ukraine at the time – and to expand de-facto control to territories beyond internationally recognised borders. Sponsoring and defining strategic direction for the militarised private group acting abroad was deniable and cheaper, and hence preferable, to waging war directly.

Following success in Ukraine in 2014-15, Russian political and military leadership continued to exercise authority over Wagner’s geostrategic objectives and for many years denied having anything to do with the organisation.

The Kremlin’s strategic ends in using Wagner included reestablishing Russia as a superpower, which involved power projection far beyond its neighbourhood, strengthening favourable regimes, destabilising regions and shaping animosity towards Western influence there.

Unlike conventional PMSCs, with the Russian state’s vast weaponry support, Wagner gained a virtual monopoly on uniquely equipped, informed (through state military intelligence) and experienced mercenaries readily available in well-organised combat units to wage actual battles against identified enemies.

Rather than regime change, Wagner’s activities across vulnerable developing countries were focused on supporting authoritarian regimes and enabling a kind of ‘ deterritorialised terrorism’, as exemplified in Colombia during the last three decades of the 20th century. This support magnified violence against local populations and opposing groups to gain their control over profitable territories, such as precious metals mines in Africa and oil and gas fields in Syria, and it enabled the Russian state’s control over minerally rich and fertile land in Ukraine.

Since 2022, the Wagner Group has perpetrated terrorism in its illegal operations in Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine.

In The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research, McAllister and Schmid emphasise that terrorism is often unduly dismissed within the context of international wars. Yet certain practices, they argue, such as systematic rape, the taking and killing of hostages, the massacre of prisoners of war, and the bombing and deliberate targeting of civilian populations, constitute terrorist tactics. Feldman and Hinojosa refer to these “acts perpetrated by state agents or by private groups on the orders of or on behalf of a state that seeks to terrorise the population and propagate anxiety among citizens” as direct state terrorism.

Targeting civilians (as in the Bucha massacre) has been a calculated strategy of the Russian war effort to coerce Ukrainians into quick surrender and deter further resistance at earlier stages of the invasion. In later stages, it became a tool for achieving publicised goals (such as in the battle over Bakhmut) and pressuring of the Ukrainian government into considering negotiations of an unfavourable ceasefire due to the high human costs of continued war.

While state military and diplomatic resources drove Wagner’s transnational diffusion, especially during the first years of its existence, another powerful modern catalyst enabled and partly motivated Wagner’s further evolution as an organisation – globalisation.

Globalisation and the Wagner Group’s transnationalisation Globalisation simultaneously motivated and enabled Prigozhin to evolve Wagner Group into a profitable and self-sustained transnational corporation capable of orchestrating and performing violence across expanding geographical reaches.

Globalisation is both an enabler and a motivator for terror. By providing services in targeted violence and military support to regimes in Syria, Africa and elsewhere, Prigozhin generated profits and moved them around the international financial system to sustain and expand the Wagner company.

Legal systems allowed Prigozhin to utilise a web of dynamically emerging and disappearing firms to obfuscate transactions and their origins and even fight international sanctions imposed on him by states in foreign courts. He was motivated financially to engage new clients (state actors) privately, preparing the ground for what McAllister and Schmid call Russia’s “cultural and economic penetration”.

Globalisation undoubtedly became a technological enabler of transnational violence for the Wagner Group. State military resources and diplomatic backing, combined with private profits and relationships with foreign regimes, facilitated Wagner in acquiring military bases and developing transportation hubs spanning from Syria to Libya and into SubSaharan Africa. This transnational infrastructure enabled stealthy procurement of military equipment, weapons, and personnel for contracted violence operations.

Meanwhile, local media acquisitions and online expertise in disinformation influence operations, combined with ubiquitous penetration of the internet and social networks, enabled the dissemination of politically motivated narratives to bolster the desired psychological effect of its operations.

The fifth wave theory

To understand the ideological motivation of Wagner’s leaders and individual members, Rapoport’s wave theory of terrorism provides a useful starting point.

David Rapoport has outlined four historical waves of terrorism since 1880: (i) anarchism, (ii) anticolonial terrorism, (iii) new left, and (iv) religious terrorism, with each lasting a few decades. He also suggested that a rise of aggressive populism in the United States and Europe, particularly in reaction to immigration, signals a possible emergence of a fifth extreme right wave.

Other researchers agree that terrorism is an evolving phenomenon and suggest that the next wave might be driven by ethnonationalism and characterised by authoritarianism, a radical quest for purity, and withdrawal from globalism into particularism.

Hostile anti-diversity and purestate rhetoric with distinguishable neo-Nazi roots has delivered electoral successes to right-wing populist parties across Europe and motivated such recent violent events as the storming of the Capitol in the United States in 2021 and the Christchurch mosque attack in 2019.

Preoccupied with the transformative power of mass violence, Wagner’s public animosity towards conventionally labelled terrorists, especially jihadists, can be seen as indicative of its role as a proponent of fifth wave terrorism.

The Wagner Group is one of the champions of ruscism – an expansionist ideology of Russian nationalism, which, driven by the state, dominates modern Russian society.

Culturally embedded Russian national chauvinism combined with bitterness over the collapse of the Soviet Union – symbol of Russian greatness and power – has provided fertile ground for the rise of a ruscism , or Russian fascism. Wagner’s members and its supporters practice ruscism as a martial patriotism directed against external, specifically Western, enemies who are allegedly obsessed with the humiliation and destruction of the Russian state.

Sometimes referred to as Putinism, the ideology has been cultivated by the Russian President, fusing it with the fascism of his favourite Russian imperial philosopher Ivan Ilyin and the civilisational Eurasianism of Alexander Dugin. Along with notable extremist groups such as the Russian Imperial Movement and Rusich, Wagner has become a leading proponent of ruthless Russian nationalism.

Prigozhin himself saw the curation of the Wagner Company and its activities as his form of service to a Russian cause, claiming that Wagner’s success was due to its strong ideology that aligned with the Russian state’s own ideology. Russians saw PMCs and, specifically, Wagner’s role abroad as a deterrence to Russia’s enemies through their showcasing of strength through preemptive violence.

Since its inception, Wagner’s leaders and soldiers have been motivated by a longing to reclaim and expand alleged Russian greatness. Rather than thinking of themselves as mercenary or nonmercenary, Russian mercenaries see themselves as representing Russia and Russia’s national interests.

Prigozhin himself saw the curation of the Wagner Company and its activities as his form of service to a Russian cause, claiming that Wagner’s success was due to its strong ideology that aligned with the Russian state’s own ideology. Russians saw PMCs and, specifically, Wagner’s role abroad as a deterrence to Russia’s enemies through their showcasing of strength through preemptive violence.

Obsessed with a sledgehammer as a symbol of threat and respect and as a central tool for the torture and execution of both enemies and traitors, rituals of violence hold significant for the group.

Intoxicated with violence, impunity and success, however, the Wagner Group grew conceited over their ideological devotion and selfperceived purity over the Russian state’s formal military leadership. Ultimately, their turn of violence against the Russian Ministry of Defence led to their leaders’ elimination.

Beyond state sponsorship, globalisation and ethnonationalism, there are other factors potentially relevant to explaining the evolution of the Wagner Group. For instance, its commercial expansion can be analysed in terms of the pursuit of profit by Prigozhin, and by other beneficiaries, including the Russian state.

Additionally, the abundance of ‘volunteers’ ready to join organisations like Wagner may be explained by the economic and social disenfranchisement of vast elements of the Russian society and the inertia of ex-soldiers.

Conclusion

Ultimately sponsored by the state and devoted to its ideology, Wagner exploited the opportunities of globalisation and grew increasingly more independent in operations and vision, but ultimately failed in its rebellion against the state’s authority.

Despite meeting the criteria of recognised definitions of terrorism in addition to its formal recognition by several states as a terrorist organisation internationally, Wagner presents analytical challenges due to its operations falling between conventional state warfare, private military operations and fifth wave terrorism.

These complexities and blurred edges must provoke further research, particularly into the ongoing metamorphosis of global terrorism and the changing motivation and behaviour of its perpetrators.