"Our business is death"

What is PMCs, how they appeared in Russia and what role Evgeny Prigozhin plays in this

In Russia, mercenaries are prohibited by law. Despite this, back in 2013, a businessman, known as Putin's Cook, Evgeny Prigozhin began to recruit people to a private military company for sending to the southeast of Ukraine. After almost nine years, Prigozhin finally admitted that PMC exists and he was its leader. Now he personally recruits prisoners for sending to the war to Ukraine, and in St. Petersburg opens the PMC Wagner Center. "Cold" tells what private military companies are and how the most famous PMC - "Wagner" appeared in Russia.

In order not to miss the main materials of the "cold", subscribe to our Instagram and telegram .

When PMCs appeared and what they do

Private military companies are a common phenomenon in the world. The first of them in the modern sense - Watchguard International - created in Britain in 1967 a soldier and founder of the Special Air Service (Special Air Service - Sas; Special Unit of the British Armed Forces) David Sterling. The company was engaged in the training of the military and suppressing the dissident movement in the Persian Gulf in the early 1970s. In addition, Watchguard International employees worked in Africa, Latin America and East Asia - in addition to training mercenaries, they were engaged in military consulting, material and technical support of government forces.

Pretty soon other private military companies appeared on the market. In the 1970s, experts from the USA, England and France began to be recruited to work in Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. According to the estimates of the journal "International Life", in 1979 the number of mercenaries from the USA and Europe, which participate in military conflicts in the territory of the eastern countries, amounted to about 11 thousand people.

As a rule, PMCs are engaged in the protection of private and state objects. For example, the American company Triple Canopy guarded senior officials in Iraq after the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein, and the British Aegis Defense Services - supported American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to Transparency International for 2022, American companies control almost half of the PMC market - its turnover is $ 224 billion. Participation in PMCs is well paid. For example, employees of the American PMC Blackwater received up to $ 1,500 a day during the operation in Iraq.

Why did Russia need PMCs

The idea to create PMCs in Russia originated at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in 2010, the journalists of The Bell found out. Then the founder of the PMC Executive Outcomes, a former officer from South Africa Eben Barlow, gave a closed lecture on the military cooperation with the private sector, and then spoke to the delegation of the General Staff on how to create PMCs in Russian conditions.

At that meeting, it was discussed whether such formations should be legal: according to the Criminal Code, mercenaries in Russia are prohibited, and the participation of mercenaries in the armed conflict is now punishable by deprivation of freedom for a term of seven to 15 years ( according to the mercenary law, a person who receives material reward and is not a citizen of the state participating in the military and does not constantly live on its territory) .

Some of the security forces opposed legislative consolidation due to difficulties in monitoring the turnover of weapons. The idea was to use the “illegal” for special tasks and this minimize the number of problems in case of failure, wrote The Bell. In 2004, in Qatar, they were detained on suspicion of killing the second head of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Zelimkhan Yangarbiev who accused of terrorism, three employees of the Russian intelligence services, and managed to return them only after Vladimir Putin’s personal intervention. If they were mercenaries, the Russian authorities would not have such problems, the interlocutors close to the Ministry of Defense told The Bell.

"Slavic Corps" - the first Russian mercenaries

In 2012, the managers of the Russian private security company Moran Security Group Vadim Gusev and Evgeny Sidorov registered The Slavonic Corps (Slavic Corps) in Hong Kong, where they began to recruit former Russian military. In the summer of the same year, the company entered into a contract with the Ministry of Oil and Mineral Resources of Syria: the Slavic Corps was supposed to train and send "specialists" to protect oil facilities. 267 Russians went to protect oil fields then. Among them was the future commander of the most famous PMC in Russia - Dmitry "Wagner" Utkin. In Syria, Russian fighters were placed in the training center in Latakia. There they learned that before starting to protect oil facilities, they must be repelled from the militants.

On October 13, 2013, the fighters of the Slavic Corps were sent to the area where oil fields were located. Four days later, the mercenaries were ambushed: for several hours they fought off from the attack of ISIS militants, and then they were evacuated to Russia, where they were met by the FSB officers. Gusev and Sidorov were charged with mercenaries. They were convicted and received three years in colony. The rest of the participants remained at large and a few months later met in the Crimea, already as part of a new military organization.

How did the Wagner PMC arose and who is Evgeny Prigozhin

At the end of February, armed people appeared in the Crimea without identification marks - they were secretly called “polite people” . For military training of the fighters, the reserve lieutenant colonel, a former GRU special forces officer Dmitry Utkin, could be responsible . Utkin took the call sign “Wagner”, according to which the media also began to call the PMC itself. Fontanka wrote that this was due to the passion for the ideology and aesthetics of the Third Reich.

According to Fontanka, in the Crimea, the Wagnerians "disarmed Ukrainian bases and established Russian order." In a situation where Russia could not provide direct military support to separatists from the LPR and the DPR, the authorities managed to intervene in the conflict with the help of the new PMC. The Debaltsevsky boiler is one of the largest battles during the military conflict in the Donbass in mid -February 2015, in which the mercenaries participated . Then, according to Ukrainian data, about five thousand Ukrainian military opposed a group of 15-19 thousand separatists.

Evgeny Prigozhin was instructed to create and manage this armed company. Prior to the creation of Wagner PMC, Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin organized buffes for senior officials for a long time: for example, in 2002, Vladimir Putin took on the boom of the ex-President of the USA George Bush, and in 2008 the restaurateur provided guests at the reception on the inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev. According to Novaya Gazeta, from 2011 to 2021, the companies received state contracts in the amount of more than 184.6 billion rubles affiliated with Prigozhin.

In 2011, Prigozhin aimed at another market, which he estimated at Trillion rubles: “We have plans - the army. This is more than half a million people. The police are two million. ” Already in 2013, wrote The Bell, Evgeny Prigozhin took up a set of people in PMCs. The interlocutors of the publication close to the Ministry of Defense claimed that the idea to make Prigozhin was born to the General Staff responsible for financial issues in the General Staff, and one of the main reasons why Prigozhin was chosen for this candidacy was a personal acquaintance with Putin and that the businessman remained in the shadows for a long time. At first, Prigozhin was not enthusiastic about this project: it was dangerous, but the benefit was not obvious, the interlocutor close to the Ministry of Defense told the publication. “But they do not refuse such instructions,” he said.

Return of PMC to Syria

After the end of active hostilities in Ukraine, the mercenaries returned to Syria. Their first major victory was the capture of Palmyra in 2016. There, according to one of the fighters, they played a decisive role: they participated in offensive operations with the support of the Russian troops and the Syrian army. In March, Bashar Assad managed to regain control of the city. “First, Wagner’s guys work, then Russian ground parts come in, then Arabs and cameras,” one of the participants in the events told about the participation of mercenaries in that operation.

After Victory, several PMC fighters, including Utkin himself, were noticed at a meeting with Vladimir Putin, who was held in honor of the Heroes of the Fatherland Day. Utkin fell into the report of Channel One, and in December 2017 a photograph of a mercenary appeared on the Web near the Russian president.

Actively about the participation of PMCs in the war in Syria, they started talking in 2018. Then the Western media reported mass deaths in Syria of Russian soldiers. At this time, Wagner's army fought under the Syrian Deir ez-Zor. According to various sources , in the battle died from several tens to more than a hundred mercenaries.

The actions of the mercenaries were not authorized by the Russian command, wrote The Bell, and this case crushed the reputation of the PMC and personally Evgeny Prigozhin. The Russian Foreign Ministry had to admit that Russian citizens who were not associated with the Armed Forces of Russia participated in the battles: “In Syria, there are Russian citizens who went there of their own free will and for different purposes. It is not the case of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to assess the powers and legality of such decisions. ”

How Eugene Prigozhin denied the existence of PMCs and his involvement, although this had evidence

Before the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Evgeny Prigozhin said that he did not know about the existence of the Wagner PMC and denied his involvement in it. However, long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the largest Russian -speaking and Western medias wrote about the relationship of a businessman with the Wagner group.

In 2018, it became known that the structures related to the businessman began to strengthen their influence on the African continent: for example, Prigozhin provided military instructors who trained the TsA army, and all of them were associated with the Wagner PMC, wrote the American CNN channel.

In addition to the American television channel, Russian journalists were engaged in the investigation of the activities of the Wagner PMC. In 2018, documentary director Alexander Rastorguev, military correspondent Orhan Dzhemal and operator Kirill Radchenko went to Africa to remove the documentary, and were killed. According to the official version , they were attacked by robbers. In turn, the Dossier publication published an investigation in which it connected the murder of journalists with Prigozhin. He rejected the accusations.

On July 29, 2020, 32 mercenaries were detained in Belarus. The KGB accused the participants of the Wagner PMC of his intention to destabilize the situation in the country during the presidential election. Among the seized material, the Belarusian security forces found the currency of Sudan and stripes with the inscriptions "Our business - death and business is good." Then the press secretary of the President of Russia Dmitry Peskov said that "in Russia, there is no such thing in Russia as PMCs." The press service of the company "Concord" Prigozhin denied the involvement of the businessman in the Wagner PMC.

In 2021, Evgeny Prigozhin filed a lawsuit against the Echo of Moskvy radio station and its leaders for the fact that the editor -in -chief of Echo Alexei Venediktov called the businessman the “master of PMC Wagner”. In August 2022, the court recognized the words of the journalist inaccurate. However, a month later, when the war in Ukraine lasted seven months, Prigozhin finally admitted that he created the Wagner PMC.

"Wagner" in the war in Ukraine

In July 2022, Medusa published an investigation that tells about the participation of PRC Prigozhin in the war in Ukraine. After the start of hostilities, recruitment to Wagner passed under the control of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the publication wrote . And in order to provide a sufficient number of mercenaries at the front, the company significantly reduced the requirements for its candidates. People who would not be able to pass the selection before in the ranks of Wagner.

Prigozhin reacted to the investigation with a statement addressed to the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia Alexander Bastrykin with a request to institute criminal proceedings against the publication under articles on state reception and publicly disseminating obviously false information about the Russian army.

However, already in September 2022, a video appeared on social networks where a person who looked like Evgenia Prigozhin recruits prisoners from Russian colonies in the ranks of Wagner to send him to Ukraine. For participation in the war, they were offered a complete withdrawal of criminal record and cash payments: 100 thousand rubles a month and five million in case of death.

After that, the Concord company Yevgeny Prigozhin published his statement , where he openly said that he was one of the creators of the Wagner PMC. He stated that the company exists on May 1, 2014 and initially volunteers consisted in it, who wanted to participate in the war in the Donbass.

In early November, the PMC Wagner Center opened in St. Petersburg. According to Prigozhin, the mission of this center is “ensuring a comfortable environment to generate new ideas in order to increase Russia's defense capabilities, including information”. In early November, children were given a lecture “On the importance of their own” there.

On November 13, the Grey Zone telegram channel, which is associated with the Wagner PMC, published a video of reprisals against Evgeny Nugin , a prisoner who was recruited in the PMC to participate in the war in Ukraine. Nuzhin said that in September he voluntarily surrendered to Ukrainian captivity, and on November 11 he was kidnapped in Kyiv. He woke up already in the basement. After these words, the former mercenary, presumably, is clogged with a sledgehammer to death.

Prigozhin commented on this video as follows: “As for the fanned, this show shows that he did not find happiness in Ukraine, but met with unkind, but fair people. It seems to me that this film is called “Dog - Dog Death”. Great directorial work looks in one breath. I hope that no animal was injured during the filming. ” Press Secretary of Vladimir Putin Dmitry Peskov responded to a request to comment on a possible murder: "This is not our business."