Unwinding the Wagner Group? Putin signs decree forcing paramilitary fighters to swear oath
Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin signing a decree forcing paramilitary fighters to swear allegiance
00:05 to the Russian flag with us is our own Douglas Herbert.
00:09 That decree matters.
00:11 It does matter.
00:12 What is this decree, first of all?
00:14 It doesn't specifically say paramilitary groups.
00:17 It doesn't say Wagner by name.
00:18 What the decree applies to are members of so-called voluntary formations.
00:23 In the past, when the Kremlin has used that type of language, Francois, voluntary formations
00:28 clearly apply to paramilitary groups, of which Wagner was sort of the paragon, the prime
00:35 example.
00:36 And, look, it's in line with what we have been seeing in recent days, weeks, and months,
00:43 where the Kremlin, Putin, his administration has been actively at work, both publicly but
00:48 also behind the scenes, essentially trying to unwind the Wagner group, to draw in to
00:57 its fighters, to woo its fighters into the fold, if you will, and to shut down, essentially,
01:03 its operations as they are, wherever they may be, from Mali to Syria.
01:08 And we've talked widely about them because, you know, the Wagner group as such, it almost
01:12 has these sort of makings of almost a Korean-style conglomerate.
01:17 It's not simply mercenary operations, even though that's what most of the world associates
01:21 it with, and it may be its main sort of line of business.
01:25 It has a lot of side hustles, as you might call it, from finance to construction to supplies
01:32 to logistics to mining to natural resources.
01:35 The list goes on and on.
01:37 And for Grigorion himself, in his final days, he was crisscrossing Africa.
01:42 He was still trying to shore up that empire, trying to reassure his very large network
01:47 across that region and the leaders and the presidents that he helped to prop up that
01:52 he wasn't going anywhere.
01:53 He was basically trying to reassure them that in the aftermath of his mutiny, he was very
01:56 much staying put, ready to bring in new fighters, ready to bring in new investments.
02:01 By all means, he was ready to continue funding his empire.
02:05 And let's call it that.
02:06 It was an empire, not just a group, with things like gold from Sudanese mines, with diamonds
02:12 and wood from the Central African Republic, and so on and so forth.
02:16 This was an empire, an intricate web here.
02:19 There were no signs he was about to shut it down, but we did see this concerted effort
02:23 by the Kremlin.
02:25 And this decree is the example of it, trying to basically unwind and say, you want to do
02:30 business with Russia, you no longer do business with the Wagner Group.
02:33 You do business with the Russian army, with me, Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.
02:38 Because before, Wagner offered this plausible deniability, this buffer.
02:44 They didn't exist for a while.
02:46 But Purgoshin, as we know, also answered to Vladimir Putin in the end.
02:51 Look, he did answer to Vladimir Putin in the end.
02:54 And Vladimir Putin, as you know, in recent weeks made it very clear that the Russian
02:58 government were the ones that funded Wagner.
03:01 The Russian government, Wagner Group, existed thanks to the, you could call them good graces
03:06 of the Russian government.
03:08 In the absence of solid state institutions underpinned by the rule of law, perhaps something
03:14 we've gotten sort of blasé about and used to in the West, the Russian state was a perfect
03:19 petri dish, a breeding ground in Putin's Russia for these types of shadowy, murky, auxiliary
03:26 formations, these paramilitary groups.
03:28 You saw it in Wagner, you saw it in Kadyrov, Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya, these sort of
03:32 side armies that pitched into the Kremlin, but also risked, as we saw in the case of
03:38 Wagner, spinning out of control.
03:40 So you have the commercial ventures and the military ventures, and you mentioned places
03:44 like Mali and the Central African Republic.
03:46 Is that game plan going to change?
03:48 Is it just going to have different figureheads?
03:50 It's going to have different figureheads.
03:51 One of the hopes, perhaps, of the Russian government, as I said, it tries to draw the
03:56 Wagner fighters into its fold, forcing them to sign contracts with the Russian military,
04:02 no longer be associated with a Wagner group as such.
04:06 There are going to be these sort of alternate now paramilitary groups, except the difference
04:11 being they won't be on the side, they will be inbuilt into the Russian government itself,
04:16 one of them being groups run by people within the GRU.
04:19 The GRU is the military intelligence agency.
04:22 We have seen them in recent weeks getting in on that sort of paramilitary act, trying
04:27 to, and not just trying to, but having seeming success so far, Francois, in supplanting the
04:32 Wagner group.
04:34 In fact, there are some reports that Evgeny Prigozhin, considered the head of the GRU,
04:39 who also showed up at a lot of conferences, including, I believe, the recent African summit,
04:44 to be a real rival of his, a potential rival, someone that he feared could be his nemesis
04:50 and his challenger.
04:51 And now, in apparent death, that is proving to be the case.
04:55 So the Wagner group will live on, albeit in a different guise, and albeit much more hardwired
05:01 to the Russian government in sort of a different, newfangled, to use a big word, incarnation.