Wagner group

#GS-02 International Relations

The Wagner Group is a Russian paramilitary organization founded in 2014 by Dmitriy Valeryevich Utkin.
They receive military equipment from the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) and uses MoD installations for their training.
The group is reportedly named after the 19^th century German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor Richard Wagner.
The group has been funded and supported by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The group has not been registered as a legal entity anywhere in the world.
The group has been aiding separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics from 2014 to 2015.
US intelligence agencies have claimed that the Wagner group has 50,000 fighters in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts.
Wagner group have often been linked to white supremacist and neo-Nazi far-right extremists due to its name and activities of some of its members.
However, experts have noted that the Wagner Group is not driven by ideology, but is rather a network of mercenaries “linked to the Russian security state.”
The U.S. on Friday (20-01-23) designated Russia’s Wagner group as a “transnational criminal organisation.”
The designation is expected to allow the wider application of sanctions on the group’s sprawling global network.