MailOnline provides answers to the most asked questions about the Wagner Group like who they are and what their aim is after the militia started a ‘coup’ against Putin in the early hours of Saturday, June 24.

Who are the Wagner Group?

Private Military Company (PMC) Wagner is a mercenary group headed up by Russian oligarch and formerly a close Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin.  

The group has for years acted as Putin’s personal band of enforcers, though it maintains connections with Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency, the GRU.

Founded in 2014, the Wagner Group got straight to work following the annexation of Crimea, arming and organising separatist groups in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

Wagner Group’s name is believed to have derived from the callsign of sinister former lieutenant colonel of Russia’s ‘Spetsnaz’ special forces, Dmitry Utkin, as the name he was designated for his love of famed German composer Richard Wagner.

In the eight years between Crimea’s annexation and all-out war in Ukraine, Wagner mercenaries have been deployed abroad to covertly further Russian interests.

They were implicated in the Russian intervention in Syria where they helped to prop up the Assad regime, and went on to operate in countries throughout Africa including Mali, Central African Republic, Mozambique and Sudan.

What are their aims?

An integral part of most Wagner assignments is gaining control over the local population and elements hostile to the regime – something in which the mercenaries have proved particularly ruthless.

Wagner mercenaries are deployed to further Russian interests abroad by doing the jobs that no official military branch could be associated with and have earned a reputation for using sheer force and brutality to achieve their goals.  

The Wagner group as been deployed in a fighting capacity alongside regular Russian army soldiers in Ukraine, and has been credited with achieving much of Moscow’s success on the frontlines.

In autumn 2022, Prigozhin embarked on a mass recruitment drive in Russian prisons, signing up hardened criminals to swell his ranks and deploy them en-masse in Ukraine on suicidal missions to gain ground by using ‘human wave’ tactics.

Who is Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin?

The chief financier and founder of PMC Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin used to claim his contractors are deployed across the border to help achieve the Russian president’s goal – the so-called ‘denazification’ of Ukraine.

For months the Wagner mercenary chief has bombarded Russia’s military leaders with expletive-ridden rants slating and rebuking their competence in an ongoing rift that has weakened the country’s forces amid its assault on Ukraine.

Until the standoff between Yevgeny Prigozhin and the defence ministry appeared to have come to a head, as the millionaire mercenary group boss called for an armed rebellion in direct challenge to the Kremlin.

Prigozhin said he would take all necessary steps to topple the country’s military leadership as he claimed his forces had ‘crossed state borders’ and were ready to ‘destroy anything that gets in the way’.

As the Wagner militia appeared to charge on Moscow, Prigozhin vowed to punish the military leaders whom he accused of killing 2,000 of his fighters after he claimed Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordered a rocket strike on his field camps.

Prigozhin is thought to have a net worth in excess of nearly £800million ($1billion). He generated more than a quarter of a billion dollars from his global natural resources empire – despite Western sanctions.

Who are the other senior figures in command?

There are five other important figures in the Wagner Group apart from founder and chief Prigozhin: 

Dmitry Utkin and Andrey Troshev

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Utkin is an operational commander and behind-the-scenes leader of the Wagner group, who many believe was a co-founder of the organisation.

He has received several Orders of Courage for his actions on the battlefield and served in the military until 2013. 

He then deployed to Syria as part of the Russian intervention which beat back rebel groups and upheld the presidency of Bashar al-Assad via a Russian-operated, Hong-Kong-based private military company known as the Slavonic Corps.

Utkin is a staunch Russian nationalist who sports Nazi tattoos and is reportedly fascinated with Hitler’s Third Reich.

An investigation into Utkin led by Bellingcat concluded that Utkin may in fact occupy more of a field commander in the Wagner group, reporting to a select group of ever-more senior operational leaders.

One of these is said to be Andrei Troshev, a former armed forces Colonel who earned himself the title ‘Hero of the Russian Federation’ for his military service – Russia’s highest military honour.

Troshev has been described by the European Union as the Wagner group’s ‘Chief of Staff’ and appears to hold seniority over Utkin in Wagner’s command structure, based on a series of intercepted communications analysed by Bellingcat investigators.

Konstantin Pikalov

Pikalov, often referred to by his codename ‘Mazay’, is another Russian armed forces veteran who is believed to be in charge of the PMC’s operations on the African continent.

The former colonel heads up the private security company Convoy, which is headquartered in St Petersburg and has provided security services to Russian consultants working with senior officials in several African countries including the Central African Republic (CAR), Madagascar and Mozambique.

But Pikalov, 55, is also believed to be orchestrating much of the Wagner group’s ongoing operations across Africa, using Convoy as a cover to operate as a liaison between Russian-backed African officials and Russia’s GRU.

According to a joint investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat, the former colonel was closely linked to the murders of three Russian journalists who had arrived in the CAR to investigate the extraction of minerals by Russian companies in 2018.

And the government of Ukraine described Pikalov as ‘responsible for serious human rights abuses committed by the Wagner Group in CAR and several African countries, which include torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings.’

Igor Kostyukov and Alexei Dyumin

Kostyukov, 62, is a decorated naval admiral and since November 2018 has been the chief of Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit.

Though he was not directly implicated in the creation or direction of Wagner group in its early years, the mercenary outfit’s close ties to the GRU mean Kostyukov is undoubtedly involved in the PMC’s operations.

His position as GRU head means all GRU officers and operatives including the aforementioned Utkin and Troshev ultimately report to him and would be required to carry out any orders the Admiral sees fit to dole out.

Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk