It was last year when the Wagner Group’s great melodrama ended in tragedy with the bomb that exploded aboard a private jet, killing its leaders, Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin.
The private military company, which had staged a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin in June 2023, totally disintegrated after the assassination.
That once potent paramilitary group, infamous for the brutality exercised in Ukraine, was significantly weakened. At its peak, it counted around 50,000 personnel. Wagner’s strength has dwindled to about 5,000 personnel.
Many of the remaining members have been integrated into Russian military and paramilitary units.
According to the latest assessment by British Military Intelligence, Andrey “Sedoi” Troshev, Wagner’s ex-chief executive, has joined Russia’s Ministry of Defence, apparently as part of Redut Private Military Company.
He is responsible for the formation of units in the Volunteer Corps that will participate in combat with Ukrainian forces.
Another similar example is Alexandr “Ratibor” Kuznetsov, a former commissioner of the 1st Assault Detachment of the Wagner PMC, who is now joining the ranks of volunteers in the Chechen Special Forces unit “Akhmat.” Boris “Zombi” Nizhevenok, a former commander of the Wagner PMC 3rd Assault Detachment, became the leader head of the “Vostok-V” volunteer unit as of May 2024.
At its height, Wagner Group was Russia’s best-armed formation – legalized by the Kremlin to take as much as it wanted from Russia’s vast penal colonies. Convicts who were willing to exchange fighting in Ukraine for freedom swelled the ranks of the group.
Despite losses at the rate of a battalion per day, Wagner has delivered important results for its Kremlin masters, notably capturing the town of Bakhmut after a year of fighting.
He was vocal in condemning the ineffectiveness of the Russian military and a lack of mass support for his mercenaries. Arrogated by their successful campaigns, in June 2023, he fully led a full-scale mutiny, grabbing the city of Rostov-on-Don and the southern headquarters of the Russian military, before marching toward Moscow.
Backroom diplomacy soon subdued the mutiny with promises of safe passage for Wagner’s leaders, but on August 23, Putin rubbed him out.
Unconfirmed reports said that Mr. Yelizarov, a former deputy of Utkin, who had led Wagner operations in Bakhmut, took charge of the outfit after the deaths of Prigozhin and Utkin.
Putin ordered Wagner’s fighters to sign an oath of allegiance to the Russian state, aimed at capturing its fighting capacity and business operations in Africa.
Yelizarov is a veteran of Wagner’s campaigns in Ukraine, Syria, Mali, and the Central African Republic. He was sanctioned by the European Union in February 2023 for commanding a Wagner unit accused of capturing the town of Soledar in January 2023.
The transformation of the Wagner Group from a powerful, well-entrenched paramilitary force to a fragmented entity integrated into Russian military structures radically changed the landscape of Russian military operations.