How Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, used the war in Ukraine to raise his profile—and put Vladimir Putin in a political double bind.
According to Ukrainian intelligence, approximately thirteen hundred Wagner fighters were flown to Syria on Russian military transport planes. Strategically, Wagner operated to further Russia’s geopolitical goals; tactically, the group was free to pursue its own spoils, including lucrative petroleum contracts that entities associated with Prigozhin received from the Assad government. “It was to everyone’s advantage and benefit,” Barabanov said.
In 2019, Russian diplomats and Prigozhin associates helped broker a peace agreement between the government of the C.A.R. and the rebel factions. The next year, that deal collapsed, and rebel groups launched an armed march on the capital, Bangui. Wagner fighters, along with the C.A.R. Army and a contingent of Rwandan soldiers, led a bloody counterassault.
Marat Gabidullin was in his late forties when he joined Wagner, in 2015. He had spent ten years in the Russian Army, but, after leaving the service, he drifted toward alcohol abuse and a life of crime. In the mid-nineties, he spent three years in prison for shooting a small-time gangster in Siberia. After enlisting with Wagner, he was sent to Molkino for a course in assault tactics and urban warfare.
A few days later, Gabidullin’s unit was ambushed. He managed to fire a few shots before a grenade exploded behind him. Shrapnel tore into his head, back, and limbs. An armored personnel carrier delivered him to Russia’s Humaymim airbase, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, where he lost consciousness. He awoke, a week later, in a hospital bed in St. Petersburg. A Wagner representative handed him a secure telephone. “No. 1 wants to speak to you,” the person said. Prigozhin was on the line.
That February, Gabidullin and his men were ordered to Deir Ezzor, in the northeast, where, they were told, they would participate in an assault on a nearby gas plant. The facility, though, was controlled not bybut by an anti-Assad Kurdish militia. Gabidullin recalled a conversation with a Wagner commander, who told him that Prigozhin had got the necessary sign-offs.
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