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The Cynical Calculations of a Wagner Mercenary [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-06-25
By Joseph Roche, Christopher Allbritton, William Glover Weiss, Ross Pelekh and Tim Mak
Editor’s note by Tim: I’m taking a brief break from reporting after a seven-week sprint launching The Counteroffensive! Experienced war correspondent Chris Allbritton will be taking the reins, and I will edit (more on Chris down below).
Thank you so much for supporting us so far — if you haven’t upgraded to paid, what are you waiting for? Your support helps us pay for our reporting (and medical costs for the simultaneous ‘heart attacks’ our team all suffered from the 36-hour coup we scrambled to cover).
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Joseph Roche starts us off with a profile of a Wagnerite who, like many Russians who were shocked by the uprising, decided not to show their hand:
"The situation between the Russian army and Wagner is tense," acknowledged Sergei Munier, a French-Ukrainian soldier believed to be involved with the Wagner forces.
But he didn’t have any more to say about whether he was supportive of his band of mercenaries. It was a surprise that he was so vague at such a dramatic time, when loyalties are being questioned and mutinies executed.
Munier bragged just days ago in a Facebook post, posing in the destroyed city center of Bakhmut:
"There is no greater honor than walking where Prigozhin (the boss of the Wagner Group) walked."
In early June, Munier was spotted on the western side of the city center in Bakhmut.
But now that Wagner looked to be overthrowing the Russian military command – radio silence.
The ambiguity reflects a pervasive uncertainty among many Russians right now. Should they throw in their lot with what Putin’s supporters have labeled a coup? Should they back Putin, who looks more vulnerable than ever before, but is known for vengeance? Or should they sit on the fence and see how it plays out, with less personal risk?
Yesterday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian private military company Wagner Group, rebelled against the Russian government. Wagner announced the capture of the Russian headquarters in the border town of Rostov-on-Don, and Moscow began preparing for a potential siege.
The Wagnerites advanced hundreds of kilometers in the direction of Moscow. Many Russian troops opted to let the mercenaries through without a fight – accelerating the speed at which Wagner forces advanced.
Before a strange and nebulous deal was reached to call off his forces, Prigozhin’s forces represented a grave threat to Putin’s regime — probably the gravest threat ever.
Munier is categorical about the situation itself: intense fighting broke out between the mercenary group and the regular Russian army, he wrote in a text, and it is violent. But regarding his position on it, he went silent.
I had known for a while that Munier had joined Wagner. At heart, the Wagner Group is a mercenary company with no real ideology other than profit through death.
Munier, at the beginning of his engagement, was driven by pan-Russian nationalism and a thirst for adventure. Not so much by money.
And for a pan-Russian nationalist, there is no urgency in taking sides in this conflict. Probably any leader that emerges will be as violent and nationalistic as the last.
A violent mercenary
I met Munier a little over two years ago. He had returned after several years of fighting in Donbas (on the Russian side).
From my conversations with him I realized that even though many who support Ukraine are rooting for domestic turmoil in Russia, there is no sense whatsoever in rooting for Wagner. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
Whatever motivates these men – fame, money, violence, or power – is unlikely to yield a stable and peaceful future for Russia, nor benefits for Ukraine or the West, at least in the long run.
Munier at an undisclosed location near the front, the Wagner patch visible. He didn’t hold back on details when he was posting prolifically on social media.
Munier's motives for joining Wagner were clear: he simply wanted to be where the fighting was.
"In 2014, I was with Igor Girkin's Russian Orthodox Army," he said. "Not because I believed in their imperial and tsarist delusions, but because they were the first ones I encountered when I arrived in Donbas and that I wanted to fight."
At that time, Munier claimed to be fighting for the independence of Donbas and Russian culture. "I was born in Luhansk, and all my ancestors were born in Donbas. I have a simple principle: I mind my own business, and Donbas is my business."
At the age of 10, his mother remarried to a French citizen, and the family moved to southern France. In 2014 he returned to Ukraine to fight. Since then, his life has been a back-and-forth between the front lines and civilian life, until he resurfaced in the ranks of the Wagner Group in 2022.
A Fair-Weather Friend to Wagner
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Munier was working in Yakutia, in the far East of Russia, for a nature preservation NGO.
By June he was closely affiliated with the now infamous Wagner mercenary group which, virtually every place they have been spotted, have been accused of heinous war crimes.
On June 22, 2022, he posted a video glorifying the Wagner Group. On July 26, he posted a photo of himself on the front lines. In the photo, a military patch can be recognized, with the words "Лето и Арбалеты" ("Summer and Crossbows"), one of the symbols of the Wagner company.
He traveled across all the fronts, in Avdiivka, Mariupol, Zaporizhia, and in a truck with "Casper," identified by the French newspaper Blast as the administrator of the notorious Wagner Telegram channel, "Reverse Side of the Medal."
Munier posted a photo of himself on Facebook, claiming to be in the company of "Casper," whom several observers recognize as the administrator of the Wagner Telegram channel, "Reverse Side of the Medal."
But when Wagner's boss, Prigozhin, called for the overthrow of Putin this weekend, Munier remained coy.
It is unclear if he joined the rebellion or not.
One of his friends, François Mauld d'Aymée, also in Donbas since 2014, told me that he doesn't know exactly where Munier stands. "It's all just a circus," he asserts angrily.
But there’s something to be learned from his radio silence: among the blood-thirsty, avaricious soldiers of the Wagner Group, loyalty is all about power, about who is about to take the upper hand.
The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Good morning to readers.
After yesterday’s confusing day, we can state two facts clearly: Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands, and Moscow, well, Moscow remains in Russia.
More questions about Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted coup remain than were answered after Belorussian President Alexander Lukashenko allegedly brokered a deal to send Wagner mercenaries back to their barracks. Before that happened, however, the world was seized by the spectacle of Prigozhin holding friendly meetings with top Russian generals and Ministry of Defense officials in Rostov-on-Don, a critical center for running the invasion of Ukraine.
And then, Prigozhin stood down, he said, to avoid civil war.
“Now the moment has come when blood can be shed,” Prigozhin said. “Therefore, realizing all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed from one side, we will turn our convoys around and go in the opposite direction to our field camps.”
What had started as a mutinous thunder-run to Moscow by the Wagner Group ended up being something more like a Joyride of the Valkyries.
The agreement to turn the Wagner columns around was apparently brokered by Belarus’ Lukashenko at the behest of Putin, who talked a tough game in the morning but ended up looking feckless and weak in the face of armed rebellion.
Putin, in his 5-minute speech, threatened Wagner rebels with “inevitable punishment” and promised “decisive action.”
But what Prigozhin allegedly got -- the details of the deal are still murky -- was exile in Belarus, amnesty for his fighters, and possibly a free hand for Wagner Group to continue their deadly profiteering in Africa, where Wagner loots billions from extractive industries in Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan and Libya—all places where people are desperate and human rights protections nonexistent.
Ukrainian officials could barely contain their glee at Putin’s crisis.
“It is not yet obvious to everyone,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, Advisor of the Office of the President of Ukraine's Telegram account. “But nevertheless, Russia right now is showing all the signs of a Failed State ... a rapidly degrading and dying entity. And it will only get worse from there.”
And with all eyes on the drama in Russia, Ukraine’s military tried to take advantage of Russia’s distraction, with Ukrainian attacks along the established front in the south and east of the country.
Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar announced successful advances around Bakhmut yesterday, as well as limited movement along the Avdiivka-Donetsk frontline in the east.
Ukrainian General Serhiy Melnyk, who leads Ukrainian units defending Kharkiv, told The Counteroffensive that any chaos in Russia is useful for Ukraine.
“Wagner is a terrorist organization and it was only a matter of time that something like this would happen,” he said. “You simply can't control people like that.”
He believes Prigozhin’s push was an attempted coup, and that Putin’s weakness is now revealed. “You can get to Moscow in a matter of hours. They have no reserves. Even [for] a small Wagner push, they started panicking, shooting civilians and destroying roads. The king is naked.”
And Kyiv, which has been pummeled by Russian air strikes and missile attacks this month, had a reprieve. By 4 a.m., there had been no air alarms in Kyiv and the lull in attacks suggests that Russia's frontline forces were distracted or even paralyzed by Prigozhin’s temper tantrum.
Introducing our guest reporter: Chris Allbritton
Hi, all. Christopher Allbritton here. Tim has graciously asked two things of me: That I help out with The Counteroffensive for a couple of weeks, and that I jot down some reflections on this conflict, given that I’ve covered two-and-a-half other conflicts over the past 20 years.
But first, some background: Following the 9/11 attacks, I listened with growing frustration to the simple-minded questions being asked in US media. “Why do they hate us?” was especially grating. I felt America was asking the wrong questions, and so, intrepid/foolhardy freelancer that I was, I snuck into northern Iraq in summer 2002 to report on the nascent democracy the Kurds were building there.
It led to the creation of Back-to-Iraq.com and I became the world’s first wholly reader-funded war correspondent — a tradition that The Counteroffensive continues.
Fast forward to the invasion and I had raised some $20,000 before the March 19, 2003 invasion. Covering conflicts is expensive (so smash that subscribe button, dear readers!) Fixers, drivers, lodging, protective gear, laptops, sat-phones, insurance, yada yada yada. It adds up.
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I later joined the Time Magazine bureau in Baghdad; and then went to Lebanon, where I covered the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel War. Then I ran the Reuters bureau in Pakistan, leading our coverage of the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Armed conflicts, wars, insurgencies, coups, and general mayhem involving things blowing up — on purpose — all have similar themes. Where they differ are the details.
In Iraq, there was no front, just the ambient terror of a ghost-like insurgency. We took our lives in our hands if we stepped out of our fortified villas. More than 200 journalists and media workers were killed in Iraq from 2003-2008. Others were “merely” kidnapped.I knew some of them. I lost friends.
During the 2006 war in Lebanon, reporters were far more likely to be killed or injured by Israeli kinetic bombs dropped on cars roaming the backroads of southern Lebanon than by Hezbollah fighters, who, for all their flaws, had a discipline when it came to hurting reporters.
And in Pakistan, militant groups bombed hotels, shot up schools, attacked markets, and generally didn’t care who they killed as long as they caused as much mayhem as possible.
But Ukraine? Ukraine is different. For one, there’s a 600-mile front — about the distance from the Outer Banks to Boston — far away from Kyiv, the cities in the central heartland and Lviv, which makes all the difference in how one covers this war. There’s no insurgency. No Russian snatch teams out prowling the streets looking for foreigners to kidnap and kill on video.
But some things don’t change. All of the populations, inevitably, are touted for their resilience. How could they be otherwise? It’s human nature to adapt. You can’t curl up under the kitchen table in the fetal position forever. At some point you have to go the store, make a living, and do the laundry, even if you face the possibility of horrific violence that could shred you at any moment.
In my short time here, I’ve rarely seen a nation that has come together as fully as have the Ukrainians. I can sense a level of mutual trust on the streets of Lviv. And I’ve witnessed small acts of kindness — two young men helped another young man on crutches onto a bus; a young woman refusing to take the sunflowers sold by a older woman on the sidewalk despite paying for the bouquet; the artist who makes medical kits from donated bandages to be sent to the front — that remind me of the compassion that New Yorkers demonstrated in the days and weeks after 9/11.
That level of kindness wasn’t absent in Iraq, Lebanon or Pakistan, of course. There are plenty of decent, kind people all over. Most people, in fact, are kind and decent. But in Ukraine, these small moments of grace feel, to me, like defiance in the face of imposed trauma.
And maybe that defiance is what this war is about: the liberal values of compassion, human dignity and the right to choose one's own destiny. As imperfect as these values are lived, I do believe these are bedrock values of the Western alliance, and Ukrainians are fighting for and demonstrating them every day.
I believe we, as reporters, have an obligation to tell their stories with the same sense of dignity and compassion, and I am grateful to have the chance.
[END]
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