Latest news with #Prigozhin
Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Russia's ‘General Armageddon' Seen in Algeria Years After Failed Mutiny: UK
A Russian military officer once key to Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine who had not been seen in public in an official capacity for nearly two years, has been spotted in Algeria, according to U.K. intelligence officials. In a post on social media, U.K. intelligence reported Sergei Surovikin attended a military parade in the North African country. Surovikin, whose reputation for acting brutally earned him the nickname of "General Armageddon" had largely disappeared from public view following a failed June 2023 mutiny and march on Moscow by Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, with whom he was closely associated. Newsweek has contacted the Russian defense ministry for comment. Reports of Surovikin's arrest following the failed mutiny were never confirmed by Russian authorities but his appearance in Algeria raises questions about his current role in the military and Moscow's footprint in Africa. In its update on Tuesday, the U.K.'s Ministry of Defence said that a "notably thinner" Surovikin appeared in Russian embassy photographs at a Victory Day event in Algeria on May 9. This was probably his first public appearance in an official role since 2023 and he is likely in the North African country as head of military specialists at the Russian embassy there, U.K. defense officials said. Surovikin is a former commander of Russian forces in Ukraine and served as commander-in-chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces. He had been linked to Prigozhin, who had been a vehement critic of Moscow's conduct in the war in Ukraine. Prigozhin led his Wagner group of mercenaries in a mutiny which saw them stop short of Moscow in a move denounced as "treason" by Putin. U.K. intelligence said Tuesday Russian authorities were probably suspicious of Surovikin's association with Wagner dating back to Moscow's intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2017. After Prigozhin died in a plane crash for which the Kremlin has denied responsibility, there were unconfirmed reports that Surovikin had been arrested and detained. Russian social media users had reported in September 2023 that Surovikin had been appointed to a new post of some kind in Algeria, although nothing had been officially confirmed. That month, investigative journalist Christo Grozev posted images from Wagner-linked social media channels of Surovikin meeting with local officials in Algeria saying that he had "kind of been rehabilitated." U.K. Defense Ministry: "Sergey Surovikin, former commander of the Russian group of forces in Ukraine, is reportedly carrying out a role as 'head of a group of Russian military specialists' at the Russian embassy in Algeria." Speculation over Surovikin's fate grew after references to him were removed from the Russian defense ministry's website but a more public presence in Algeria may raise questions over whether he will take on a more prominent role in Russia's military. Related Articles Russian State TV Network Mocks Donald Trump's Attack on PutinUkraine Sounds Warning Over Russian Troops Massing at Front LineZelensky Makes Trump, Putin ProposalThe Sanctions Era Is Quietly Ending. The West Isn't Ready | Opinion 2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
UK intelligence reveals that Russian General Surovikin has been found in Algeria
UK intelligence has learned that Russian General Sergei Surovikin who has not been seen in public for many months is likely in Algeria. Source: UK Defence Intelligence update dated 27 May on X (Twitter), as reported by European Pravda Details: The update relays reports from the Russian media that General Surovikin was spotted in a photo from the Russian Embassy in Algeria, taken during Victory Day events on 9 May, where he appeared in the role of "head of a group of Russian military specialists". [Victory Day is a Russian holiday commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 – ed.] This is one of Surovikin's first public appearances since Yevgeny Prigozhin's failed mutiny in 2023. [Prigozhin was the financier of the Wagner Private Military Company. He led a failed mutiny in June 2023, during which he accused Russia's military leadership of betraying Wagner fighters and briefly advanced towards Moscow before standing down after negotiations – ed.] Surovikin previously commanded the Russian Group of Forces in the war against Ukraine and later headed the Russian Aerospace Forces. He was known to be close to Prigozhin, notably due to involvement in operations in Syria. Quote from UK intelligence: "Reports of Surovikin's arrest and detention in relation to the June 2023 Wagner Group mutiny were not publicly confirmed. The Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) did not officially announce Surovikin's resignation. However, in September 2023, references to him were reportedly removed from the Russian MOD's website." Details: Analysts suggest that the Kremlin has viewed Surovikin with suspicion due to his long-standing ties to the Wagner Group dating back to the Syrian campaign. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
Telegraph
21-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Putin is laughing in our faces
Not for the first time in his already short second term, president Trump is at risk of once more being outsmarted by Putin, in this year's ultimate game of diplomatic high stakes poker. Having campaigned last year in an election in which Ukraine was front and centre – symbolising Washington's failed foreign policy agenda and a perceived need for refocusing back on 'America First' – Trump repeatedly vowed to end the three-year war 'on day one'. One hundred and twenty days later, and with no end to the war realistically in sight, the president held a private two-hour long phone call with Putin, in a further attempt to bring the Russian dictator finally to heel. This time, instead of threats to further bank-roll Kyiv, Trump appealed to the businessman inside Putin, offering promises of 'unlimited potential' of a post-conflict Russian trading relationship with the rest of the world. Whilst understandable that Trump – himself liking to imagine he is the world's best deal-maker – attempts to address Putin both as an equal and as a businessman, the Russian president is of course neither. At best a relatively low-ranking career KGB agent, and now second-rate dictator, whose own lack of internal power nearly spelt the end of his regime when former aide-turned mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin threatened a putsch on Moscow almost two years ago. Trump may well have his flaws, but a second rate despot he is not – and to treat Putin as an equal and now as a fellow businessman is to not only do himself a disservice, it also risks emboldening Putin. In less than four months, Trump's strategy to dealing with Putin has lurched from sympathetic ally; then to annoyance; to threats of increasing military aid to Ukraine (seen as a near existential threat by the Kremlin); to now promises of unlimited trade with the US. The right strategy to follow from the start was, of course, severely limiting Russia's access to the US-led global financial markets. Starmer – to his credit – has led a fresh round of sanctions on both Russian individuals and on Russia's infamous shadow fleet. Even the Russian-gas loving EU has issued fresh sanctions. So why is Trump now so keen to appease Putin, and offer potentially billions in trade deals as a reward for a Russian agreement to a ceasefire to a bloody war which they needlessly started? Only through an ill-thought out strategy, coupled with strategic impatience and diplomatic hubris can Trump think that this latest appeal to Putin will result in any meaningful difference in tone or sentiment from Moscow. If the Kremlin's junior representatives to Turkey last week to meet with Ukrainian officials are anything to go by, Putin will continue to drag these discussions out at largely meaningless levels, all the while likely extracting further promises of financial reward from Trump. The time has finally come for Trump to roll up his sleeves and get tough on Putin. For three years – and arguably since 2014, if not 2008 – Putin has been laughing at the West, at its weak and fragmented leadership in the face of Russia's continued belligerence and aggression. Trump is desperate for a deal between Ukraine and Russia. If he thinks he is going to get it by cosying up to Putin over late night calls and showering him with lucrative trade deals, then he is in for a very disappointing year. Trump needs to step-up, and put-up, or he and the West are going to be taken for a ride by Putin for the next three and a half years – never mind the last 120 days.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The Wagner Group's dealings are darker than we thought
The Central African Republic may be Africa's most failed state. Since the 1979 overthrow of its self-declared emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the country has seen coups, insurgencies and full-blown civil wars. It has hosted nearly a dozen United Nations-backed peacekeeping missions, most of which have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. None has achieved lasting results. So when, in 2019, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late leader of Russia's mercenary group Wagner, helped to broker an accord in the CAR, he at least got value for money. Having won a contract to act as military advisors to the CAR's government, Wagner dished out bribes to persuade rebel leaders to end seven years of fighting. One leader received $60,000, a box of Turkish pistols and 200 Android phones. The total price of these sweeteners was only $1 million or so. As the US journalist John Lechner notes in Death is Our Business, his new book on Wagner, 'it was a clear foreign-policy win for Moscow and a boon for Russia's international image.' Prigozhin was no Russian version of Mandela, however, as Lechner's book makes clear. The one-time street-food seller is best known for Wagner's brutal operations in Ukraine: in 2023, he recruited nearly 50,000 Russian ex-prisoners for the 'meat-grinder' battle of Bakhmut, and around 20,000 of them died. Many would argue that the nearest he came to bringing about world peace was when he launched an armed mutiny against the Kremlin that same summer, during which, for a matter of hours, Putin's regime looked like imploding. But Prigozhin retreated, having apparently lost his nerve, and died two months later in a plane crash, which was widely blamed on a Putin-sanctioned bomb – a victim, then, of the very thuggery he'd epitomised. Wagner continues to operate today, but it's now under much closer Kremlin control. Lechner's book covers some similar territory to Downfall, last year's excellent Prigozhin biography co-written by Mark Galeotti and Anna Arutunyan, but where it adds value is in Lechner's journalistic shoe-leather. Not only has he interviewed around 30 ex-Wagner members – itself no easy task – but he has conducted extensive ground reporting on Wagner operations in Africa. This would be a hazardous assignment even for the major news outlets, let alone a freelancer such as Lechner. Wagner's African ventures are, by definition, in places where Western intervention has failed: the jihadist-plagued ex-French colonies of the Sahel, for example. And Wagner doesn't like scrutiny. In 2018, three Russian journalists were shot dead in the CAR while reporting on the group, a hit that some commentators linked to Prigozhin. But Lechner dives in headlong, visiting the CAR, Libya, Mali and Ukraine. Already fluent in Russian and French, he learns Sango, the CAR's lingua franca, and he interviews everyone from pro-Wagner locals to the head of the group's operations, who holds court in a luxury hotel in the CAR's capital, Bangui. The result is a vivid snapshot of Africa's modern soldiers of fortune, far darker than anything in Frederick Forsyth's novel Dogs of War. The key to Wagner's success in the likes of CAR and Sahel is brutally simple: it has brought order through the use of what Lechner calls 'extremely harsh but effective military force'. Human-rights groups decry this, but locals tell Lechner that they appreciate being able to travel around their country safely for the first time, unmolested by murderous gangs. 'While there were countless people with good intentions working for the UN in places like CAR,' Lechner writes, 'it was well-known that UN peacekeeping missions often failed to keep the peace and protect.' Prigozhin's 'troll factories' also played a role, churning out online propaganda that depicted Wagner as saviours, righting centuries of French imperial wrongs. The reality, however, was that Wagner's presence was as rapacious as anything from the colonial era. In exchange for keeping local leaders in power, they have taken concessions on gold and other natural resources. Little thought is given to governance, development or any of the other knotty issues to which more benign partners might attend, nor do human rights remotely figure on their agenda). Lechner cites a massacre in central Mali in 2022, when Wagner and Malian government forces executed 300 villagers on suspicion of being jihadists. He himself was later arrested by Mali's secret police, who didn't want foreign journalists digging into the affair. 'Prigozhin's men,' Lechner writes, 'were often force multipliers; they increased the capacity of governments to commit abuses against their citizens.' In the long term, such violent methods may well backfire. Lecher's narrative thread is occasionally patchy. This is an occupational hazard of writing about dangerous people in dangerous places, who don't always oblige authors by helping to fill in the gaps. But Death is Our Business is still a fine account of Russia's new private mercenary forces, and deserves a place on the bookshelves not just of military buffs but of diplomats and aid workers in Africa. For, even if Wagner's presence on the continent promises only long-term disaster, its short-term success is owed, in part, to the failure of the West.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Putin's Shadow Armies Have Set Their Sights Beyond Ukraine
When Russian troops attacked Ukraine in February 2022, top figures in the Kremlin thought that the country would quickly collapse. They had not prepared for a long war and the inevitable toll in treasure and blood that breaks families and endangers governments. But when Ukraine's defenders put up a formidable resistance, it became clear that Russia was going to need help. In the years leading up to the full-scale invasion, the Russian president Vladimir Putin had come to rely on private militaries, especially Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner Group. Battalions of mercenary soldiers could be used as a scalpel to fulfill foreign policy goals in places like Sudan and Syria, where Russia had an interest in resources like gold or could count on political support from autocratic leaders. Prigozhin, who had spent time in a Soviet prison cell in the 1980s before becoming a restaurateur and one of the Kremlin's preferred caterers in the 2000s, sourced many of his soldiers from Russia's jails. Those who went to the front had in some sense already been taken away. When the body bags came back, Putin and his generals figured, they would not get flak. For a long time, Wagner attracted little notice, but, as the journalist John Lechner writes in 'Death Is Our Business,' an excellent new book on Russia's private militaries, Ukraine would thrust Prigozhin and his army into the spotlight. Less than a month after the invasion, the ex-con got to work, eventually deploying some 50,000 men with call signs like 'Zombie' to win battles against Ukrainian forces. 'Almost immediately,' Lechner observes, 'he and Wagner Group were everywhere.' The use of mercenaries helped to hide the brutality of war from many Russians, and seemed like a good deal for Wagner's armed contractors too. Prigozhin promised convict-soldiers freedom and a decent salary in return for six months at the front. In reality, a Ukrainian soldier tells Lechner, they were used as a swarm of human 'meat' against Ukrainian defenses. Wagner boasted the sledgehammer as its symbol, a rune that denoted Russian power. But the group also used it as a tool of execution against deserters, inadvertently showcasing the brittleness of a regime that had to use fear to motivate even its mercenary soldiers to stay in the fight. The system was fragile in more ways than one. When Prigozhin started to enjoy success in eastern Ukraine, Russian military commanders began to see him as a threat and tried to rein him in. Prigozhin, never one to be outdone, turned his troops on Moscow, culminating in an abortive assault on the capital and a negotiated retreat. Two months later, his private jet was blown from the sky above Russia. 'Death Is Our Business' is not the only new book to chart Prigozhin's meteoric rise and fall. 'Putin's Sledgehammer,' by the international affairs expert Candace Rondeaux, places his life story within a wider view of Russian history. Her detailed analysis shows how the country's restructuring under Putin provided fertile soil for Prigozhin to graduate from woman-strangling street thug to catering star and mercenary prodigy. In the mess of gangsterism and 'shock therapy' capitalism that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, Prigozhin made a name for himself as a hot dog peddler. By the 2000s, he had nurtured ties with Putin and graduated to serving fine food to oligarchs and heads of state, including, in 2006, President George W. Bush. ('I survived,' Bush recently recalled.) In 2014, the year Putin's forces took Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and pro-Russian militias established breakaway states in eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin partnered with Dmitri 'Wagner' Utkin. (How they met is unclear, though Rondeaux floats connections made by Russia's military intelligence, where Utkin served.) They were an unlikely pair: Prigozhin had a Jewish father and Utkin was a neo-Nazi with an SS tattoo. The ex-con was looking to assist the separatist rebels across the border as a way of brown-nosing Putin, and Putin's generals were eager to use the new company to carry out arm's-length operations. Where Rondeaux offers broad analysis, Lechner blends beautiful first-person writing with granular reporting. An enviably talented linguist — he speaks Russian and Chechen as well as Sango, the lingua franca of the Central African Republic — the author interviewed more than 30 Wagner fighters and associates, as well as people who fought with and against the group across war zones in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. 'The bullets fly by so fast,' one Wagner soldier tells him near Bakhmut, 'you don't have a chance to lift your head.' Lechner's book is particularly good at focusing on the way Wagner became embroiled in foreign wars after the conflict in eastern Ukraine died down. It was in Syria, fighting with the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, that Prigozhin's men first filmed the sledgehammer execution of a Syrian deserter. The only time Wagner fighters engaged U.S. forces head-on, they suffered a humiliating defeat. In early 2018, a Wagner unit attempted a strike on a gas facility in Syria guarded by American and Kurdish soldiers and was almost wiped out. Prigozhin would blame Russian military command for not passing on warnings, but the fault just as likely lay inward; his outfit was as venal and shot through with corruption as his master's regime. Prigozhin was 'mercurial,' Lechner explains. 'The most successful in his orbit tended, over time, to be sycophants.' Western complacency, meanwhile, stoked Russian imperial ambition. Though rich in resources, Rondeaux notes, Russia still relies on the rest of the world to fuel its war machine. Wagner's operations in Africa burgeoned around the same time as their Syrian operation. In 2016, the French president François Hollande 'semi-jokingly' suggested that the Central African Republic's president go to the Russians for help putting down rebel groups. 'We actually used Hollande's statement,' Dmitri Syty, one of the brains behind Wagner's operation there, tells Lechner. 'Death Is Our Business' provides powerful descriptions of the lives that were upended by the mercenary deployments. Wagner is accused of massacring hundreds of civilians in Mali in 2022, and of carrying out mass killings alongside local militias in the Central African Republic. 'Their behavior mirrored the armed groups they ousted,' Lechner writes. As a Central African civil society activist whispers to Lechner, 'Russia is no different' from the sub-Saharan country's former colonial power, France. Both books are particularly interesting when they turn their focus toward Europe and the United States. In Rondeaux's words, the trans-Atlantic alliance does not 'have a game plan for countering Russia's growing influence across Africa.' Lechner, who was detained while reporting his book by officials from Mali's pro-Russian government, is even more critical. He notes that, whatever Wagner produced profit-wise, the sum would have 'paled in comparison to the $1 billion the E.U. paid Russia each month for oil and gas.' And, while Wagner was an effective boogeyman, mercenaries of all stripes have proliferated across the map of this century's conflicts, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen. 'The West was happy to leverage Wagner as shorthand for all the evils of a war economy,' Lechner writes. 'But the reality is that the world is filled with Prigozhins.' Lechner is right. When Wagner fell, others rose in its stead, although they were kept on a tighter leash by Russian military intelligence. In Ukraine, prisoners are still being used in combat and Russia maintains a tight lid on its casualty figures. Even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, as President Trump has promised, Moscow's mercenaries will still be at work dividing their African cake. Prigozhin may be dead, but his hammer is still a tool: It doesn't matter if he's around to swing it or not.
