[Bloomberg] The Kremlin has been unable to conceal its use of mercenaries for its military interventions because the nationalist fringe ‐ which supplies many of the soldiers for hire ‐ openly discusses their role. That and other considerations make it likely that Russia will eventually admit it’s using private troops.
On Thursday, Yevgeny Shabayev, a far-left nationalist activist who heads a "Cossack" group in Moscow, demanded that private military company fighters who take part in operations in Syria, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Yemen and Libya be officially recognized as veterans. At the moment, the Russian government won’t even admit the existence of the companies.
The statement, co-signed by two other nationalist figures, Leonid Ivashov, a retired general, and Vladimir Petrov, a retired colonel, claimed that "the heads of private military companies (Patriot, Wagner and others) receive state awards personally from the Russian president." Yet even though the companies receive profitable business concessions with the Kremlin’s help in the countries where they are deployed, their fighters get no help from the government if they’re wounded in combat. Instead, the statement claimed, police and domestic counterintelligence services keep an eye on them, and the families of the dead fighters are pressured into silence. |