Wagner ‘does not exist’: Why Putin claims a rift in the mercenary group

In an interview Thursday with the Russian business daily newspaper Kommersant, Putin described a three-hour meeting with Wagner commanders, including the group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, just days after the private military company’s abortive march on Moscow last month.“Wagner PMC does not exist,” Putin said when asked if Wagner would be kept on as a fighting unit. “We do not have a law for private military organizations. It simply does not exist.

Putin went on to explain in the interview that the State Duma — Russia’s parliament — should consider legislation to legalize PMCs, conceding, “It’s not an easy question.” It’s more than a technical or philosophical question. After all, Putin himself acknowledged in remarks on June 27 to security officials that “the maintenance of the entire Wagner group was fully provided for by the state,” with the government allocating more than 86 billion rubles, or around $1 billion, for the maintenance of Wagner forces between May 2022 and May 2023 alone.

The same was true with Russia’s covert support to separatists in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine from 2014 onward. The Kremlin insisted on maintaining the fiction that regular Russian forces had not propped up the separatist republics, even though Putin winkingly acknowledged that the Russian government was actively involved in Donbas, including support to the separatists and prisoner exchanges.

“I’ve never just been the financier of the Internet Research Agency. I invented it, I created it, I managed it for a long time. It was founded to protect the Russian information space from boorish aggressive propaganda of anti-Russian narrative from the West,” Prigozhin said in February.

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