What’s next for the Russian state-funded Wagner Group?

Hello, everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado today is the 27th of June. And the news is that the Russian government has admitted formally that Wagner is an arm of the Russian state to the tune of about a billion dollars a year in terms of their outlays. Now, why is this important? Now a Wagner was formed by the Russians, specifically by a guy by the name of if any proposing back in 2013 2014, in the lead up to the dawn boss war, which is a war where the Russians basically created what were called little green men to fight on the other side of an international border and foment a, quote, secession or, and then under that pretext moving regular forces. No one really bought it. But the legal section did allow a degree of separation that gave especially the Europeans pause, and anyone who was looking for an excuse to continue normal relations with the Russians. The Germans are probably at the top of that list, grabbed on to that little flimsy bit of legalisms with both hands and wouldn’t let go. On the years since Wagner has been used by the Russian state in any number of conflicts all over the world, most notably in the Middle East and Africa. And in those operations, because it has not been a state entity, it has gleefully engaged in a series of massacres that are really war crimes by almost any definition. And so Wagner has been under sanction not just in the United States and the European Union, but Australia, Japan, a lot of other countries that we generally considered part of the you know, if you want to use a loaded term civilized world,

and are the leaders of it are persona non grata at most of the world’s airports.

But as long as the Russians haven’t claimed that Wagner is one of their own, from a government point of view, that it’s just a group of mercenaries kind of like a Russian Blackwater, if you will, then that degree of legal separation allows Wagner do what it wants might be under sanction. But it’s not like it’s under a state sanction. Hope that changes today. Now that Vladimir Putin has said that Wagner is an always was part of the Russian state. Now, assets of the Russian state can be seized in order to pay for things that Wagner has done in various countries. And whenever you have a government shift in one of the countries where the Wagner is accused of war crimes, or one bordering it, that has an influence in that area, you now have two things going on. Number one, the degree of legal installation is gone. Now, anything that Wagner does or has done, Moscow itself is culpable. And in a lot of circumstances, Wagner slash Russia had been compensated, not with cash, but with say, mineral concessions, with gold mines being a favorite, those are now legally all up in the air. So the admission here, not only is going to piss off a lot of people in Europe, and we’re generating a whole new round of punitive sanctions, it means that the assets of the Russian state and the assets of Wagner are now one in the same, and the same tools can go after all of them. And that flimsy legal pretext is completely gone now. And so anyone who had a new wine into a private asset by Wagner, or public asset by Russia, can now use those same tools to go after both. So we’re going to see a wrapping up of Wagner’s international economic position in a relatively short period of time. And it won’t take much of a government shift in places where Ragnar has been accused of war crimes that include Sudan and the Central African Republic, and Syria and Libya, in order to see their military position wrapped up as well. And that, of course, assumes that nothing else goes wrong. And several other things are going wrong. So as you guys have, obviously those library through kind of a not coup over the weekend, and Wagner troops now have to pledge loyalty to the Russian state and hand over their heavy equipment to the Russian military. Some of them will, some of them won’t. And what that means is there’s a smaller number of Wagner staff that are available to man all these international emissions in the first place, even if the Russian government doesn’t go through and do a purge of them. And that Purge is definitely coming. Remember that Vladimir Putin’s power center is not within the Russian military, they control it, but that’s not their power center. Their power center is within the security services, most notably the intelligence bureaus like the FSB, and the GRU. And those institutions are very capable of doing a purge of personnel of people who are not physically in Russia. So we’re going to be seeing a lot of that so Wagner’s capacity to function internationally is going to go down significantly. And since the Russian military no longer has the capacity to project beyond the former Soviet Union, you’re looking at all of this getting wrapped up in one way or another, probably by the end of the year. All right. That’s it. Take care