When paramilitaries from the feared Wagner Group took cover in Belarus after their failed mutiny against the Kremlin last month, dozens of other mercenary groups were already poised to take their place in the Ukrainian conflict.
Mercenaries from Redut, Slavonic Corps and E.N.O.T, among dozens of others, have already been spotted fighting in the Russian invasion of Ukraine that began last year, according to reports.
Mercenaries from Redut, also known as Redut-Anti-Terror are among the most prominent, and were some of the first to enter the conflict in Ukraine, according to Russian news reports.
The group, whose Russian-language name means “Redoubt,” has been active in Syria where soldiers have been involved in guarding facilities for a construction conglomerate controlled by Russian billionaire Gennady Timchenko.
Some of the group’s mercenaries, which were recruited on Russian social media platforms, have been convicted of war crimes during the invasion, according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
Last week, a court in Ukraine sentenced three Redut mercenaries, including Maksym Ziaziulchyk, a Belarusian soldier who was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Ziaziulchyk, 22, said he had traveled to the central Russian city of Tambov to sign up for Redut at a salary of $3,400 a month, paid in US dollars.
Human Rights in Ukraine, a nonprofit that documents war crimes in the country, said that, while Redut is controlled by Russia’s defense ministry, the salaries are coming from oligarchs linked to Russian leader Valdimir Putin.
“Even if … Redut is linked with … or under the control of Russia’s defense ministry, somebody very rich is doubtless footing the bill for these mercenaries,” said a statement on Human Rights Ukraine’s web site earlier this week.
Other Russian conglomerates, such as Lukoil and Gazprom, also have their own security forces which were initially set up to protect their oil fields and other facilities in the region and in foreign countries. Soldiers from Potok, a mercenary group linked to energy company Gazprom, complained about battlefield conditions in Ukraine last year, according to Radio Free Europe.
The group E.N.O.T., a Russian acronym for United People’s Communal Partnerships, emerged in 2011 to organize militias in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The group has also been active in Syria and, since 2015, has trained its forces at camps in Serbia.
It’s also used child soldiers from Russia, Montenegro and Serbia. In 2018, E.N.O.T. training camps in Serbia, which were run by veterans of the Bosnian war, were shut down by over allegations of child abuse, according to Balkan news reports.
Despite the proliferation of other paramilitary groups fighting in Ukraine, the Wagner Group remains powerful.
The group was in 2014 by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin — a former special forces officer in the Russian Army and member of the Slavonic Corps, a private military contractor that operated during the Syrian Civil War.
The soldiers, who were recruited in St. Petersburg by the Moran Security Group, were used to defend government installations in Syria, according to Russian news reports.
Even after Prigozhin’s attempted mutiny against Putin last month, the Wagner Group remains Russia’s dominant mercenary fighting force, said Rebekah Koffler, a Russian-born intelligence expert and the author of Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America.
“The Wagner Group hasn’t lost momentum but rather is redeploying in Belarus,” Koffler told The Post Tuesday, adding that Prigozhin’s forces are setting up training camps in an unused military base that Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarus president, has offered to them.
Koffler believes that the attempted coup on June 24 was a “false flag operation” which allowed Putin to consolidate even more power. More than 25,000 Wagner Group forces marched into Rostov-on Don, launching 24 hours of chaos as Prigozhin threatened an insurrection and threatened to march on Moscow.
Putin accused his former ally of treason and called the rebellion “a stab in the back of our country.” But by the end of the day, Prigozhin had ordered his men back to base.
“The West fell for the narrative that Putin is weak, which is what he wants,” Koffler said. “In reality, what Putin has done is set up a strategic reserve of combat ready Wagner units, Putin’s best war-fighting force, within 140 miles from Ukraine’s northern border, in preparation for opening a second front.”
Despite the contretemps between Putin and Prigozhin, who emerged from exile to thank his fighters for their “March of Justice” in an audio message Tuesday, the two remain strong allies, Koffler said.
“In reality, Prigozhin is one of the world’s most murderous characters,” she said. “He is still 100% Putin’s ally, very loyal. Putin never denounced him. Washington and the West have always misread Putin. And that is very dangerous.”