VLADIMIR Putin has used a shadowy private army to invade countries tormented by civil war and protect maniac dictators – including in SYRIA.
The so-called Wagner Group has waged war in Ukraine and propped up regimes in Venezuela, the Central African Republic and the failed state of Libya with the backing of the Kremlin.
They are said to have between 5,000 and 10,000 soldiers spreading chaos around the world complete with tanks and artillery.
And despite attacking US military advisers in February last year in Syria, they have in recent days taken over an American military base in the north of the war torn country in support of the Syrian government in its fight against the invading Turkish army.
Last week, Donald Trump pulled his remaining troops out of the war zone – paving the way for the Turks to launch an offensive – and Putin has taken full advantage of the situation.
The Russian leader brokered a deal between bloodthirsty tyrant Bashar al-Assad and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who were abandoned by the firebrand US President.
As Assad’s Syrian forces took full control of Manbij – under two hours drive north east of Aleppo – the Wagner Group seized a US military base in the city, it has been reported.
In February 2018, the privately-funded militia first came to prominence when 600 of its members attacked the SDF in northeast Syria.
Whether the Moscow-backed troops realised a number of American military advisers were part of the Kurdish group is unclear.
The assault – which lasted for four hours – was met with a barrage of US airstrikes which killed or injured around 300 of the Russians.
According to Foreign Policy, that fiasco resulted in the Wagner Group having its “wings clipped” by the Kremlin.
The current extent of its power and operations within Syria is not known – and rival Russian militias have emerged in recent years.
But the Wagner Group’s influence in modern war zones, across four different continents, is undeniable and frightening.
The company, whose members are mostly ex-service personnel, has fought clandestinely in support of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and in Libya where they backed General Khalifa Haftar overthrow the UN-backed government.
In their Venezuela deployment, they reportedly flew in two chartered aircraft to Havana, Cuba in January, from where they transferred onto regular commercial flights to the troubled socialist country.
Their task was to protect embattled President Nicolás Maduro from any attempt by opposition sympathisers in his own security forces to detain him, Reuters reported.
Press freedoms in Putin’s Russia are notoriously compromised and some reporters who have attempted to investigate Wagner have ended up dead.
The mercenary army was thrust into the spotlight last year when three Russian journalists were killed in Central African Republic while probing the group.
While authorities in Moscow claim the documentary filmmakers, whose bullet-riddled bodies were left at the side of a road, were killed in a random robbery – their colleagues claim “known associates of the Wagner Group” were involved in their murders, reports Time.
And one news outlet, which reported on the activities of the shadowy firm, claim their staff have been threatened and harassed.
Proekt, an independent Moscow-based online news outlet which specialises in investigations, began to publish a series of articles in March looking into the role of the group.
Around the same time editor-in-chief Roman Badanin said his journalists began to receive emailed threats of physical retribution for their work.
Unknown people tried to break into his staff’s personal accounts on Facebook, the Telegram messenger service and Google mail, he said, and one of his journalists was followed in the street by an unknown man who filmed her with a video camera.
“This is all simply an attempt to make us nervous, to distract from our journalistic work, to make it clear that we’re under surveillance and that they’re watching us,” Badanin told Reuters in an interview.
Badanin said he could not prove who was behind the harassment campaign, which he said peaked last month when Proekt ran an investigation into Wagner’s apparent activities in Libya.
Proekt did not complain to the police over the incidents, he said, saying he had instead decided to speak out publicly to draw attention to the threats.
Russian private military contractors use a defence ministry base in southern Russia containing barracks that were built by a company linked to businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, it was reported in April.
The US imposed sanctions on Prigozhin after it accused him of trying meddle in its 2016 presidential election and the 2018 congressional elections.
Prigozhin has denied any links to Wagner and has declined to comment on the allegations, calling them a “private matter” for the US Treasury.
According to recent figures, the global market for private security will reach £200 billion – around five times the UK defence budget.
A report for the foreign policy think-tank Chatham House said: “Increasingly arms and power are held in private hands, instead of the state.”
“We’re seeing the growth of lethality among private companies who are not even in the shadows,” said McFate, now a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and Georgetown University in Washington DC.
“They are one of the biggest security threats of the 21st century.
“They’re not going to take over western Europe or North America but they can go to sub-Saharan Africa and then the Middle East and take over and sell natural resources.
“Or they could go into a fragile country and become the power behind the throne. Of the 190 or so states in the world, the top 30 are not in danger but they others should be concerned.”
McFate imagines a future when wars will be fought by private armies battling on behalf of the super-rich.
“Say one oligarch would fight an oil company and they hire mercenaries and states would be by-standers in that war,” he said.
