Ben Makuch
CIA Director Bill Burns said that the agency is doing everything in its power to counter the Wagner Group—a key Kremlin ally and private military contractor with thousands of soldiers fighting everywhere from regional conflicts in Africa to Ukraine—today during a public hearing for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
“Our assessment is that the Wagner Group is a vicious, aggressive organization which has posed a threat not just to the people of Ukraine,” said Burns in response to questions from various senators. He pointed out that the mercenary group, whose chief is Yevgeniy Prigozhin (who first came to prominence in Russia as a catering oligarch from St. Petersburg), is currently in charge of most of the fighting in the besieged Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. “But I've also seen it, in my own travels in West Africa and the Sahel, where I think the deeply destabilizing impact of Wagner can be seen in a lot of very fragile societies right now.”
As a means of exporting Russian influence abroad, President Vladimir Putin has dispatched the Wagner Group to West Africa and the Sahels as a sort of Kremlin shadow army fighting with national governments in a series of intractable conflicts. The mercenary group has also been involved in suspicious mining and natural resource extractions, with some of its fighters accused of rape and torture, while they appear openly at the side of national leaders and militia commanders alike.
Do you have any tips on the Wagner Group? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Ben Makuch on email at ben.makuch@vice.com or on the Wire app @benmakuch.
Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry, did not respond to a request for comment on the Wagner Group and its activities. In the past, the Russian government has always denied it has anything to do with Wagner.
But Burns was clear that the CIA is working hard to counter Wagner and its operations, with the help of the French government (a former colonial power in the region) and other allied nations.
“We work as an agency, along with our partners, to help many of those governments and many of our security service partners to resist that,” he said in the hearing, without providing specifics on what that support looked like. “We work with the French and with other countries, other allies in that effort as well.
“But we take very seriously the threat posed by [Wagner] in everything we can to counter it and disrupt it.”
In the merry-go-round of Russian politicians outside of Putin, Prigozhin emerged in the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a leading military figure that often shows up in eastern Donbass—the main site of fighting in the war—clad in military attire to check in on his soldiers.
Just today he posted on his personal Telegram account that he was on a casual “business trip in the territory of Donbass” and didn’t want to discuss media inquiries regarding the many sanctions against him, his mother, and his company.
“As for the challenge of my sanctions and the sanctions against PMC Wagner,” he said after posting an image of himself and other soldiers holding Kalashnikov rifles. “I am not going to challenge them and I believe that at the moment they are imposed quite reasonably.”
Colin P. Clarke, an analyst on the mercenary group and the director of research at intelligence consultancy firm the Soufan Group, said he isn’t surprised that the CIA chief said the agency is countering Wagner. But he added that the Biden administration, “more broadly lacks a comprehensive strategy to deal with” the group and needs to go further.
“The U.S. is used to dealing with terrorist and insurgent groups, but the administration has not been nimble in responding to the threat posed by private military companies like Wagner, which are essentially paramilitary proxies acting as an extension of the Russian state,” he said in an email to VICE News. “The Treasury Department listed Wagner as a transnational criminal organization, but that designation doesn't go far enough in countering the threat.”
There is also a growing movement within the U.S. government to designate Wagner as an official terrorist organization among groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. In early March, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he wouldn’t “object” to designating Prigozhin’s mercenary outfit with the official distinction. If that terror designation did happen, it would immediately hamper Wagner from engaging in the global economy along with other legal penalties and make their African operations more difficult to carry out.
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