front and center following this weekend of

rebellion in Russia.

Putin had one of his worst weekends ever.

This act, one of a five act play.

And is there more to come?

The future of Wagner Group and its mercenary leader,

Yevgeny Prigozhin, remains murky following

the armed mutiny against the Russian state.

Until recently, Russia denied the existence of

Wagner. There was an.

Incentive to not make the footprint of the

organization too big.

But over time, that sort of went out of the window.

The Wagner Group's activity isn't limited to

war torn Ukraine.

These are.

Mercenaries. And, you know, they sell their

services to people who are willing and able to

pay them.

So the big countries where they're operating today

are Mali and Central African Republic.

They also operate in Libya and Sudan.

But those are kind of smaller deployments.

Securing access to lucrative resources

appeared to be a key motivator of Wagner Group

business operations there.

In diamonds, gold, forestry, coffee and

alcohol and probably other sectors that we

don't know about yet.

If we're talking about Syria.

There was certainly other business related things,

such as agreements to liberate oil fields, quote

unquote, in exchange for revenue cuts.

Once the war in Ukraine reached a new stage with

the full on invasion by Russia in 2022, Vladimir

Putin's failure to rapidly take over the

country led to a need for more troops.

He tried to outsource a lot of the burden of

fighting the war to Wagner, but.

Heavy losses led to a drop in recruiting standards.

What was once an organization made up of

former Russian military members started to take on

more employees without a military background,

including convicts.

Heavy fighting continued to take its toll, and

Wagner's leader bemoaned the lack of support from

the Russian state on the front lines in Ukraine.

The military increasingly saw the Wagner group of

mercenaries as a threat.

Questions remain If Wagner started the armed mutiny

as a way to force a contract negotiation with

the Kremlin, or if this was a desperate ploy by

Prigozhin to stay relevant in the world of

Russian power politics.

But whatever happens next could have big

implications for Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

How did it get to this point?

Right. Months of tension between the head of

Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the Russian

military came to a head in late June.

A private Russian military organization is accusing

the Russian military of launching strikes on its

training camps and killing troops.

After marching on Rostov on Don.

He sent an armed convoy towards Moscow that caused

Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare

an armed mutiny was underway in a video

statement. The mercenary force ended its rebellion

after the leader of Belarus, Alexander

Lukashenko, brokered a deal with Yevgeny

Prigozhin. The details of this deal and the long

term effects remain unknown.

Over the longer term.

I think that this probably has done some

damage to Putin politically.

And the murky missions Wagner is involved in

across the globe are likely another factor in

this brokered deal. These operations bring in huge

sums of money.

It's in the millions and billions of dollars

definitely moving towards the billions.

The issue is that it's it's very hard to kind of

kind of get an exact idea just because of the

illicit channels that that Wagner is using in

order to export things.

And also the number the sheer number of shell

companies that they use, because not only do they

change their names in the businesses that they're

running, but all of the companies that they then

export out of also have shell names and then they

use a variety of middle traders.

A camp has been reportedly laid out in Belarus, which

could end up housing Wagner members who are not

absorbed into the Russian military. But what comes

next for the group and its leaders has yet to

play out. Private military companies are

nothing new. Governments have hired mercenaries

throughout history to provide security guard

elites and fight in wars during the global war on

terror. The US used private military companies

and security contractors extensively.

Blackwater was sent in to fulfill specialist

functions. It wasn't set in to just become a force

multiplier, you know.

Yes, to some degree.

Russia was imitating a phenomenon that it first

saw in the West.

It did so in a in a highly distorted, much

more disorganized, much more unscrupulous way.

Hal Wagner operates in countries such as the

Central African Republic are what sets it apart

from other modern PMCs.

Wagner group will get involved in these

countries at the same time that the Russian

state is involved in large kind of military

assistance programs.

Often they kind of get into these side operations

that are more building their own business.

So basically a lot of resource extraction

projects, which is often how they finance

themselves or how they kind of make economic

agreements with the with the state in order to stay

in these countries.

Having an organization that isn't officially

under Russian government control has open doors to

agreements that otherwise would likely remain

closed.

The resources that they generally go after are

precious metals.

That's that's the biggest one because it's

relatively easy to export and relatively easy to

smuggle. We can surmise that a lot of it is in

fact going back to the Russian state.

So in that way it's it's helping the Russian state

at a time where their precious metal reserves

are incredibly low.

The core of Wagner's troops included the battle

hardened personnel who gained their expertise by

serving in the Russian military. As the war in

Ukraine wore on, Wagner losses began to mount, and

the group was forced to turn to convicts to

bolster numbers. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin

found himself with a manpower shortage in the

regular Russian military.

He did not want to impose martial law.

He did not want to impose a widespread conscription

on the Russian people.

So he tried to wage this war on the cheap, so to

speak.

The combination of well-trained soldiers and

convicts with nothing to lose created an

organization that at times was effective on the

battlefield. But high losses and a new strategy

by Russia changed the dynamic for Wagner.

Late last summer, early last fall, Putin bit the

bullet, so to speak, and imposed a partial

conscription.

This new wave of mobilization and a change

to Russian strategy made Wagner less critical to

Putin's war in Ukraine.

And I think that's part of the reason why the regular

Russian military finally said to Wagner, okay,

enough. Your fighters are going to have to sign

contracts with us because they weren't as dependent

on Wagner today as they were a year ago.

Wagner's mutiny may stand out as a warning to other

countries that outsource war fighting to private

companies. But it's also possible that Wagner

emerges from this critical juncture in an

entirely new position than before.

One of the challenges that the Russian government has

is that you don't build up an organization like

Wagner overnight. So if they do plan to liquidate

the whole organization, which I'm skeptical of, it

would be a very costly, cumbersome process that

I'm not sure the Russian state wants to take on

right now.

As for Prigozhin and his senior commanders, my

guess is no.

They are not willing to be subordinate to the

regular Russian military.

There's no love between them and the Russian high

command. There's a great deal of of animosity.

Whatever happens to Wagner, it's unlikely that

there will be a decrease in demand for mercenaries

around the globe.

You're going to have a scenario where you see a

lot more of these groups popping up that look like

Wagner. They could be state sponsored.

They could not be. But sort of the expansion of

of the the mercenary phenomenon on the African

continent, it could be very problematic because

they tend to commit a lot of human rights

violations.

As immune as Vladimir Putin has seen during his

time in power. It's possible this armed mutiny

could create cracks in the facade.

Putin is scheduled to face a presidential election in

March of 2024.

That's only a few months from now.

And I'm relatively certain that at least some

Russian elites are wondering whether he is

the horse to back in that election campaign or not.

I think a lot of this is going to depend on what

happens in the battlefield.