Sadat and Wagner Group - Proxy between the Eurasianists and the Neocon

Syria war: Who are Russia's shadowy Wagner mercenaries?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43167697

Russian mercenaries are reported to be in the thick of the fighting in Syria, helping President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

One shadowy group in particular, called Wagner PMC (Private Military Company), hit the headlines because of a clash on 7 February that resulted in dozens of Russian casualties.

The toll of dead and wounded is disputed, but it is still not clear why Russian irregulars attacked a base held by Kurdish anti-Assad forces and where US advisers were present. US forces retaliated with air strikes.

What is known about Wagner?

In June 2017 the US Treasury added Wagner PMC to a long list of Russian individuals and entities subject to sanctions because of their involvement in the Ukraine conflict.

The PMC "has recruited and sent soldiers to fight alongside separatists in eastern Ukraine", the US Treasury said.

The US also identified Dmitry Utkin as Wagner's "founder and leader" and placed him on the list.

Russian media reports, quoting anonymous military sources, reveal that Mr Utkin earlier served in a special forces brigade of Russian military intelligence, the GRU. Then in 2013 he went to Syria with a group of fighters recruited by a company called "Slav Corps", reports say.

The GRU secretly oversees Wagner, according to security sources quoted by Russian RBC news. Russia's official military deployment in Syria began in September 2015; it has mostly taken the form of air strikes, sometimes hitting civilian areas hard.

Wagner is estimated to have as many as 2,500 men in Syria.

Its officers serving in Syria are reported to earn up to 300,000 roubles (£3,800; $5,300) a month.

'Wagner Group': the mercenaries serving Putin in Syria

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-5531057/Wagner-Group-mercenaries-serving-Putin-Syria.html

The deaths of several members of the so-called "Wagner Group" in Syria last month shone a light on Russian President Vladimir Putin's mysterious private army Moscow is using there.

Questions had already been raised on its role in the Syrian conflict and intensified when Washington said on February 7 it had killed at least 100 pro-regime troops in Deir ez-Zor.

After days of silence, Moscow acknowledged five Russian nationals were killed and "dozens" wounded in the attack, saying they all were in Syria "on their own initiative."

Various media outlets have reported up to 200 fatalities and the group of Russian investigative bloggers known as the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) has established the identities of dozens of them -- all members of the Wagner Group.

"Wagner can and should be regarded as Russia's shadow army in Syria, as it has been providing the vital frontline component to Russia's operations in Latakia and Eastern Syria," CIT's Kirill Mikhailov told AFP.

The group played an important role in the retaking of Palmyra from the Islamic State group which had controlled the city since March 2016, he added.

Pavel Baev, an associate research fellow at the French Institute of International Relations, said Russia's resort to "shadow armies... has the double benefit of ensuring deniability and discounting casualties."

But "the problem with assets like the Wagner Group is that they are never fully controllable and could become maverick," he said.

The group's "capabilities exceed any Western private military company by far," said Mikhailov.

In the era of the Proxy Wars, the new proxy agents are different from the other previous wars. The new contemporary wares are made by decentralization of the public actors, like states or military personal, and done by investitors, lobbists, private military companies and their personal, military joint-ventures, rebels, insurgents, civilian people, media and technology.

Both companies are involved in the field of minitary consultancy and inteligence, creating a possible scenario for the conflict, favorable to the countries. Both companies are creating a scenario to the countries that they serve their proposes, acting in the assymetric scenario with the capability of long range conflict and infiltration, also, creating a positive intervention in the conflict to the geopolitical projection favorable to their countries.

Their engagement is into small local conflicts with local rebels and fighting insurgents. These small and local wars guarantee the success of the conflicts and the local influence of them to the cities where they are in battle.

The subject is about to understand how business strategy and Revolution in Military Affairs can consolidade the victory and success in these small battles, with irregular agents and investments of countries in local insurgents.

Also, these companies promote the capability of their countries advantage in the latitude of Eurasia and the classic Heartland, promoting distinction through cultural values and influence in Syria and Middle East, diplomacy and military power in the region that USA are interested to get influence.

The Revolution in Military Affairs request doctrine and stragey and the new business strategy requests a flexible doctrine, the promotion of the publicity and competitive advantage.

Michael Porter create the idea that the competitive advantage makes the superior performance of the company, to understande is to study what is behind the lines of the companies, who are the investitors and what their products or services are involved with, and how they execute it.

Sadat and Wagner Group are being invested by their government and their military capability are stupendous, this make the difference in between the battle in a foreign field that makes the difference between local insurgents and them. 

Revolutions in military affairs are cyclical processes, it can be inspired by outright defeat, or by a perception of inferiority or decline versus a peer or niche opponent. If the opponent have inferior power or it has no capability to engage the conflict, the possibility of victory are bigger, and also, the hybrid scenario makes favorable to the combat.

Initiating a RMA requires the empowerment of visionaries, the use of prospective scenarios, intuition and military strategy knowledge.

RMA have a point of critical mass when changes in concepts, organization, and technology meld. Integration of technology and business strategy with military power makes he difference in the fields. The Doctrine being in line with the Strategy and the Tactic and the use of technology as a difference.

Once recognized, every revolutions breakthrough generates responses, and this repsonses can be symmetric or asymmetric; asymmetric responses may be more difficult to counter. If the conflict is irregular, the difference and the surprise can make difference in the take of the decision.

According to Peter Drucker, "management has no choice but to anticipate the future, to attempt to mold it, and to balance short-range and long-range goals....The idea behind long-range planning is that [the question] "What should our business be?" can and should be worked on and decided by itself, independent of the thinking on "What is our business?" and "What will it be?" There is some sense to this. It is necessary in strategic planning to start separately with all three questions. What is the business? What will it be? What should it be? These are, and should be separate conceptual approaches. With respect to "What shoud our business be?" the first assumption must be that it will be different."

The greatest advantage for the breakthrough power lies in the period immediately following critical mass; thus there may be a temptation to initiate conflict before responses can be effective. This returns the idea of Clausewtzian warfare, that who strikes first, who strikes harder, who has more power. There is a pretty idea here that is to use the classic war doctrines and adapt the new assymetric conflicts, and vice versa. The Guderian vision of war is to use the full capability and this full capability, together technology, can be the difference to the advance positively through an irregular conflict, that the enemy is unknown.

According to Michael Porter, "The intensity of rivalry among existing competitors depends on the balance of competitors, industry growth, the size of fixed or storage costs, the amount of differentiation or switching costs, the minimum size of investment, the types of competitors, the strategic stakes, and the size and type of exit barriers. Substitute products offer alternatives and limit the size of profits. Substitutes also depend on price and the ease of switching costs." (Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage and Business History - Robert E. Ankli)

All revolutions in military affairs have a culminating point determined by the interaction between the revolutionary breakthrough and the responses, followed by a consolidation phase. During the consolidation phase, superior training and leadership may be the only ways to achieve superior relative combat effectiveness against symmetric responses. During the consolidation phase, strategic advantage lies with entities best able to employ politico-economic, as opposed to strictly military power. 

That is how leadership is the strategic point and how leaders can make difference. The leaders can make it clear in the orders and have the operational understanding.

Revolutions in military affairs begin when the potential latent in technological, conceptual, political, economic, social,and organizational changes that have occurred or are occurring is recognized and converted to augment combat effectiveness. In premodern, heterogeneous security systems, revolution was often initiated by states outside the system or on its periphery. Sometimes their advantage accrued from superior morale, training, organization, leadership, strategy, or tactics. Examples include Alexander’s Macedonians, early Republican Rome, 8th century Arabs, Mongols, Vikings, and the Swedes of Gustavus Adolphus. The Assyrians were perhaps typical when they unleashed a military revolution without new technology–many societies had iron weapons and compound bows–but based on combined arms tactics that integrated archers, spearmen, and charioteers. Other external or peripheral revolutionaries such as the iron-armed Hittites and chariot-riding Kassites, Hurrians, and Hyskos who challenged Mesopotamia and Egypt, or the European conquerors of the Americas, Asia, and Africa did capitalize on superior technology, but did not attain victory purely because of it.

(STRATEGY AND THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS: FROM THEORY TO POLICY - Steven Metz; James Kievit)

The capability of Sadat and Wagner Group are beyond the military capabilty, they have the capability of strategical projection through geopolitical influence of their countries, involving their countries directly in the conflict and through a legitimacy and indirectly in the legality. Also the capability of long range conflicts make the difference between them and local mercenaries and insurgents, that create a scenario of organized crime and insurrection through the local people, with the implementation of violence and imposing their order by fear, the logic of terrorists. But Wagner Group has a military capability and the irregular atributes to promote not only the victory, but a scenario that is favorable to the implementation of new politics, inflence of Russian politics and diplimacy.

The proxies are importante to the superiority of power in Eurasia, to create a logic of the Karl Haushofer and Halford Makinder. To control the geopolitics of these latitudes can promote a superior world politics.

Halford Mackinder developed his theory of a Eurasian “heartland” over forty years. He first proposed it in an address on “The Geographical Pivot of History,” delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904 (subsequently published in the The Geographical Journal, vol. 23, #4, 1904). He proposed that History and the exercise of power at the global scale in the 20th century could be understood as the product of the peculiar geography of a “pivot” in Siberia and Central Asia. This “pivot” was characterized by the fact that it was eternally immune to sea power; great Siberian rivers all ran north into the ice-bound Arctic Ocean which the British navy could not penetrate, while Central Asia had land-locked river basins equally beyond its reach. Therefore, this pivot era could not be controlled by sea-power. In the age of the rail—the trans-Siberian railway was just being completed—this inaccessibility (to the British navy) rendered the “pivot” not only impregnable but turned it into a threat to the exercise of sea-power over the Eurasian landmass that surrounded it (Central Europe, the Middle East, India, China). - https://ericrossacademic.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/of-heartlands-and-pan-regions-mapping-the-spheres-of-influence-of-the-great-powers-in-the-age-of-world-wars/

Karl Haushofer developed his theory of pan-regions by analyzing the growth of the American and the Japanese empires in the period prior to WWI. According to his analysis, the world was dominated by four industrial heartlands: Western Europe, Russia, Japan and the United States. Each needed the resources (minerals, fuels, labor, markets) of vast continental hinterlands in order to thrive. The US had already established its “sphere” in Central and South America (established by the Monroe Doctrine and Theodor Roosevelt’s Corollary). Russia had already established its territorial empire across Siberia and Central Asia. Japan was in the process of creating a sphere for itself in the Far East (what we call today Asia-Pacific), where it faced the entrenched interests of the British, French and Dutch overseas empires. The Western European sphere had been established in Africa and South Asia but its two historic metropoles, Britain and France, were no longer competitive with the growing manufacturing power of Germany—Germany must replace these two older empires and establish its own pan-region in Europe-Africa-South Asia. - https://ericrossacademic.wordpress.com/2015/03/05/of-heartlands-and-pan-regions-mapping-the-spheres-of-influence-of-the-great-powers-in-the-age-of-world-wars/

The new maneauver of Neocon and USA under Trump leadership showed that the USA politics are determined to undermine Russia and Eurasianists through the borders of China. The request of Putin in the G8 again showed that the strategy of keep the 'enemies close' is the new strategy of the USA and the use of Neocon and the PNAC to promote the interaction with North Korea make the Geopolitics of USA very strong and effective.

These proxies will be the next conflict era, a possible Blackwater, a Chinese PMC under the USA leadership, will change the history of military in China, making the Maoist Guerrilla revival and make the new intern market of China goes to Private Military. Also a possible conflict between a future Blackwater in one side and Sadat and Wagner Group in other side will show economicaly and militarly which one are more capable to understand the new logic of market and in military strategy.

TURKEY’S SHADOW ARMY IN SYRIA

https://www.infosphereab.com/blog/turkeys-shadow-army-in-syria

In a recent report top Middle East journalist and expert Jonathan Speyer take a closer look on Turkey’s use of Syrian militias in its war with the Kurds and the combination of political and military muscle as the key to succeed in today’s fragmented Middle East.

In the article, Speyer argues that in order to wield influence and gain advantages in today’s Middle East, it’s paramount to combine those military and political forces in the field. “Political soldiering” is most vividly displayed by the Iranian IRGC, which is not loyal to the Iranian state as much as to the present regime and its overall strategic goals (watch the ongoing conflict between President Rouhani and the IRGC/Khamenei leadership).

The IRGC is important in this new way of conducting foreign policy, and its model is being used by other actors, such as Turkey. The big advantage of the IRGC-structure is that it can be used by Teheran in everything from assassinating Kurds in Europe, to conduct terror-attacks on Jewish targets across the globe (like in Buenos Aires and Burgos) and to create proxy-forces loyal to it to project power in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. This political party-like militia has the advantage of informality and deniability compared to conventional forces and gives Teheran the chance of still being invited into the diplomatic salons.

The Turkish iteration into this way of doing business is called the SADAT Defence Consultancy and is headed by a former Brigadier General, Adnan Tanriverdi. He was expelled from the army in 1997 because of his Islamist leanings and his ties to Erdogan go back a long time. In 2016 he was appointed Chief Military Advisor to the President.

Other countries are using this model too: Russia used irregular “volunteers” to foment disturbances in Lugansk and Donetsk provinces in eastern Ukraine and military contractors connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Company, has played a key-role in Russian interference in Syria.

The SADAT consultancy’s own website is clear about the Islamist goals and the Company’s mission is explained as: “establish a Defensive Collaboration and Defensive Industrial Cooperation among Islamic Countries to help Islamic World take the place where it merits among Super Powers by providing Consultancy and Training Services.” And just to make things even clearer it goes on to call Western states “crusader” and “imperialist” countries.

After the failed coup-attempt in July 2016, Erdogan’s Islamist project took on a new and more aggressive stance with re-instating hundreds of officers dismissed or expelled for Islamist leanings. And SADAT was set up in order to facilitate training and equipping forces outside of the regular Turkish army to help expand Turkish aims in Syria. It’s noteworthy that those aims very often put Turkey on a collision-course with its NATO-allies.

In Syria, Turkey’s main creation is the so called Free Syrian Army, whose Sunni recruits have been trained and equipped by SADAT. And even though it’s the Syrian Kurds that has been the focus of FSA, allegations that SADAT is training militias to use on Turkish political opposition have surfaced from time to time.

Erdogan’s long-term project to destroy the secular republic of Kemal Ataturk and create an Islamic republic instead, is greatly helped by institutions such as SADAT, combining external power-projection with providing muscles to help Erdogan’s repressive politics at home.

Thousands of Russian private contractors fighting in Syria

Firm tied to 'Putin's chef' allegedly part of Moscow's attempt to hide extent of its involvement in Syrian civil war

https://www.timesofisrael.com/thousands-of-russian-private-contractors-fighting-in-syria/

MOSCOW (AP) — Before he was killed by a sniper in Syria at age 23, Ivan Slyshkin wrote a poignant message on social media to his fiancee: “We will see each other soon — and I will hold you as tight as I possibly can.”

But Slyshkin’s name won’t be found among the Russian Defense Ministry’s official casualties in the fight against Islamic State extremists.

That’s because the young man who left his hometown of Ozyorsk in the Ural mountains was one of thousands of Russians deployed to Syria by a shadowy, private military contractor known as Wagner, which the government doesn’t talk about.

Slyshkin’s gravestone depicts him holding a machine gun, according to a local news website Znak.com that sent a reporter to his March 2 funeral in Ozyorsk, where friends said he joined Wagner to earn money to pay for his wedding.

“He was in Wagner’s group,” his friend Andrei Zotov told The Associated Press, adding that Slyshkin was killed as the security forces were advancing on the Al-Shayer oil field north of Palmyra.

“There are many good guys there. He volunteered to join the company,” Zotov said. “Like many Russian fighters, he wanted to solve his money issues.”

The St. Petersburg-based website Fontanka reported that about 3,000 Russians under contract to the Wagner group have fought in Syria since 2015, months before Russia’s two-year military campaign helped to turn the tide of the civil war in favor of Syrian President Bashar Assad, a longtime Moscow ally.

When Putin went to a Russian air base in Syria on Monday and told Russian troops that “you are coming back home with victory,” he did not mention the private contractors. Russian troops are expected to remain in Syria for years while the contractors are likely to stay to guard lucrative oil and gas fields under a contract between the Syrian government and another Russian company allegedly linked to a businessman known as “Putin’s chef” for his close ties to the Kremlin.

Proxy fighters like Slyshkin have played a key role in Syria. In addition to augmenting troops officially sent by Moscow, their secret deployment has helped keep the official Russian death toll low as Putin seeks re-election next year.

The Russian Defense Ministry has said 41 of its troops have died in Syria. But according to Fontanka, another 73 private contractors have been killed there.

The Kremlin and the Defense Ministry have stonewalled questions about Russians fighting in Syria in a private capacity. Private contractors have been used by countries like the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan for years; Russian law forbids the hiring of mercenaries or working as one.

The Defense Ministry has refused to say how many of its troops are in Syria, although one estimate based on absentee ballots cast in the Russian parliamentary election last year indicated 4,300 personnel were deployed there. That number probably rose this year because Moscow sent Russian military police to patrol “de-escalation zones.”

“The Russian people are not very enthused by the idea of an empire that would involve their boys coming home in body bags. There’s clearly a lack enthusiasm for this conflict,” said Mark Galeotti, senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague.

“By having this military company Wagner, they can have a force they can actually deploy … but when people die, it doesn’t have to be announced,” Galeotti said.

Fontanka, which is respected for its independent reporting, has obtained what it described as Wagner’s spreadsheets and recruitment forms that indicate thousands of Russians have fought in Syria. Of about 3,000 Wagner employees deployed to Syria over the years, the single largest contingent at a given time has been about 1,500, said Denis Korotkov, a reporter for Fontanka.

Since 2015, at least 73 of them have died, he said.

Another investigative group, Conflict Intelligence Team, or CIT, put the number of private contractor deaths at 101. Both outlets say those are conservative estimates.

“The most important proof is people, dead and alive, who have said they are mercenaries and their relatives say there are mercenaries,” said CIT founder Ruslan Leviev. “How would hundreds of people all over the country collude and come up with the same story?”

Activists with CIT made a name for the group by combing social media and other records for Russia’s involvement in Ukraine and are doing the same for Syria.

Both Fontanka and CIT published photos from what they called a Wagner training base in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia. Some of the facilities look identical to those seen in official Defense Ministry photos of a military base in Molkino, in the same area.

Agreements signed with the security companies have kept the private contractors and members of their families from speaking to the media about their activities. Survivors receive generous compensation for keeping silent, and most attempts by AP to contact relatives and friends of those killed have been unsuccessful.

Media in southern Russia reported the death of Alexander Karchenkov in Syria in November 2016. The BelPressa website showed the mayor of his hometown of Stary Oskol giving a medal to Karchenkov’s tearful widow, Marina, and mother.

Marina Karchenkova said her husband went to Syria as a contract soldier because he “had children to raise.”

In a handwritten form dated December 2015, Karchenkov said he was unemployed, serving in the Soviet army in 1989-1991 and as a volunteer in Kosovo in 1998-2000.

In October, the Islamic State group released video of two Russian captives it said had been fighting in Syria, and one of them identified himself as Roman Zabolotny and said the other was Grigory Tsurkanu. The Defense Ministry denied they were Russian servicemen, and media reports said they were working for Wagner. Their fate at the hands of the extremists is unknown.

The Wagner group was founded by retired Lt. Col. Dmitry Utkin, who came under US sanctions in June after the Treasury Department said the company had recruited former soldiers to join the separatists fighting in Ukraine. Utkin was photographed a year ago at a Kremlin banquet thrown by Putin to honor military veterans.

Also under US sanctions is Yevgeny Prigozhin, the St. Petersburg entrepreneur dubbed “Putin’s chef” by Russian media because of his restaurants and catering businesses that once hosted the Kremlin leader’s dinners with foreign dignitaries. In the more than 10 years since establishing a relationship with Putin, his business expanded to other services for the military.

Earlier this year, an anti-corruption foundation run by opposition leader Alexei Navalny detailed how Prigozhin’s firms have come to dominate Defense Ministry contracts. The US State Department put Prigozhin on its sanctions list in 2016 related to the Ukrainian conflict, citing his “extensive business dealings” with the Defense Ministry.

Among the firms linked to Prigozhin is Evro Polis, a Moscow-registered company that Fontanka reported has become a front for Wagner’s operations in Syria.

In 2016, Evro Polis listed the sale of food products as its core activities, according to the Spark Interfax database. But this year, it listed mining, oil and gas production, and opened an office in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

The AP obtained a copy of a 47-page contract between Evro Polis and Syria’s state-owned General Petroleum Corp., which said the Russian company would receive 25 percent of the proceeds from oil and gas production at fields its contractors capture and secure from Islamic State militants. While the five-year contract could not be authenticated, Fontanka reported the same deal in June.

“The link between Evro Polis and Prigozhin is significant and is not in doubt,” said Fontanka’s Korotkov. “We believe that this firm is just a cover for the private company Wagner, and it could be an attempt to legalize this group, possibly for a commercial use later on.”

Both Evro Polis and Prigozhin’s Concorde Management and Consulting were unavailable for comment, and the Defense Ministry did not reply to AP’s request for comment.

An AP reporter who went to Evro Polis’ Damascus office in November found it closed, with no sign on the door.

Syria’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources declined comment when asked about the Evro Polis deal. Asked about the contract, the Russian Energy Ministry told Fontanka it cannot divulge “commercial secrets,” and declined comment to the AP.

As the Russian campaign in Syria draws to a close, the private contractors will probably stay, analysts say.

Wagner is “is likely to cement its footing because we saw that there were not only military goals to pursue … but there is a commercial motive,” Leviev said. “Someone needs to guard the oil fields.”

Death of Military Contractors Illuminates Russia’s War by Proxy in Syria

Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 15 Issue: 24

https://jamestown.org/program/death-military-contractors-illuminates-russias-war-proxy-syria/

Officials from the United States and Russia, together with non-governmental sources, all agree on the core narrative: On February 7, 2018, east of the Euphrates River, in the oil-rich province of Deir el-Zour, a battalion-size armed group loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, supported by armor and artillery, moved to take over a dysfunctional oil refinery occupied by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); but this invading force was then decimated by US firepower “in self-defense.” The Euphrates River is more or less the so-called “de-confliction line,” agreed on by US and Russian military chiefs to separate Russian-supported pro-al-Assad forces and the US-backed SDF. On February 7, the pro-al-Assad forces were operating on the wrong (eastern) side of the river and threatened SDF fighters and coalition special forces embedded with them. The Russian Ministry of Defense insisted “no Russian servicemen were involved” and explained the incident as a mistaken move by local pro-al-Assad militias pursuing some Islamic State leftovers. The Russian authorities scolded the pro-al-Assad fighters for failing to notify and vet their move with Russian command in advance; but they simultaneously rebuked US forces for “seeking to grab valuable economic assets instead of fighting ISIS [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—the former name of the Islamic State group]” (Interfax, February 8).

Yet, as more evidence trickled in, the narrative presented in Moscow began to shift. According to Kommersant, a large force of several hundred men—pro-al-Assad militias reinforced by fighters from the notorious private military company (in Russian Chastnye Voennie Company—ChVK) “Wagner”—gathered to attack the refinery and possibly take over nearby oil and natural gas fields. The backbone of the force was made up of up to 600 ChVK Wagner Russian contractors armed with tanks and heavy guns, according to an unnamed military source. The attack was not authorized by the Russian command and was planned as a night raid—the Russian-led force opened fire and attempted to swiftly move in, believing the SDF would offer only token resistance and that US forces would not risk aerial attack as the Russians moved in. But the US promptly deployed overwhelming firepower before all of the ChVK Wagner contractors moved out into battle formation. They suffered heavy losses in both men and equipment. The unnamed Kommersant military source told the paper that about 11 Russians were dead (Kommersant, February 14).

Igor Strelkov (Girkin)—the former commander of Russia-backed rebels in Ukraine’s Donbas—was one of the first to post a report, based on information from “reliable sources,” about at least a hundred Russian ChVK Wagner fighters “slaughtered” by the US. Strelkov, like some other radical Russian nationalists, has opposed President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into the Syrian civil war, believing true Russian patriots must fight for Russian interests by defending truly Russian land, like in Donbas. Strelkov called for future potential volunteers “to think twice before enlisting with ChVK Wagner” (Newsru.com, February 9). This is not the first time Strelkov has published reports about heavy Russian casualties in Syria that have quoted former “colleagues from Donbas” who are now with ChVK Wagner (see EDM, October 12, 2017).

Different media outlets have reported widely disparate casualty estimates: Pro-Kremlin sources have tended to downplay the losses, declaring about 10 to 20 Russians dead and up to 50 wounded, while others report casualties in the hundreds. Official sources refuse comment, citing a lack of reliable information. But no one seems to refute the fact of an encounter gone badly wrong or that ChVK Wagner mercenaries were hit by US military fire, that many were killed or wounded, and that heavy equipment was destroyed (Kp.ru, February 13).

The ChVK Wagner force demonstrated rare incompetence by cavaliering into a night assault against a US-backed force, apparently ignorant of the fact that the US military has, for some time, preferred to fight in the dark to utilize night-vision superiority. The experience of fighting in Donbas or against the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State may have provided them with a false sense of security, underestimating what a full-scale US precision firepower attack could bring.

Russian military chiefs, meanwhile, may be somewhat pleased ChVK Wagner receive a licking. The private military company is reportedly financed and sponsored by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman from St. Petersburg known in the Kremlin court as “the cook” because he began his career catering for Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin reportedly has business interests in Syria and is apparently seeking to take over phosphate mining, oil and natural gas deposits. In promoting ChVK Wagner, “the cook” and his private army have reportedly increasingly come into conflict with the Ministry of Defense and Minister Sergei Shoigu (Novaya Gazeta, January 21).

The Russian military command almost certainly knew in advance of ChVK Wagner’s planned move east of the Euphrates. And in Moscow, most assume the “traitorous” Americans were also aware of the imminent attack and, thus, prepared a deadly ambush (Militarynews.ru, February 13). This narrative is supported by the fact that, just hours before the ChVK Wagner force was massacred, a 210-meter bridge over the Euphrates, built last September by Russian sappers (see EDM, September 28, 2017), was washed away by a sudden flash flood. The Russian military accuses the SDF and/or the US of deliberately opening the floodgates at a hydroelectric damn upriver to destroy the bridge. The Pentagon denies this allegation (Interfax, February 9). The collapsing bridge cut off the Wagner-led force on the left bank from supplies, reinforcements and the possibility of an organized retreat.

Lieutenant General Jeffrey Harrigian, the top US Air Force general in the Middle East, told journalists the encounter in Deir el-Zour “was not entirely unexpected”: For a week prior to the incident, the US had observed a slow buildup of hostile forces on the Euphrates bridgehead and reportedly contacted the Russian military. According to Harrigian, to repel the attack, multiple precision-fire munitions were released by ground artillery, F-15E fighter jets, MQ-9 drones, B-52 bombers, AC-130 gunships and AH-64 Apache helicopters (RBC, February 14). Some of these formidable assets could have been scrambled at short notice, but the B-52s, based presumably at Diego Garcia island, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, must have been in the air, loaded with ordinance, hours before ChVK Wagner made its move.

No one seems to be telling the whole truth about an encounter in which the US military seemingly knowingly planned and executed an attack on proxy Russian troops, while the Russian military command deliberately turned a blind eye. This dangerous combination of heavy casualties and muddled narratives could potentially escalate into something much worse than war by proxy.