Russia has effectively dismantled and replaced the Wagner Group in the year since the mercenaries shocked the world by launching a mutiny against President Vladimir Putin’s government, experts have told the BBC.
Yevgeny Prigozhin – the late leader of the paramilitary force – crossed from Ukraine on 23 June 2023 and seized the southern city of Rostov after months of increasing tensions with military leaders in Moscow.
His forces then began a brief charge towards the capital, meeting virtually no resistance. The “march for justice”, as Prigozhin called it, came to an abrupt end the following day after he called off the advance.
Just two months later, Prigozhin’s plane crashed and he was killed along with several other senior Wagner members, throwing the group’s future into uncertainty.
Dr Sorcha MacLeod, a member of the UN’s working group on mercenaries and lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, said ex-Wagner troops had fragmented across the Russian state.
“[Wagner] may not exist in exactly the form it did previously, but a version – or even versions – of it continue to exist,” she told the BBC. “There’s been this sort of dispersal amongst the Russian state so there is no one overall controller.”
“The Wagner Group was incredibly important geopolitically and economically to Russia, so it was never going to disappear as some people suggested,” she added.
For years, Prigozhin’s forces had been a valuable and deniable tool for Russian operations across Africa and Syria. But it was in Ukraine – as Moscow’s conventional forces struggled to dent Kyiv’s defences – that Prigozhin and Wagner came into the open.
Throughout late 2022 and early 2023, Wagner was key to Russia’s few battlefield victories. Its forces – largely made up of ex-prisoners – managed to take the eastern city of Soledar, before it became entrenched in months of intense fighting in the meat-grinder of Bakhmut.
At its peak Wagner had around 50,000 mercenaries in Ukraine, according to the US National Security Council.
Now, experts say Wagner’s operations in Ukraine have been subsumed by other Russian state and paramilitary units. One ex-Wagner commander recently told BBC Russian that the mercenaries had been ordered to “join the ministry of defence” or to go away.
