Editor’s Note: Candace Rondeaux is the director of the Future Frontlines program at the New America Foundation and a Professor of Practice at the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University. She has testified in Congress on Russia’s deployment of paramilitary forces in Ukraine and beyond, and is writing a book about the Wagner Group. Rondeaux is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former South Asia Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. This commentary draws on a research series focused on the Wagner Group, recently published by New America. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago, the private military company Wagner Group has often been at the forefront of fighting, and remains one of the most potent forces on the battlefield today.
Its head, Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ex-convict and self-avowed financier of the Russian paramilitary, meanwhile, is alternately being talked of as a potential rival to Russia’s president Vladimir Putin or a target of assassination.
Either way, there are increasing signs that the Wagner Group and Prigozhin are paying a heavy price for their fealty to Putin and the wealthy Russian elites who help finance the paramilitary. And, for all the speculative hyperventilating about Prigozhin’s rise to power, several important questions remain unanswered.
How did a nation like Russia – with its top ranked military and nuclear arsenal – come to rely on the personal army of billionaire convict with no apparent battlefield experience?
Could Prigozhin really use the Wagner Group to vault himself into a government position or even replace Putin himself? And most importantly for global stability: how might the Wagner Group factor into future negotiations between Russia and Ukraine?
The answers to these questions hold grave implications for the trajectory of Putin’s war – and the future relationship between Russia, the United States and NATO.
These are also questions that the team of researchers that I lead at New America and Arizona State University have been researching for the better part of the last five years. What we’ve learned while uncovering the Wagner Group’s covert operations and…
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