Leaked documents reveal Russian mercenary group Wagner is operating in Haiti

A trove of classified documents leaked this week have revealed that a Russian group of mercenaries is operating in Haiti – right under the noses of the United States.

The terrifying group went viral in 2022 after a video of members beating a deserter to death with a sledgehammer circulated online allegedly offering to help Haiti’s embattled government fight violent gangs, the documents show.

The Wagner group has already gained a foothold for Russia in at least half a dozen African countries, in addition to ties to Turkey and Syria.

While the Kremlin’s depleted military capability was exposed in the intelligence breach, the group of mercenaries appeared to remain a powerful force.

Officials say it may be impossible to trace the original source of the leak because potentially thousands of US government officials have the security clearances necessary to access the documents.

Founder of the private mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, admitted to founding, running and funding the group last year after denying it for years

Y yearsEvgeny Prigozhin, a close confidant of Russian President Putin, denied any connection to the Wagner Group. But in September he admitted that he founded, ran and financed the group.

Since then he has been the face of the group, which had developed a reputation for its extreme brutality and ruthlessness.

In November 2022, a video surfaced online showing a former Wagner contractor Hamadi Bouta, a deserter from the Syrian army, being beaten to death with a sledgehammer after allegedly fleeing to the Ukrainian side and being recaptured.

The leaked documents claim that Prigozhin raised an army of 22,000 recruited freed Russian convicts in Bakhmut area.

The group also entered NATO territory and secretly met with “Turkish contacts” in February, seeking weapons to fight against Ukraine. It is not clear whether they collected weapons.

Hamadi Bouta was a Syrian deserter executed by the Wagner group in 2022

The Wagner group has already gained a foothold for Russia in half a dozen African countries

But the documents indicated that the West African nation of Mali was an outpost to acquire the weapons from Turkey.

The documents named a Wagner associate who revealed that there are more than 1,645 Wagner associates in Mali.

“This is a very interesting sign that their capabilities are deteriorating,” Candace Rondeaux, an expert on Wagnerism and senior director at New America, a Washington-based think tank, told the New York Times.

“Going further certainly suggests that the US and European sanctions are starting to have an impact on the deterioration of the pipeline.”

WHO DOES THE WAGNER GROUP OWN?

Yevgeny Prigozhin, who received a 12-year prison sentence in 1981 on charges of robbery and assault, started a restaurant business in St. Petersburg after his release from prison. In that capacity he got to know Putin, who was deputy mayor of the city in the 1990s.

Prigozhin, 61, used his ties to Putin to set up a catering business and won lucrative Russian government contracts that earned him the nickname “Putin’s Chef.”

He later expanded into other businesses, including media outlets and an infamous “troll factory” that led to his indictment in the US for meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Prigozhin denied any connection to the Wagner Group before acknowledging ownership of the company in September.

Prigozhin is a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin

The documents, which included reports from late February to early March, also revealed probes in several other countries, including South Korea, Iran and the UK.

WHERE DID WAGNER WORK?

The Wagner Group was first seen in action in eastern Ukraine shortly after separatist conflict broke out there in April 2014, weeks after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

While supporting the separatist insurgency in the Donbas, Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, Russia denied sending its own weapons and troops there, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Involving private contractors in the fighting allowed Moscow to maintain a degree of denial.

Prigozhin’s company was named Wagner, after the nickname of its first commander, Dmitry Utkin, a retired lieutenant colonel of the Russian Army special forces.

It quickly established a reputation for its extreme brutality and ruthlessness.

Along with Ukraine, Wagner personnel were deployed to Syria, where Russia supported President Bashar Assad’s government in the country’s civil war. In Libya, they fought alongside Libyan commander Khalifa Hifter.

The group was also active in the Central African Republic and Mali.

Prigozhin reportedly used Wagner’s efforts in Syria and African countries to win lucrative mining contracts.

US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that the company used its access to gold and other resources in Africa to fund its operations in Ukraine.

Some Russian media have alleged that Wagner was involved in the July 2018 murder of three Russian journalists, who were shot dead in the Central African Republic while investigating the group’s activities there. The murders remain unsolved.

WHAT IS THE REPUTATION OF THE GROUP?

Western countries and United Nations experts have accused Wagner Group mercenaries of committing numerous human rights abuses across Africa, including in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mali.

In December 2021, the European Union accused the group of “serious human rights violations, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings”, and of carrying out “destabilizing activities” in the Central African Republic, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

Some of the reported incidents were notable for their gruesome brutality.

A 2017 video posted online showed a group of gunmen, allegedly Wagner’s contractors, torturing a Syrian man, beating him to death with a sledgehammer and cutting off his head before mutilating and then burning his body. Russian authorities ignored requests from the media and human rights activists to investigate the murder.

WHAT IS WAGNER’S ROLE IN UKRAINE?

The Wagner Group plays an increasingly visible role in the war in Ukraine, as regular Russian forces suffered severe attrition and lost control of previously captured territory in a series of humiliating setbacks.

Prigozhin this month claimed all the credit for capturing the salt mining town of Soledar in the Donetsk region, accusing the Russian defense ministry of trying to steal Wagner’s glory. He said Wagner led the assault on the city of Bakhmut, a nearby Ukrainian stronghold that Russian troops have been trying to capture for months.

Prigozhin has visited Russian prisons to recruit fighters and promise pardons to prisoners if they survive a six-month front-line tour with Wagner. He posted a video congratulating the first group of convicts who were officially pardoned and given the right to leave the company.

The US estimates Wagner has about 50,000 personnel fighting in Ukraine, including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 of the convicts the company has hired.

The US estimates that Wagner spent about $100 million a month on the fight and received weapons from North Korea, including missiles and missiles.