‘We’re going to prove that Wagner is a terrorist organisation’

Last January, an escaped mercenary from Wagner’s private military company crossed into Norway by walking across a frozen river that marked the border with Russia, pursued by Russian police.

Andrei Medvedev told the rights group Gulagu.net that his life was in danger after a soldier under his command tried to flee the war in Ukraine, in which Wagner plays a leading role, and was killed with a sledgehammer blow to the head.

Medvedev said this was standard practice for Wagner deserters, and wanted to testify against Wagner owner Yevgeny Prigozhin, but needed asylum in Norway.

He can now become a star witness in a series of civil lawsuits being prepared against Wagner around the world, with a flagship class action lawsuit now set to go to court in the UK.

Last November, UK-based law firm McCue Jury and Partners filed a pre-action letter against Prigozhin and 32 defendants associated with the firm.

“We are going to prove that Wagner is a terrorist organization, that Wagner committed terrorist attacks against not only specific persons or buildings in Ukraine, but the population as a whole, because Wagner has an unlawful conspiracy with the Russian Federation,” the senior partner of the Russian Federation told. the company, Jason McCue, to Al Jazeera.

“The Russian Federation used Wagner terrorism [against] the Ukrainian people so that they would put up less resistance and evacuate the country to allow for an easier invasion. That was done on purpose,” he said.

McCue has done it before.

He fought for and won compensation for victims of the Irish Republican Army, after the British government agreed not to continue the group as part of a 1998 peace deal.

When suspected Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, killing all 298 people on board, Ukraine’s parliament asked McCue to sue on behalf of the victims.

Now McCue has formed a global alliance of law firms backed by a massive evidence-gathering machine from investigative journalists and retired spies, aided by input from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office and Ukrainian military intelligence, dubbed the Ukraine Justice Alliance, to bring the St. Petersburg established private military company Wagner.

It provides evidence to a wider forum called the Ukraine Civil Society Lawfare Program (UCSLP), made up of law firms around the world.

The British case will try to prove that Wagner agents planted explosives near a nuclear facility.

“Our evidence is that ordinary Russian troops refused to plant those explosives and Wagner did it,” McCue said. He did not specify the facility.

Last July, Energatom, Ukraine’s nuclear energy body, said Russia was using Ukrainian power stations as munitions stores.

“The Russian army dragged at least 14 units of heavy military equipment with ammunition, weapons and explosives into the engine room of the first power station of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant,” Energatom said.

Oleksandr Starukh, head of the military administration of Zaporizhzhia, said Russian troops were actively shelling civilian settlements on the opposite side of the Inhulets river reservoir from the Zaporizhzhia factory.

That prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to tell the UN General Assembly that Russia had “taken the idea of ​​having a human shield to a whole other and horrifying level.”

But Russia’s tactics may have been to provoke return fire, generate anti-Ukrainian propaganda and possibly cause a nuclear disaster for which Ukraine could be blamed.

“We are ready to show how the Russian army guards [the plant] today, and how Ukraine, receiving weapons from the West, uses these weapons, including drones, to attack the nuclear power plant, acting like a monkey with a grenade,” said Evgenyi Balitskyi, head of the Russian occupation administration of Zaporizhzhia.

Not an easy task

Pavlos Eleftheriadis, a professor of public law at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, said that while violations of international law, such as the invasion of another country, are easy to prove, criminal cases are more difficult.

“The burden of proof is high. You need witnesses. You are asking an ordinary court to take a position on an event that is outside its jurisdiction. We should not underestimate that”, says Eleftheriadis.

“The rules of civil and criminal courts are very demanding. It doesn’t matter if Prigozhin is a very bad person. You have to prove the facts.”

“This is such a strong case,” McCue told Al Jazeera. “I don’t think I can lose.” He described his evidence to the House of Commons as “technically indisputable”.

The volume of evidence, plaintiffs and lawsuits also puts a huge financial strain on legal firms, which do not accept government money, only private donations. McCue said about $20 million has already been spent and the UCLSP may need to crowdfund to continue. But the reward can also be huge, financially and morally.

Achieving geopolitical goals

McCue’s flagship case is seeking five billion pounds sterling ($6.1 billion) in compensation for the victims, but McCue has said his claimants may include all 180,000 Ukrainian expatriates living in the UK, so the value of the lawsuit could rise.

But compensation for the victims is not the only goal.

The UCLSP is trying to fill an accountability gap. The International Criminal Court this month indicted Russian President Vladimir Putin for the illegal abduction of Ukrainian children, making him a wanted man. But it still has not established an international tribunal to prosecute Russia for the crime of aggression.

However, civil society lawsuits — what McCue called “lawfare” — can proceed if individuals fund them.

“It’s strategic use of the law where international institutions or bodies or governments fail to do justice or there’s a loophole in the system,” McCue said.

The strategic goal of convicting Wagner is to “frustrate and tie up and wreak havoc on the Russian war machine,” McCue said.

“When I use the word Wagner, I am also referring to the companies and individuals and oligarchs, kleptocrats involved in his umbrella to achieve Putin’s foreign policy goals, be they geopolitical or economic.”

Wagner has no known assets in the UK.

The strategy is to transfer the judgment of a British court to where they lie, seize bank accounts in Switzerland, mining operations in Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic, or gold smuggling operations in Sudan – all suspected Wagner assets.

That would be intended to undermine Putin’s ability to wage war.

Putin is busy hiring people [Wagner] to carry out his foreign policy,” McCue said. “He uses them as a proxy because they can commit crime and terrorism to achieve his goals, where he can then stand aside and say they are not part of the Russian military.”

Once Wagner is stigmatized as a terrorist organization, McCue hoped, it will also struggle to recruit retired career soldiers who have “told their wives how to fight terrorism.”

It helps that the European Parliament labeled the Wagner group a “terrorist organization” last November and the US Treasury Department did so in January, facilitating the seizure of its assets. The European Commission and the US Congress are under pressure to follow suit.

“We now need to find new complex answers to complex questions,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, director of the Ukraine Center for Civil Liberties, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

“That is why I support the idea of ​​recognizing the Wagner group as a terrorist organization,” she told Al Jazeera.

The CCL is more focused on prosecuting an international tribunal and assisting the Ukrainian prosecutor and the Council of Europe in gathering evidence against Russia, including Wagner.

“The methods they use to achieve the political and economic goals of the Russian state in different countries are terrorist methods. We’re documenting everything Russians have committed in Ukraine, including members of the Wagner group, but the work we’re doing is just a base for further investigation, so we’re… happy to collaborate with any initiative that’s aware of this issue aim,” Matviichuk said.

McCue said other cases in the US, Israel, the Czech Republic and France are maturing, as well as a second case in the UK, leading to “potentially millions of victims and potentially hundreds of billions in damages.”

The UCSLP campaign could score a further strategic victory by scaling up the damage.

Currently, some $300 billion in Russian state assets are frozen within the European Union. Seizing them is illegal under international law, but court convictions can bind them so that their proceeds go to the plaintiffs.

Even if the European Union were to thaw those assets after the end of the war in Ukraine, they would remain bound by the court sentences.

“We can easily evaluate that we have a potential $200 billion in claims in lawsuits that have already come out from our friends around the world,” said McCue. “If we get competent judgments, we can tie them to sanctioned assets.”