In the Anabasis, Xenophon recounts his experience commanding the return to Greece of “the ten thousand” Greek mercenaries that Cyrus the Younger had hired for an internal war in the Persian Empire. With Cyrus killed in the battle of Cunaxa, the Ten Thousand frustrated mercenaries had to return through the Syrian desert, Babylon, the mountains of Asia Minor and Anatolia to return home. That a disciple of Socrates led them is because that intellectual, as well as a warrior, was also a mercenary. But at that time, rented warriors were not frowned upon. On the contrary, he was accompanied by a halo of brave adventurers, as he was undoubtedly the author of works between philosophical and political, such as Los Memorables.
However, for most of history, mercenaries represented one of the darker sides of warfare and the human condition. mercenaries always existed, but they rarely had the prominence that they achieved in antiquity. In medieval wars, for example, the condottieres, who were the generals who commanded armies of mercenaries hired by the republics and principalities of the Italian peninsula, were protagonists.
All wars had fighters who were paid to go to the battlefields. Also those of the 20th century and those that occurred in the first two decades of the 21st century. “security companies” hired by the White House to operate in IraqThey were private armies.
From medieval condottieres on, mercenarism was seen for what it is: a disgusting activity. For this reason, it is necessary to underline the dark peculiarity of the leading role assumed by the wagner group in the war that bleeds Ukraine. For the first time in history, an army of mercenaries takes center stage and makes itself visible, proudly, at an international level, while openly disputing the Russian generals for the command post in the war against the Ukrainians.
the russian condottiere Yevgeny Prighozin he has more press and public exposure than the generals of the army that is fighting in the Donbas. To make matters worse, when he doesn’t appear bragging that his private army is the one fighting the hardest and advancing the furthest into enemy territory, he appears accusing the generals of the Russian army of sabotaging Wagner’s offensives and stingying his ammunition to complicate his combat capacity. .
Prigozhin and some commanders of the mercenary force also rail against Russia’s “military bureaucracy”. All that remains is for them to launch it against Vladimir Putin himself. He wagner group is the private military organization that is turning Ukraine into a stage to showcase on a global scaleand his is an exhibitionism that shows the weight that Yevgeny Prigozhin has in the Kremlin.
To such an extent is there impudence in this unusual vetism of a company of mercenaries, that its very name shows the pro-Nazi impulse of its hierarchsexposing the fallacy of one of Putin’s arguments to justify the invasion: “Ukraine is in the hands of Nazis and the invasion is to denazify it.”
By the way, Richard Wagner was one of the great exponents of romanticism in 19th century music and this is attested by monumental operas such as Tristan and Isolde. But he also wrote essays, like “Judaism in Music,” that exhibited his anti-Semitism, and others that exuded supremacist nationalism. What his music aroused in ultranationalists, including Hitler himself, is what Woody Allen ironically described, saying: “when I listen to Wagner I feel like invading Poland”.
The creator of this private military company, Dmitry Utkin, named it after the nineteenth-century German composer without hiding his far-right motivations. And “Putin’s cook”, as they call the gastronomic businessman who became a main shareholder, CEO and spokesman for the wagner groupHe never bothered to fit the “philosophy” of his organization with the hoax of “denazification.”
Russian mercenarism has troops operating in the Central African Republic at the service of the Faustin-Archange Touadera regime, while it deploys its criminal brutality in the conflicts in Mali, Libya and Mozambique, where it charges its contractors with hard cash or with concessions to mining operations. Before starting to build a mining empire and political influence in Africa, this Kremlin-backed private military company became visible in the Syrian civil war, doing dirty jobs for the Russian military who went to save Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
But it is, nothing less, than in the war that bleeds the Ukraine where the leading role of the Wagner Group and its CEO, started this unpresentable vedetism displaying their supposed achievements on the battlefield and accusing the army of their defeats. The heads of the mercenary company appear more than the Russian generals on television channels. They hold press conferences and give one-on-one interviews insulting the Russian Defense Ministry and military.
No one shows up more than Wagner’s owner in that tragic scenario. From such centrality, he shouts to the world that the military bureaucracy is an obstruction and not a vehicle towards Russian victory in the Ukraine. A strange case of ostentation of criminality and political power, which is humiliating the generalate, eclipsing the role of the army and showing a dark gravitation over the Kremlin. Why did mercenarism reach such a level of prominence? What does this strange and obscure Vedetism reveal about power in Russia? whatIt is another symptom of debasement and decadence?
Some time ago, the private military company that was incubated in the company Moran Security Group and began to take shape in the organization called slavic body, began an impudent exhibitionism of his unpresentable features. The gastronomic businessman who had the Kremlin catering concession, therefore made Putin’s lunches and dinners, used that relationship to extend his influence at the height of power and multiply his companies, among which are the “soldiers of fortune” who took the vanguard on the offensive, launching their assault troops on the Bakhmut defenses.
To drive the Ukrainians to the west side of the Dnieper River, the Wagner Group is sending waves of fighters recruited from Russian prisons. They are the cannon fodder with which Yevgeny Prigozhin is cooking his influence about the autocrat who rules Russia with an imperial appetite.
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