place. and the reason why the wagoner group is so valuable to putin is they provide good, plausible deniability. if they get caught massacring a village putin can say hey, it wasn t me, wasn t the army. it was these rogue mercenaries. which of course is completely false. these guys are working on the orders of the kremlin and the g are you military intelligence et cetera. so, but we need to do if you want to put a stop to this, one of two things. one, if they live off of plausible deniability, put in plausible deniability. our intelligence community can easily track some of these guys and shine the light on them. so, at that point they are useless to putin. they only have value to putin if they can stick around in the shadows. let s turn on the spotlight,
ourselves, what is this group? nobody better then at georgetown university professor of strategy, sean mick fêtes. i read your piece in the hill. it s really eye-opening to me it says germany s intelligence agency intercepted radio traffic recently confirming the notorious russian mercenary unit, played a leading role in the war crimes. professor, what is this group? its ties to putin and what is their mission? the wagner group has been putin s weapon of choice the last essay eight years since like 2013/14. what it is, these are mercenaries they do not work for the russian military. they are recruited from ex- russia military and from around russia and the former soviet union. they do the kremlin s dirty work for putin. they are completely owned by an
been used by putin all over the world? this is a central question. the reason why putin has come to use it mercenaries as his weapon of choice is because our intelligence community like the cia and others, they do not track these groups. they track russians, chinese, iranians, terrorists they do not track mercenaries and they do not track this makes them an ideal instrument for putin preview it to wage war in secret if you want to war they could get dirty fast you know the agency is not using them. we should be doing is step up the intelligence collection of where the wagoner group is operating now in ukraine and other places. they are looking to work in sudan. they were working in sierra for a while, and libya all over the
population. and now that we are seeing a russia do more of this, putin is now shifting away from sort of conventional warfare into flattening cities and massacring people. this is what the group specializes in. mark: we just read a mass grave of 9000 people. we are reading about the movement of tens of thousands of ukrainians into russia. like stalin and hitler pulling these people in. we are looking at all of this. and then we read about the most sickening kind of torture, and rape and as i read your piece and i listen to you now, it is not just the russian regular army, it is these guys who are doing this. has the united states ever taken affirmative steps to deal with this group given the fact i has
oligarch. in one of the things they do is commit atrocities per. they seem to be doing a hell of a good job of it lately in ukraine. what are their numbers? about how many of them are them if you know? we don t know exactly i ve talked to a few members actually. they would estimate about ten 15000 members have it passed through their doors since 2014. but it s hard to know at any given time how many there are. the number s range from five 10,000 break many of them are trigger polars and many have a special like russian special forces backgrounds. their numbers have been dwindling in ukraine recently too. mark: why is that they re getting killed? there being whacked. putin use the wagner group as a fifth column they have been used