Vladimir Putin has met a former senior Wagner commander to discuss how to best use “volunteer units” in the Ukraine war, as Kyiv said several hundred members of the mercenary group had returned to the battlefield.
Putin was shown on state television on Friday meeting Andrei Troshev, a former Wagner commander known by his nom de guerre “Sedoi” – or “Grey Hair”.
The meeting, which took place in the Kremlin a day earlier, highlighted Moscow’s efforts to show that the state had gained control over the mercenary group, more than a month after its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was killed in a mysterious plane crash.
Addressing Troshev, Putin said they had previously agreed that the former Wagner commander would be “engaged in the formation of volunteer units” to be employed in Ukraine.
“You yourself fought in such a unit for more than a year … You know how it’s done,” Putin continued.
The Kremlin has steadily moved to bring the rebellious mercenary force under its control after Prigozhin’s aborted rebellion in June. It has dismantled Wagner’s military base in the south of Russia and forced the group to hand over thousands of tonnes of weaponry.
After the failed mutiny, Putin said Wagner would be banned in Russia and that its fighters could sign contracts with the defence ministry, leave for Belarus or go home.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Friday that Troshev had already signed a contract with the defence ministry.
Earlier this week, the Ukrainian military said some former Wagner fighters had returned to the battlefield, but were operating as part of the regular army and had not joined as a separate unit.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an aide to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has sought to downplay the significance of their arrival in Ukraine. He wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “the media effect” of the return of some Wagner fighters to Ukraine was “greater than its real significance”.
British military intelligence said in a recent briefing that hundreds of fighters formerly associated with Wagner had probably started to redeploy to Ukraine as part of a variety of different units.
“The exact status of the redeploying personnel is unclear, but it is likely individuals have transferred to parts of the official Russian ministry of defence forces and other [private military companies],” the briefing said.
Some Wagner-linked Telegram channels distanced themselves from Troshev’s meeting in the Kremlin, indicating a split within the group.
Anton Yelizarov, a former Wagner commander whose nom de guerre is “Lotus”, was quoted on Friday as saying the majority of fighters had not joined the defence ministry.
“Rumours that most of the commanders of the Wagner PMC moved to work under the control of the ministry of defence are just a dream of the ministry of defence,” said Yelizarov, a former deputy of Dmitry Utkin. Utkin, who died on the same plane as Prigozhin, was often described as the founder or co-founder of Wagner.
Yelizarov, who is believed to have commanded the storming of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, further claimed that Troshev was never a senior Wagner commander.
The fate of Wagner and its operations abroad has been unclear since the mutiny in June and Prigozhin’s death two months later.
The US said last week it had not seen a withdrawal of Wagner forces from Africa “in any substantial or meaningful numbers”. Russia’s foreign ministry has previously assured nations in Africa and the Middle East that it would manage Wagner forces following Prigozhin’s demise.
Two sources close to Wagner told the Guardian that some of the group’s fighters had signed contracts with the defence ministry or with other private military groups close to the ministry.
Other fighters, the sources said, had decided not to do so out of personal loyalty to Prigozhin and anger over his death.
Ever since Prigozhin’s private jet plummeted from the sky, the Kremlin has sought to keep memorials as low-key as possible.
Putin denied Prigozhin a state funeral when the warlord was buried at a remote cemetery on the outskirts of his home town of St Petersburg. The majority of makeshift street memorials that sprung up after his death have been quietly removed by authorities.
But some Prigozhin loyalists continue to demand answers from the Kremlin about his death.
In an angry post on his Telegram channel, Maksim Shugalei, a political consultant close to Prigozhin, questioned why it took the authorities so long to investigate his former boss’s death.
“For me, it’s not a plane crash, it’s murder,” Shugalei wrote.
“In my opinion, it takes two to three hours to find out whether it was an explosion onboard, or whether it was a rocket. I demand answers from the authorities on the question of what happened in the sky on August 23 2023.”
