Marat Gabidullin is a Russian author who came under pressure when he tried to publish a book he wrote about the Wagner Group. Gabidullin is a former mercenary of this private military company (PMC), and was also an assistant to Yevgeny Prigozhin. The book was due to be published at the end of 2020, but the publication was blocked the day after an interview with the author by Meduza was published.

Gabidullin's memoirs disclose interesting information, especially about Dmitry Utkin, who is said to be the creator of the Wagner Group. This PMC is part of the Prigozhin conglomerate. And Prigozhin is close to Vladimir Putin: schematically, the Putin/ Prigozhin/ Utkin trio looks like a Russian version of the De Gaulle/ Foccart/ Bob Denard trio. Officially De Gaulle had nothing to do with the Biafran war and the sending of mercenaries to Nigeria. And officially, Putin has nothing to do with Wagner's activities in Africa. In De Gaulle's era, media control made it possible to say such things with some credibility. But today, even if you eliminate the journalists who bother you, what credibility can you expect since the deployment of the Internet?

Less well known than Prigozhin, Utkin is a former member of Russian military intelligence1 (he was a commander2 of a GRU special forces detachment). While he is generally regarded as the creator of the Wagner group, a Bellingcat investigation describes him more as an official figure used to hide the fact that the Wagner group is directly part3 of the GRU hierarchy. Initially, "Wagner" is in fact Dmitry Utkin's 4 nom de guerre.  This nickname is said to have come from his "obsessive fascination with the Third Reich", which seems to be corroborated by his neo-Nazi tattoos. A veteran of the Wagner group indicates that many members of the PMC share a white supremacist ideology comparable to the Nazi thinking5 of the 1930s.

The barbarity of the Wagner group was soon denounced, most notably the torture and beheading of a Syrian national in 2017: videos showing this barbaric act were published on the Internet, first in June 2017, then in November 2019. The mercenaries beat Hamid Bouta with a sledgehammer, decapitated him, cut off his arms with an entrenching tool, and then burned his body.

wagnerbeheading2.webp

And it is probably Marat Gabidullin's revelations about this barbaric act that earned him threats and the ban on publishing his memoirs: Gabidullin asserts in an interview with Meduza that it was Utkin himself who ordered the mercenaries to torture and kill Hamid Bouta in this way in order to intimidate the Syrians, and to film the scene.

wagnerbeheading3.webp

Prigozhin may try to compare Colonel Goïta to Che Guevara, but it is unlikely that Ernesto Guevara or Thomas Sankara would have agreed to do business with white supremacists, let alone if they had committed such barbarities, whether or not they were puppeted by the Kremlin.

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Photo credit : novayagazeta.ru, novayagazeta.ru, chernovik.net

3 "While Dmitry Utkin has been widely presented as the front man and “principal” for the Wagner PMC, there is ample data suggesting that his role was more of a field commander, and that the “Wagner Group” mercenaries are integrated in an overall chain of command under central Kremlin control with its military intelligence (GU/GRU) apparatus."
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/08/14/pmc-structure-exposed/
5 "One Wagner vet we spoke to in Russia confirmed to us that the core of the organization is made up of people “with these radical views and hang-ups” and described them as “extremists,” many of whom have tattoos of pagan runes. He added that the symbols were part of many mercenaries’ self-identification with Viking culture — a popular vein in white supremacist ideology in Europe that harks back to an imagined “pure” and totally white past, as did Nazi thought in the 1930s."
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/the-wagner-group-files/