The legal action against military contractor Wagner Group follows a wave of torture-related cases in Europe against officials from the Syrian regime, whose chances of winning a punishing civil war were boosted by Russia’s military intervention in 2015.
MOSCOW–Three campaign groups announced on Monday a landmark legal case in Moscow against Russian mercenary group Wagner over the torture of a detainee in Syria, aiming to hold to account a murky fighting force with Kremlin links.
The legal action against military contractor Wagner Group follows a wave of torture-related cases in Europe against officials from the Syrian regime, whose chances of winning a punishing civil war were boosted by Russia’s military intervention in 2015.
Three groups from France, Russia and Syria filed the criminal complaint against alleged members of the contractor outfit over the 2017 beheading of a man believed to have deserted from the Syrian army.
Wagner has been linked to a powerful ally of President Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin and the probing potential “war crimes” in this case is unlikely to lead to convictions.
Prigozhin, 59, who has been hit with US sanctions for meddling in the US presidential election in 2016, denies any association with Wagner.
A fight against impunity
But the proceedings represent a rare attempt to bring Wagner out into the open, several years after reports of their deployment in conflicts across the Middle East and Africa first emerged.
“This complaint is important because we aren’t just dealing with a single crime. This is a whole wave of impunity,” said Alexander Cherkasov, a senior member of Memorial, one of the groups bringing the claim.
“People who escape punishment after carrying out crimes like this are given the opportunity to repeat them in places like Chechnya, eastern Ukraine and Syria. In the end they come back to Russia and walk on the streets among us.”
Although private military companies are illegal in Russia, Wagner has in recent years played an increasingly important role in realising the Kremlin’s overseas ambitions, observers say.
Members of the group were reportedly dispatched alongside Russian warplanes and ground troops following Moscow’s intervention in the Syrian war in September 2015 on the side of President Bashar Assad’s army.
Moscow has never confirmed reports of Wagner mercenaries but on Monday said that since its operation launched in Syria 112 Russian troops had died in combat operations.
Wagner’s presence was forced into the spotlight in 2018 when independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that several Russian-speaking men who killed and mutilated a detainee on video in the eastern Homs province were Wagner fighters.
The complaint brought on Monday on behalf of the victim’s family aims to force Moscow to bring criminal proceedings against the alleged members of the private contractor group, in what NGOs say is the first case of its kind.
Later on Monday, Novaya Gazeta said its offices in Moscow had been targeted that morning in a “chemical attack” that the paper linked to its reporting on the detainee.
In a statement, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Memorial and the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression said they had filed evidence that clearly linked at least one defendant to Wagner.
Bringing crimes into the open
“The Russian government must assume its legal and moral responsibilities for the violations committed by its army, including the private entities involved in external military operations under its command, such as the Wagner Group,” said Mazen Darwish, director general and founder of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression.
Ilya Novikov, one of the Syrian family’s lawyers, said Russia was obliged under its constitution to investigate crimes carried out by Russian nationals abroad.
But he said no criminal inquiry had yet been launched by the Investigative Committee, a body that probes major crimes.
The Kremlin said on Monday it was aware of the complaint but that it was “an issue for the Investigative Committee, not the presidential administration.”
It follows dozens of other cases brought in Germany, Austria, Sweden and Norway against officials in Assad’s regime by around 100 refugees, backed by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), a Berlin-based group.
Across Europe, activists are joining forces with police and UN investigators in collecting testimonies, sifting through tens of thousands of photos, videos and files of one of the best documented conflicts in history.
European officials have also taken note of Wagner’s role in conflicts beyond Syria, slapping sanctions on Prigozhin last year for destabilising Libya.
Guns for hire
Reports of Wagner’s existence emerged at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, which was sparked in 2014 and spurred allegations the Kremlin was backing a separatist insurrection in the east of the country.
The group later reappeared in Syria, where it bolstered the embattled regime of Assad and was accused by Russian media of torturing detainees and securing oil assets.
Wagner fighters have since resurfaced in politically volatile African countries like the Central African Republic as military “instructors” and Libya, where they are propping up the rival administration of strongman Khalifa Haftar.
Apart from buttressing official Russian military operations, as in Syria, Wagner is reported to have also played the traditional role of a private security company elsewhere, guarding infrastructure or politicians.
Wagner is believed to be financed by 59-year-old businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been hit with EU and US sanctions for destabilising Libya and meddling in US elections.
Prigozhin spent nine years in prison for fraud and theft towards the end of the Soviet Union, emerging as a catering magnate with Kremlin contracts after the Soviet collapse.
He was hit with sanctions by Washington, which said his troll factory was behind 2016 election interference. Prigozhin has denied links to Wagner.
Day-to-day operations were reported by the Russian state-run TASS news agency to be overseen by former military intelligence officer Dmitry Utkin, who was hailed at a “heroes of Syria” ceremony in 2016 and photographed with Putin.
Unwanted attention
The group, which like all private fighting companies is outlawed in Russia, is understood to recruit from law enforcement agencies and the military, wooing prospective soldiers with salaries five or six times larger than the average in Russia.
Several local Russian news sites have reported from funerals in Russia of suspected fighters saying families receive large payouts in exchange for their silence.
The Carnegie think-tank has described Wagner as “one of Moscow’s worst kept secrets.”
It said the group has two primary goals: “To provide the Kremlin with plausible deniability when deploying fighters in war zones” and be “a ready-made capability for building influence with receptive states.”
Its operations, however, have not been without losses or scandal.
Belarus last year detained 33 “militants” from the group, accusing them of planning riots with the opposition ahead of elections.
The men claimed they were transiting through the Belarusian capital Minsk to destinations including Venezuela, Libya, Cuba, Turkey and Syria, in an embarrassing admission for Moscow, which discretely secured their release.
Dozens of Wagner contractors are believed to have been killed and wounded in the Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor in 2018 during an operation to claim oil facilities guarded by US troops and their proxies.
In July the same year, three journalists researching Wagner’s operations in the Central African Republic for an investigative media outlet were killed in an ambush.