Three weeks ago, Ukrainian intelligence told journalists that President Zelensky had survived three assassination attempts, two by Wagner soldiers (the third was said to have been made by a group of Chechen fighters). Again, this week, we heard that there had been another attempt on his life by the Wagner Group.
On Thursday, the organisation was included on a new Foreign Office sanctions list targeting “strategic industries, banks and business elites”.
How Zelensky survived due to a Russian intelligence link
Ukraine’s charismatic leader staying one step ahead of a ruthless gang of hired killers also sounds like something dreamt up by a propagandist in the Mariinskyi Palace (Zelensky’s official residence). Nevertheless, a senior member of the US intelligence community told me it was true that Wagner goons had been “contracted” to kill Zelensky. This source went on to say that it was true as well that Zelensky had survived, thanks to a leak from within Russia’s main security service, the FSB. The Ukrainians had been told not only that an operation to kill Zelensky was underway, but also the exact locations of the assassins, leading to their capture. The source said that Putin’s anger over these extraordinary leaks lay behind the arrests, reported last week, of the head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch and his deputy.
The old man calls me again from Germany to tell me it’s important to understand that most of the Vagnerovtsi in Kyiv are more interested in enriching themselves than killing the Ukrainian government. There is no better trained or better equipped mafia in Russia than the Wagner Group, he says, and being sent to Ukraine means they can get “100 times” what they were making in Moscow. This is because of the opportunities provided by the war to extort Ukrainian oligarchs.
His friend now in Ukraine told him a story: last week, a black Cadillac Escalade belonging to one of Ukraine’s richest men was brought to a halt with a 0.50 calibre bullet fired into the engine block. The oligarch didn’t just have bodyguards for protection – he had his own militia. Two pick-ups packed with heavily armed men were following behind the Escalade. They could do nothing but watch. In fact, the oligarch wasn’t in the vehicle, just one of his employees. But the message had been delivered: “You think you’re untouchable. We can get you any time.”
So, my contact in Germany says, a number of the oligarchs are paying up. They may support the Ukrainian government, but they are more afraid of Wagner than of what Zelensky might do if he finds out. He goes on: maybe squeezing the oligarchs helps Vova [as some Russians nickname their President] and maybe not. But like the men who join the French Foreign Legion, Wagner’s soldiers of fortune believe “la Légion est notre mère”. They will help the man next to them, but little more than that. “They have no loyalty to a country or an ideology, or even to Putin. They just want to make money.”
‘A gas station run by a mafia that is masquerading as a country’
I couldn’t find anyone to confirm the story about the black Escalade – or that Ukrainian oligarchs are paying protection money to the enemy in the middle of a war. It could be provokatsiya, or just tall tales from the Moscow underworld. And others I spoke to, with their own sources inside the Wagner Group, called them Putin’s true believers. But everyone agreed that at its core, Wagner is a criminal organisation. That isn’t surprising when the Russian state itself is run as a criminal organisation. The late senator John McCain called Russia “a gas station run by a mafia that is masquerading as a country”. A former colonel in the FSB explained the system to me once: Putin wants something done and members of the royal court at the Kremlin – oligarchs, generals, lawyers, secret policemen – fight each other to do it, because when Putin smiles, you get rich.
Over the past two decades, Putin’s smile has fallen upon an oligarch named Yevgeny Prigozhin, who, press cuttings will tell you, helps fund the Wagner Group. He has always denied any connection to it. Prigozhin is known as ‘Putin’s chef’ because he ran what was apparently the Russian leader’s favourite restaurant when he was a lowly official in St Petersburg. Today, Prigozhin’s company caters Kremlin events. Although almost certainly a billionaire, he can still be seen hovering – huge and bullet-headed – behind Putin’s chair, like the world’s most overpaid butler.
