Prigozhin’s media empire was conceived as a contractor that would perform functions for the state while remaining under external management. But it turns out that receiving billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money is no guarantee of either effectiveness or loyalty.
In an interview, Leonid Nersisyan examines Moscow’s stakes in the Levant and North Africa in light of the stalemated war in Ukraine.
Leonid Nersisyan is a defense analyst focusing on the foreign and military policy of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States region. He also follows the defense industry in general, as well as armed conflict and arms control. Nersisyan is a research fellow at the Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Diwan interviewed Nersisyan in July to get his perspective on how the Ukraine war and its repercussions have affected Russia’s defense posture in the Middle East.
The moniker often given to Iran, that of being the quintessential “survivalist state”, is not without merit. With both its highs and lows, Tehran has been at odds with the US since the 1979 revolution, and yet maintained a level of stability despite all challenges.
La Russie cherche à gagner de l’influence en Afrique de plusieurs manières, qu’il s’agisse de campagnes de désinformation ou de l’envoi de mercenaires de Wagner.
Une étude récemment publiée
par le Centre d’études stratégiques de l’Afrique, montre que la Russie tente de saper la démocratie dans plus de deux douzaines de pays africains. Les principaux outils utilisés sont l’ingérence politique, les revendications extraconstitutionnelles de pouvoir et la désinformation. Dans certains cas, ces outils fonctionnent.
As the Cold War began to wane, multipolarism became a rallying cry for everyone sick and tired of superpower politics, nuclear standoffs, and the banal bipolarism of Soviet misinformation and American propaganda.
This “rise of the rest” was prefigured in the Non-Aligned Movement that began in 1961, the New International Economic Order that the United Nations launched in the 1970s, the consolidation of an economically powerful East Asia and a single European market in the 1980s, and the south-south cooperation that emerged in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, after a couple of papers by Morgan Stanley, of all places, the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa was christened and then institutionalized.
Since its mutiny, the Russian private military company “Wagner Group” has redeployed to Belarus and is now training troops near the Polish border while President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko makes belligerent statements. However, Telegram channels, including that of Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin, as well others reporting on Wagner Group and Belarus, report that Wagner Group personnel are also training Belarussian internal security forces.
Open-source intelligence this week revealed that the Wagner Private Military Company has begun training elite units of the Belarusian Armed Forces in Belarus. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s fighters are now training the 38th Air Assault Brigade, which falls under the Belarusian Special Operations Command, and they may start training the 5th Spetsnaz Brigade and the 103rd Airborne Brigade later. Hudson Institute’s Ukraine Military Situation Report will continue to monitor open-source intelligence for signs that other Special Operations Command formations are cooperating with Wagner.
Following Ukraine’s successful Kherson counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, the war in Ukraine has moved into the Materialschlacht, or war of attrition phase, which is rapidly depleting critical resources. Typically, when discussing resources in this sense, Ukraine is most often referring to the tanks, missiles, ammunition and other materiel that it needs from its partner countries.
In a recent development, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan issued a stark warning about the escalating tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, raising concerns over the potential outbreak of a new war. The two nations have a long history of conflict over the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, with efforts toward a lasting peace treaty showing limited progress. Diplomatic mediation by the European Union, United States, and Russia has yielded few results, leaving the situation highly volatile and complex.
The U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on July 25 repeated U.S. warnings that Russia could use sea mines to blow up a ship and blame the attack on Ukraine.
Ambassador Michael Carpenter said Russia would use such an incident — known as a false flag attack — to justify further attacks against civilian ships in the Black Sea.