New Lines reports:

“If you’d have come here to tell me that my son is still alive, you would have made me the happiest mom in the world.”

Svetlana Antipova opens the gate to allow us into her yard in the village of Shyryajeve.

It is a pitch-black Saturday evening, a little over an hour’s drive outside Odessa, Ukraine. The stillness is interrupted only by dogs barking in the neighbors’ yards, altered to the arrival of strangers.

Evgeny Antipov, Svetlana’s son, was a mercenary in the Wagner Group, Russia’s notorious private military company. Evgeny was killed somewhere near Homs, in central Syria, four years ago last June. A little over a month before he left, Evgeny had told his mother that he was going on an unspecified work trip for the next three months. “I won’t have a phone with me,” he told her. “When I come back, I will call you.”

His call never came.

Evgeny’s friends, rather, contacted Svetlana on the Russian-language social media platform VKontakte, telling her that her son was dead.

Evgeny is one of 4,184 Wagner mercenaries that the SBU, Ukraine’s security service, and a think tank started by a number of former top SBU generals have identified. The Ukrainian Center of Analytics and Security, or UCAS, as the think tank is known, shared its data with New Lines, Estonia’s Delfi.ee and the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The trove of information offers arguably the most comprehensive anatomy of Russia’s dark army, built and paid for by the Kremlin-backed oligarch and catering magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin. Coyly referred to in the press as “Putin’s chef,” Prigozhin has been serially sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for his role in Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine, multiple instances of U.S. election interference, and, most recently, malign political and economic influence peddling in the Central African Republic (CAR).

Wagner’s mercenaries have been fighting on the side of the separatists in eastern Ukraine, propping up Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria and backing the warlord Gen. Khalifa Haftar in Libya, as well as fighting anti-government rebels in the CAR. They have also been deployed to Sudan, initially in support of since-ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir, and Mozambique, where they mounted a disastrous and swiftly abandoned offensive against Islamist insurgents.

On Dec. 13, the European Union sanctioned the organization along with three companies and eight people connected to it. “The Wagner Group is responsible for serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic (CAR), Sudan and Mozambique, which include torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings,” the European Council stated in its sanctions decision.

Wagner is closely intertwined with and subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, a sanctions enforcement agency, has designated Wagner a “proxy force” of that ministry. Reporting has also shown it is very close to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. One of the group’s training facilities is located in the Russian region of Krasnodar, right next to a heavily guarded GRU Spetsnaz (special forces) military base. [Continue reading…]