In December 2022, the story of Pavel Nikolin thundered in Russia. He was recruited into the Wagner PMC in the settlement of Ufa, where, according to Baza, he was serving a sentence for theft and robbery. He was in Ukraine, then he fled the front, as a result he was detained in the Rostov region … after shooting at Russian policemen. He took them “for Ukrainian saboteurs”, reported the press service of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The Nikolin case is just the harbinger of a great wave of criminal terror that will overwhelm Russia when Wagnerian mercenaries recruited from the areas return from the war, experts believe.
“It’s clear that these are people with specific criminal experience,” political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said in an interview with Russia’s media service. – This experience has been consolidated in the PMC Wagner, where sentences are delivered calmly and naturally, executions take place without even the appearance of legal process. That is to say, everything is organized simply, according to the concepts of a vertically organized mafia.
“They are doing exactly what they were put here for. And if they are lucky enough to return, they will continue to do so in Russia, because they have tasted blood and impunity,” write users of the Moscow online portal. There is also such a comment : “The country has been unraveling the “Afghans” for a good ten years, everything will be worse here.”
“Afghans” were called Soviet soldiers who returned from Afghanistan in the 80s. By the way, there, too, according to the Kremlin, there was no war, but “the presence of a limited contingent of Soviet troops ”, which fulfilled an “international duty”. In fact, it was a real war and it was not easy to adapt to civilian life after it. Veterans of the Chechen wars experienced the same problems in the 1990s and early 2000s. But these were not criminals recruited from the areas with their own conceptions of morality, as is the case with mercenaries Wagner PMC fighting in Ukraine.
“These are not the kind of people who will become bakers and teachers,” Colin Clark, senior fellow at the Soufan Center, told media. “Russia will have to deal with criminal elements who will raise funds through criminal means, which will further destabilize the country. Maybe even more than in the early 90s, when there were a lot of professional killers in Russia, and it all looked like the Wild West.
“After the Great Patriotic War, there were also a large number of criminal gangs,” Dmitry Oreshkin recalls, “partly associated with the spread of weapons, partly with post-traumatic syndrome, partly simply with the weakening of national institutions and contempt for them, relying only on force.
The prisoners recruited by Prigogine are accustomed to living according to the same conceptions. Recruitment to the PMC Wagner itself is also outside the legal realm, since Wagner’s status is not specified in Russian law and US authorities have generally recognized the PMC as a transnational criminal organization. The very process of recruiting with a promise of pardon for service in PMCs, the lawyers say, is illegal. However, the Kremlin announced on January 27 that pardon decrees, as required by law, are signed by the president, they are simply classified documents.
“But the fact is that Prigogine personally promises freedom in exchange for the possibility of ‘redemption with blood’. And he has no official authority for this,” said Dmitry Stratievsky, director of the Berlin Center for Study from Eastern Europe.
“Prigozhin isn’t even in the civil service,” Stratievsky said in an interview with Russia’s media service. – It has no relevant contracts with government agencies. In other words, this whole situation is outside the legal realm. And the prisoners recruited in the colonies are also used to existing outside the judicial field. Moreover, it is customary among them to despise the standards of public morality. I will not go into distant history, into the ancient period or the Middle Ages, into modern and recent history, nothing of the sort is known to me. It’s an unprecedented situation.”
According to experts, regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russian society is already guaranteed internal criminal terror. But how stable can the government be, having created the preconditions for this terror with its own hands?
“The Wagner group will split into several criminal clans,” said Dmitry Oreshkin. – It is unlikely that Prigozhin will be allowed to keep control of this personal army after the end of the war, since it is a serious force in the struggle for power. And, therefore, other forces – be it the FSB, the army or the police – will not be interested in the existence of this structure.
According to Dmitry Stratievsky, after the war, public opposition to armed Wagnerians is not excluded. “Let’s not forget that trust in the police in Russia is extremely low,” says Stratievsky. “And people will see that no one can protect them from Wagnerian gangs of criminals. Maybe people will even take up arms to defend themselves. And we will have a multi-layered and very dangerous situation.
