Day: November 9, 2023

Russia’s feared mercenary Wagner group has allegedly been training Hamas terrorists with the attacks on Israel having “Russian hands” on it, an expert has claimed.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, had offered to find a “peaceful solution” while also offering to back Hamas with “units ready” to do so. But now, according to an ex-Prime Minister of Ukraine, Russia might already be involved in the conflict, with its Wagner forces supposedly training fighters through its Syria base – and with Hamas using some of the group’s signature moves.

Petro Poroshenko, speaking to Euractiv, said: “I’m absolutely convinced that there is Russian interest, Russian hands, in the preparation of the Hamas terror attack on Israel.

READ MORE: Israel’s feared SAS unit will be unleashed against Hamas as brutal training revealed

For more news from Israel, click here.

Hamas has been trained by Wagner, an expert has claimed (Image: AFP via Getty Images)

“I have known it since 2014 when the first Wagner group appeared in the east of my country. I know the signature of Wagner from their attacks in Lysychansk, Severodonetsk, Soledar, Bakhmut. “This is exactly Wagner tactics. I’m absolutely sure that the Russian Wagner instructors in Syria were transferred to Hamas in Gaza and participated in the training of terrorists to prepare the absolutely barbaric attack on Israel from the Gaza strip.”

More than 1,300 Israelis have been killed by Hamas terrorists – the group was proscribed as a terror organisation by the UK Government in 2021 – with around 1,100 being killed in Gaza. It is thought that there are around 130 hostages in Gaza, with around 17 of those being either British nationals or having a British passport.

Wagner forces are in neighbouring Syria (Image: AFP via Getty Images)

Poroshenko’s comments were backed up by the General SVR Telegram channel, a Russian anti-Puin channel. They said: “Representatives of the Wagner PMC (Private Military Company) and the Redut PMC took part in the preparation of Hamas militants for an attack on Israel, in coordination with the Russian leadership.”

Putin – who did at one point have a close relationship with Israel, but that appears to have deteriorated over the last few years – has commented on the issue, but blamed it on the United States. He said: “I think that many people will agree with me that this is a vivid example of the failure of United States policy in the Middle East.”

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Vladimir Putin is increasingly confident Russia’s military can outlast Ukraine as a second winter of war approaches with Kyiv’s U.S. and European allies distracted by the deepening conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The Kremlin is convinced developments are moving in Putin’s favor and that he’ll be able to hold on to territories in southern and eastern Ukraine that his army seized in the invasion, according to three people with knowledge of the situation.

Russia’s playing for time as Putin prepares for presidential elections in March, two of the people said. The aim is to secure territory Russia currently holds and, with neither side able to make a decisive breakthrough, wait for war fatigue in the U.S. and Europe to mount and shift pressure onto Ukraine to seek a settlement.

Today, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi received a phone call from Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Olaf Scholz.

Spokesman for the Presidency, Counselor Ahmed Fahmy, said the phone call followed-up on the latest developments in the Gaza Strip. President El-Sisi and the Federal Chancellor reviewed Egypt’s unyielding efforts to push toward a ceasefire to protect the civilians, given the exacerbating humanitarian conditions in the Strip. They also tackled Egypt’s efforts to provide and deliver humanitarian aid and relief to the people in Gaza and to evacuate foreign national. Federal Chancellor Scholz expressed deep appreciation for Egypt’s role, underscoring Germany’s stance with regard to the importance of protecting civilians and allowing access for the aid. The two sides also discussed ways to achieve security and stability in the region. President El-Sisi reiterated that the two-state solution is the path for just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of The Presidency, The Arab Republic of Egypt.

“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.” — Harry Truman

With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.

These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.

That authoritarian danger is now posed by the FBI, whose love affair with totalitarianism began long ago. Indeed, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government so admired the Nazi regime that following the second World War, it secretly and aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen as part of Operation Paperclip. American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since.

If the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II weren’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies — the FBI, CIA and the military — adopted many of the Third Reich’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them against American citizens.

Indeed, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.

Compare the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves — powers that have grown since 9/11, transforming the FBI into a mammoth federal policing and surveillance agency that largely operates as a power unto itself, beyond the reach of established laws, court rulings and legislative mandates — to its Nazi counterparts, the Gestapo — and…

The CIA and Mossad chiefs met with the Qatari prime minister in Doha on Thursday to discuss the parameters of a deal for hostage releases and a pause in Hamas-Israel fighting in the Gaza Strip, a source briefed on the meeting told Reuters. The outcome of the talks was unclear. Qatar, where several Hamas political leaders are based, has been leading efforts to mediate between Hamas and Israeli officials for the release of hostages taken by Hamas militants when they rampaged into Israel on October 7, killing 1,400 people.

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Israel then launched an unrelenting bombardment of Hamas-ruled Gaza and late last month launched an armored invasion of the enclave, where over 10,000 people have now been killed, 40 percent of them children, according to Palestinian officials. David Barnea, head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, CIA Director William Burns and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani held the meeting after Qatari mediators met officials from the Hamas political office on Wednesday night and discussed potential parameters of a deal. The advantage of the trilateral meeting was to bring all three parties together at one table in real time to speed up the process, the source said. The talks also included a discussion about allowing humanitarian imports of fuel into Gaza, so far refused by Israel lest, it says, it is diverted to Hamas for fighting purposes.

A source told Reuters on Wednesday the talks touched on a release of 10-15 hostages in exchange for a one- to two-day humanitarian pause in the war that is devastating Gaza.

Read more:

Britain’s interior minister accuses police of pro-Palestinian bias over marches

France’s Macron calls for ‘ceasefire’ at Gaza aid conference

Israeli military official says there is no ‘humanitarian’ crisis in Gaza Strip

On 13 October in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek, Putin claimed that ‘no one suspects [Russia] wishes to play around’ with the Gaza conflict because of its strong and good relations with each of the protagonists. But the historical record belies this assurance. Even in Soviet times, when Moscow took the ideological offensive against ‘US imperialism’ and ‘Israeli aggression’, it sought to create synergies between the region’s endemic contradictions and hostilities. Under Putin’s watch, it has cooperated ‘pragmatically’ with every country and its worst enemy. It has ‘played around’ with pre-meditation and purpose, deepening relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Hamas and Israel simultaneously.

In itself, the Putin-Netanyahu relationship emerged from a balance of fears no less than a balance of forces, to which one must add the respect of each party for the tenacity and calculated ruthlessness of the other. But it also was a product of permissive circumstances: President Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ and the diminution of America’s presence and influence in the Middle East.

Over a good fifteen years, the relationship brought tangible benefits to both sides. On the one hand, Russia looked the other way whilst Israel struck targets inside Lebanon and Syria. In turn, Israel refused to join the Western sanctions regimes of 2014 and 2022 against Russia, and despite US entreaties, has not supplied air defence systems or other lethal weapons to Ukraine either, at least overtly. In 2011, Putin went so far as to describe Israel as ‘a special state to us…practically a Russian-speaking country’, and only seven years ago, he called it an ‘unconditional ally against international terrorism’. Yet Putin offered no condolences to Netanyahu after Hamas’s attack.

To understand why, one needs to appreciate just how radically the Ukraine war has restructured Russia’s priorities. Prior to February 2022, the 50-year special relationship with Germany was at least as important as the Russia-Israel relationship, but it was sacrificed on the altar of Russia’s ‘special military operation’. Russia has now made the same calculation with respect to Israel.

Five interests now take precedence: the rupturing of the West, the war in Ukraine, ties with Iran (which the war has made an indispensable ally of Russia), sabotaging the US-sponsored Saudi-Israel entente, and driving as many wedges as possible between the ‘collective West’ and the ‘global South’. In short, the specific conditions that spawned the Russia-Israel relationship fifteen years ago have given way to new ones.

These new conditions are at least as advantageous to Russia as the old. Today, we need to face four unpalatable truths.

First, Russia views Israel as the Achilles heel of the United States. Washington might claim that it will support Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’, but it knows that Israel cannot be allowed to fail. If Congress is forced to debate the relative priority of Ukraine and Israel, there is no debate. Israel wins.

Second, Israel’s greatest weakness is that it is predictable. History has taught its people that turning the other cheek is a recipe for extinction. The attack of 7 October was not merely, in the words of Israel’s ambassador to Germany, ‘the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’, it was a stunning exercise in ‘reflexive control’: the defeat of an adversary by its own actions. Israel’s survival is more at risk today than at any time since 1948.

Third, the fates of Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan are intertwined. What links them is the commitment and credibility of the United States. The Kremlin believes that their removal from the political map would mean the end of the West as such. Possibly, it is right.

Fourth, whether or not Russia was complicit in Hamas’s attack, it had every reason to be. Its 17-year relationship with Hamas goes well beyond courtesy calls. The visits of the Hamas leadership and the head of its Politburo to Moscow in March and September this year were almost certainly about consultation rather than courtesy. If, as ‘informed sources’ claim, Hamas and Iran began planning the operation one year ago, it is most unlikely that Russia was kept in the dark.

Françoise Thom recently wrote: ‘Putin understands nothing about Western civilization. On the other hand, he has an unerring instinct for what can destroy it’. Maybe.

Over the years, Putin has proved himself to be less a master strategist than an engineer of lose-lose outcomes. He might come to regret some of these. US military power is now returning to the Middle East in earnest. It takes little effort to grasp that an Israel-Iran, not to say US-Iran war could bring a swift halt to Iran’s lifeline of military supplies to Russia. Moreover, it would swiftly expose Russia’s limitations. In such a war, Russia would have no spare military power to offer. Instead of making Russia indispensable, it might show the world that it has no clothes. In the end, Russia might pay a horrendous price for the harm it has wrought. But the end could be far away. Meanwhile, Russia’s capacity to confound, subvert and damage is likely to remain unrivalled.

This article is a revised version of the one published in Postimees on 26 October.

Yunus-bek Yevkurov, Russia‘s Deputy Defence Minister, and Andrei Averyanov, a notorious general from the GRU military intelligence agency, touched down in Bamako, Mali, on Saturday, September 16.  They were slated to meet political leaders from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, according to local media and various sources on Telegram.

This was not the first of the duo’s visits to Africa. They have made several visits to the continent since the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin on August 23, 2023… and even prior to that. Yevkurov, always flanked by Averyanov, was in Libya – one of the main African bases for Wagner’s mercenaries – the day before the plane crash back in Russia which killed the Wagner Group chief, as well as two others from the organisation’s top leadership who could have replaced him. 

Yevkurov, the negotiator

The meeting in Mali was not coincidental: Yevkurov and Averyanov were scheduled to hold talks with representatives of the countries Prigozhin had last visited. Riley Moeder, an Africa specialist studying the role of Wagner’s mercenaries on the continent at the New Lines Institute, an American geopolitical research center, holds that Russia is playing on a sense of continuity: “Prigozhin was filmed in that region before his plane crashed, and this region is looking for support. So Moscow wants to assure them that it remains committed to that region,” she says.

The Russian deputy defence minister had already visited Mali and Burkina Faso in the first week of September to assure local authorities that Moscow would “do everything in its power to help” them, The New York Times reported in an investigation into the future of Wagner’s African “empire” published on September 8.

Yevkurov and Averyanov would therefore appear to African leaders to be the successors to the late Wagner boss. What’s more, as The New York Times reports in the same investigation, they also met with some of the remaining Wagner mercenaries in Mali. Several media outlets have already presented the GRU’s Averyanov as “Prigozhin’s successor” in Africa.

Indeed, the profiles of both men correspond to some of the roles hitherto played by Wagner’s former leader.

For example, Deputy Defence Minister Yevkurov is a decorated general with “quite a good military reputation”, says Ivan Klyszcz, a specialist in Russian foreign policy at the International Centre for Defence and Security in Estonia. That may be enough to inspire respect among the Wagner mercenaries.

Yevkurov also has a solid reputation as a peacemaker and negotiator from his time spent in Ingushetia, an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation located in the Greater Caucasus mountain range. He led this Russian republic from 2008 to 2019, at a time when the region “was more violent than Chechnya“, says Klyszcz, who has focussed on this part of Russia. “The region was almost as safe as everywhere else in Russia when he left.”

For the Kremlin, Yevkurov has a certain diplomatic finesse that is perfectly suited for being “the new face of relations between the Russian government when dealing with these African regimes”, says Andreas Heinemann-Gruder, a Russia specialist who studies private paramilitary groups at the University of Bonn.

Averyanov and the GRU assassins

Diplomatic finesse is arguably not Averyanov’s strong suit. General Averyanov is best known for having led the GRU’s infamous 29155 unit, which specialises in covert operations like sabotage and assassination. Spies from this unit are suspected of having blown up an ammunition depot in the Czech Republic in 2014, attempting to stage a pro-Serbian coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the attempted poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal in 2018. 

Read moreUnit 29155, the Russian spies specialising in ‘sabotage and assassinations’

In other words, “[Averyanov’s] qualification is preparing special operations abroad. He is the ‘hit and kill guy’ you call when you need this kind of service,” says Heinemann-Gruder.

What’s in it for African regimes? “Averyanov can … take over some elements of regime security, and not only bodyguard services, but also in [his] area of specialisation: repression and targeted assassination,” adds Klyszcz.

But Averyanov is more than a cold-blooded killer. “Averyanov is a decorated veteran from Afghanistan and Chechnya and was also active in Moldova and Crimea. As with all Russian special operatives, he is trained to take the initiative, operate cut off from superiors’ orders, and make links with local allies,” says Jeff Hawn, Russia specialist and an external consultant for the New Lines Institute. This pedigree makes him an ideal candidate to negotiate with local military groups, just as Wagner’s managers would do when arriving in a new country in Africa.  

Yevkurov, the shrewd politician, and Averyanov, the master spy, thus appear to be as different as they are complementary. However, they both have one quality in common setting them apart from the late Yevgeny Prigozhin: “They’re both reliable, loyal soldiers who are not the type of personality which could be expected to ‘go rogue’,” says Hawn. 

“Loyalty is a very powerful advantage in the Putin system right now,” says Klyszcz. This would be especially the case for anyone aspiring to take over for Prigozhin, who, after his abortive rebellion attempt against the Russian defence ministry in June, came to epitomise treachery in the eyes of the Russian leadership.

More openly official support

Is all of this enough for the Kremlin to hand the keys to Wagner’s kingdom in Africa to the duo? According to the experts interviewed by FRANCE 24, they will play a role, but not as sole operators. Yevkurov and Averyanov embody, as representatives of the Russian state, a move from the semi-clandestine operations and relations carried out by Wagner to more open relations with the African regimes in place. “It’s no longer hybrid warfare but official support. They show that communication is continuing with Russia, but now through official channels,” says Heinemann-Gruder. 

But this does not mean that the structures set up by Wagner will simply be absorbed by the Russian ministry of defence. Wagner’s very decentralised model is still useful to Moscow, because “it’s easier to adapt to local situations. What is happening in Mali is not what is happening in the Central African Republic,” says Moeder. The situation in Mali, with its imperative to fight terrorism, has little in common with the nature of operations in the Central African Republic, where Wagner’s main aim is to secure lucrative mining activities. Wagner also runs propaganda operations in several countries and even manages a brewery and vodka distillery in the Central African Republic.

Such diverse activities and hybrid warfare, wherein conventional tactics are blended with subversive actions,  “require greater dexterity than the Russian security bureaucracy is likely capable of”, writes Joseph Siegle, Director of the Center for African Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in Washington, in an article published on The Conversation.

Finally, it will still be useful to let the mercenaries carry out certain actions to be able to continue denying official involvement on the part of Moscow in the event of exactions or reprisals in a country.

Yevkurov and Averyanov are thus an important part of the first stage of the reorganisation of Russian operations in Africa. “The Russians are beginning to learn some lessons from past experience with Wagner and other PMCs (private military companies). We can expect less autonomy and clear political leadership,” says Heinemann-Gruder.

And if Moscow’s progress in taking control of operations is rather slow, it’s also because the Wagner Group also has well-entrenched financial interests in Africa. “There is a web of [Russian] oligarchs and businessmen who benefitted from Prigozhin’s businesses and shell companies, and who have everything to gain from the system remaining,” says Moeder. Moscow’s interests therefore also lie in making sure that everyone involved in Wagner’s African operations continues to benefit. 

This article was translated from the original in French.