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Putin’s Shadow Army Suffers a Setback in Syria

"Undoubtedly we'll be hearing more about “Putin’s cook”, Yevgeny Prigozhin"

By Joshua Yaffa

February 16, 2018

Russian soldiers patrolling Palmyra, Syria, in 2016. A U.S. air strike last week in eastern Syria reportedly killed scores of Russian citizens who were private military contractors.
Photograph by Vasily Maximov / AFP / Getty

For the first time in fifty years, U.S. and Russian military forces have engaged in direct combat. Soldiers from the two countries last clashed during the Vietnam War, when Soviet soldiers shot down U.S. warplanes with anti-aircraft weapons. Last week, on February 7th, the two powers met again, when U.S. drones, attack helicopters, and fighter planes struck a contingent of pro-regime fighters near Deir Ezzor, a Kurdish-held city in eastern Syria. As would emerge later, among those killed were up to a hundred Russian citizens who were fighting in Syria as private military contractors, a shadowy mercenary force whose presence in Syria is not officially recognized by the Kremlin.

Not long before the attack, the Russian contractors, fighting alongside members of pro-Assad tribal militias, carried out a strike against a compound held by Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led army, backed and advised by U.S. troops. During the maneuver, the Russian contractors crossed the Euphrates River near the town of Khusham, breaching what Moscow and Washington have agreed is the dividing line separating their respective zones of authority. U.S. Special Forces embedded with the S.D.F. called in the ferocious response from the air.

According to investigations in the Russian press, as many as two thousand or three thousand Russian contractors are involved in military operations in Syria. Most of them are linked to a structure called Wagner, a company that has apparent ties to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a onetime St. Petersburg restaurateur who became close to Vladimir Putin in the early aughts. Prigozhin ended up with lucrative contracts to supply food to the Russian Army and has taken to overseeing the sorts of enterprises that the Kremlin finds useful but doesn’t want to manage itself. On Friday, the special counsel, Robert Mueller, indicted Prigozhin and twelve other Russian nationals for allegedly interfering in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. He is widely linked to a so-called troll factory in St. Petersburg, where hundreds of people are paid to sit and create fake social-media accounts to foster discontent and confusion in political discussions online. Wagner was named by its commander, a former Russian special-forces officer named Dmitry Utkin, who is a fan of the German composer. In 2016, Utkin was photographed at a Kremlin ceremony in which Putin handed out awards for military valor.

[...]

When I spoke with Noah Bonsey, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group who covers Syria, he told me that the entire incident is “clouded in more ambiguity than usual, even by the standards of the Syrian war.” As he put it, “The key question is: Who ordered this foray across the Euphrates, and why? Was it a local decision? Did the Russian military command know about it?” He suggested that the oil facility made sense as a target because, in recent weeks, the Trump Administration has referred explicitly to control over the oil fields of eastern Syria as leverage in the ongoing conflict. This may have increased Russia’s interest in those same oil fields. At the same time, Kurdish forces are caught in a prolonged battle with the Turkish Army in Afrin, in northern Syria. The S.D.F. has moved some of its troops to aid in the fight, repositioning them out of Deir Ezzor. “Someone may have viewed that as an opportunity,” Bonsey said.

[...]

Complicating all of this is the fact that, at least technically, private military companies are illegal in Russia, and previous attempts in parliament to draft the necessary legislation to formalize their status have gone nowhere. “We’re at crossroads,” Ivan Konovalov, a defense analyst and the author of a Russian-language book on private military companies, said. “Either we’ll see the winding down of the operations of such companies or the passing of legislation to regulate their activity.” One deputy in parliament this week called for exactly that. Konovalov hopes a law will soon appear. “Without it, there’s no mechanism to deal with such situations, no one knows what to do,” he told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-shadow-army-suffers-a-setback-in-syria

I didn't expect the next news of Prigozhin to come from Syria. We didn't learn anything new about Trump, just see some more,
hmm, complications which could have arisen from some in his administration blabbing strategy about seizing oilfields.

Trump has long said we should have taken control of all the oil in Iraq, but couldn't have been him shooting his mouth off. Nah. Never.