Ukraine war: Wagner Group suffers heavy losses as their boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, steps firmly into the spotlight
The graves are all fresh. Row after row of them, almost identical. The same mound of sandy soil, the same black, red and yellow wreath mounted with a golden star.
The same wooden, orthodox cross to mark the grave, though there are some Muslim headstones too. Just the names and the dates on a small bronze plaque to distinguish the lives extinguished. None of them lived to a ripe old age.
This is a cemetery for Wagner mercenaries near Krasnodar in southern Russia. Krasnodar region is the Wagner Group’s heartland. Their training ground is nearby in a village called Molkino.
There is a newly built chapel not far away which houses the urns of cremated fighters. And there is space available for still more graves in this cemetery, when the next wave of bodies come home.
Wagner is heavily involved in Russia’s offensive around Bakhmut and Soledar in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. Its fighters have died, Ukraine says, in their thousands.
Most likely the bulk of those were convicts, sent in to die like cannon fodder and be buried in a Wagner cemetery far from home. Perhaps after time in Russia’s penal colonies they no longer had homes to speak of.
“The area near Soledar is covered with corpses of the invaders… This is what madness looks like,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, said in one of his nightly addresses.
The rows of graves of Wagner fighters are almost identical
Russia claims to be in control of Soledar, a victory that Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, declares as his own.
In the past few days he has also claimed to be behind the capture of the village of Klishchiivka about nine kilometres south of Bakhmut, though that has yet to be confirmed from the Ukrainian side. The Russian defence ministry has been less gracious about Wagner’s role but it has conceded that they played a role in capturing Soledar.
There are rumours, dismissed by the Kremlin as media speculation, that army boss Valery Gerasimov was brought in to replace Sergey Surovikin as head of Ukraine operations partly to keep Prigozhin in line.
Putting the top military commander in charge of Russia’s “special military operation” could be interpreted as a way of reinforcing army hierarchy and reminding Prigozhin and his band of mercenaries who is ultimately in charge.
Prigozhin, who only a few months ago refused to confirm the well-known secret that he ran the Wagner Group and sued anyone who suggested otherwise, has come out in public all guns blazing. There is no longer a need for the “regime of silence”, he said.
Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin inspects body bags. Pic: Fan Media Agency
There are videos of him now in the salt mines around Bakhmut, where US officials believe he has an eye on the mineral spoils.
There are videos of him handing out medals to his fighters. There are videos of him surveying piles of body bags behind the frontlines and attending funerals back home. He has not shied away from his losses, demanding the same burial rights for his men as for regular army soldiers.
He has shown himself willing to be a presence at the frontlines, quite the battleground commander, which is more than can be said for the ultimate commander-in-chief who, unlike Ukraine’s president, has paid no visits to the front.
Prigozhin’s PR team provide quick responses, purportedly from the man himself, to media questions. In a recent salvo, he takes aim at Kremlin bureaucrats who he says are longing for Russia to lose the war and for the US to start calling the shots in Russia. But the US “won’t take you in”, he writes to these supposed Kremlin traitors. “And then you will come to us, where the Wagner sledgehammer will be waiting for you.”
It is getting harder for the Wagner Group to recruit fighters after heavy losses
The sledgehammer is no idle threat. In November, video appeared purporting to show a Wagner mercenary bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer for defecting to Ukraine. When asked to comment, Prigozhin replied, “a dog receives a dog’s death”.
Later that month, a bloodied sledgehammer in a violin case was presented to the European Parliament as they debated declaring Russia a terrorist state, a sinister message from the group also known in Russia as “The musicians”.
But losing that many men creates problems and the recruitment drive in Russia’s prisons is reportedly drying up.
Paul Whelan, a US citizen (who also holds British citizenship) and was jailed in 2018 on espionage charges, told his brother David that Wagner recruiters had little luck the last time they came round his prison colony. “Everyone else has a clear picture of what happens to prisoners who go to fight the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine”, David Whelan wrote in his regular email updates. This time round, they reportedly managed to sign up just eight men, compared with 115 on the previous occasion.
Prigozhin is a powerful man. He is unashamedly critical of both Russia’s senior military command and of the Kremlin elites though he does not say a bad word about Vladimir Putin.
Wagner has played a key role for years already as an unofficial arm of Russian foreign policy in Syria, Libya and other African countries.
Now in Ukraine, the group is out in the open. But Ukraine is a far bloodier battlefield and the fight more existential, both for the Wagner Group and for Putin’s Russia, which has enabled men like Prigozhin, with his brutal, sledgehammer tradecraft, to flourish.
Four more arrests have been made by French police investigating the Louvre museum heist.
Two men and two women from the Paris region were detained on Tuesday, prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.
Ms Beccuau’s statement did not say what role the quartet are suspected of having played in the robbery. The two men are aged 38 and 39, and the two women are aged 31 and 40.
They are being interrogated by police, who can hold them for questioning for 96 hours.
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Louvre: How ‘heist of the century’ unfolded
The latest arrests come after investigating magistrates filed preliminary charges against three men and one woman who were arrested last month.
Some of the French Crown Jewels, worth an estimated £76m, were stolen in the audacious October raid.
The haul – which included a diamond and emerald necklace Napoleon gave to Empress Marie-Louise, jewels linked to 19th-century Queens Marie-Amelie and Hortense, and Empress Eugenie’s pearl and diamond tiara – has not been recovered.
The heist was pulled off in mere minutes last month – and took place while the Louvre was open to visitors, raising doubts over the credibility of the world’s most-visited museum as a guardian for its priceless works.
On Sunday 19 October, two men used a stolen furniture lift to access the second floor Galerie d’Apollon.
They then cracked open display cases with angle grinders before escaping with their loot and fleeing on the back of two scooters driven by accomplices.
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Moment thieves escape Louvre in jewel heist
The Paris prosecutor previously said the robbery appeared to be the work of small-time criminals rather than professional gangsters.
Speaking shortly after the heist, art detective Arthur Brand told Sky News that detectives faced a “race against time” to recover the stolen treasure.
“These crown jewels are so famous, you just cannot sell them,” Mr Brand said. “The only thing they can do is melt the silver and gold down, dismantle the diamonds, try to cut them. That’s the way they will probably disappear forever.
“They [the police] have a week. If they catch the thieves, the stuff might still be there. If it takes longer, the loot is probably gone and dismantled. It’s a race against time.”
Washington woke up this morning to a flurry of developments on Ukraine.
It was the middle of the night in DC when a tweet dropped from Ukraine’s national security advisor, Rustem Umerov.
He said that the US and Ukraine had reached a “common understanding on the core terms of the agreement discussed in Geneva.”
He added that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would travel to America “at the earliest suitable date in November to complete final steps and make a deal with President Trump”.
Ukraine latest: ‘Delicate’ deal details must be sorted, White House says
By sunrise in Washington, a US official was using similar but not identical language to frame progress.
The official, speaking anonymously to US media, said that Ukraine had “agreed” to Trump’s peace proposal “with some minor details to be worked out”.
In parallel, it’s emerged that talks have been taking place in Abu Dhabi. The Americans claim to have met both Russian and Ukrainian officials there, though the Russians have not confirmed attendance.
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Peace deal ‘agreement’: What we know
“I have nothing to say. We are following the media reports,” Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, told Russian state media.
Trump is due to travel to his Florida resort Mar-a-Lago tonight, where he will remain until Sunday.
He set a deadline of Thursday – Thanksgiving – for some sort of agreement on his plan.
We know the plan has been changed from its original form, but it’s clear that Zelenskyy wants to be seen to agree to something quickly – that would go down well with President Trump.
Read more:
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My sense is that Zelenskyy will try to get to Mar-a-Lago as soon as he can. Before Thursday would be a push but would meet Trump’s deadline.
It will then be left for the Russians to state their position on the revised document.
All indications are that they will reject it. But maybe the secret Abu Dhabi talks will yield something.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial US and Israeli-backed aid distribution group, has said it will permanently cease operations.
Set up as an alternative to United Nations aid programmes in May, GHF’s executive director John Acree said on Monday that it “succeeded in our mission of showing there’s a better way to deliver aid to Gazans”.
The foundation had already closed down aid distribution sites after US President Donald Trump’s ceasefire plan was agreed by Hamas and Israel in October.
The GHF which began operations in Gaza after an Israeli blockade of food deliveries, lasting nearly three months, was criticised by Palestinians, aid workers and health officials who said it forced people to risk their lives to reach the sites.
File pic: Reuters
According to witnesses and videos posted to social media, Israeli soldiers repeatedly opened fire at the sites, killing hundreds. The IDF denied this, saying it only fired warning shots as a crowd-control measure or if its troops were in danger.
In July, analysis from Sky News’ Data and Forensics team found that aid distributions by GHF were associated with a significant increase in deaths.
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Gaza deaths increase when aid sites open
MSF – also known as Doctors Without Borders – said in a report in August that the GHF sites “morphed into a laboratory of cruelty,” and described scenes there as “orchestrated killing”.
‘We are proud,’ says GHF director
Mr Acree said in a statement through the GHF’s website that “from the outset, GHF’s goal was to meet an urgent need” and to hand over a successful aid operation to “the broader international community”.
The GHF would hand over its work to the US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center in Israel overseeing the Gaza ceasefire.
“We are winding down our operations as we have succeeded in our mission of showing there’s a better way to deliver aid to Gazans,” Mr Acree said.
File pic: Reuters
The GHF director added: “At a critical juncture, we are proud to have been the only aid operation that reliably and safely provided free meals directly to Palestinian people in Gaza, at scale and without diversion.
“From our very first day of operations, our mission was singular: feed civilians in desperate need. We built a new model that worked, saved lives, and restored dignity to civilians in Gaza.”
According to the GHF website, the group distributed more than three million food boxes, totalling 187 million meals, and supplied 1.1 million packs of Ready-to-Use Supplementary Food (RUSF) for malnourished children.
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Hamas welcomes GHF closure
In a statement, Hamas welcomed the closure of GHF and accused it of being a project that “engineered starvation” in partnership with Israel.
A Hamas spokesperson said: “Since its entry into the Gaza Strip, this foundation was part of the occupation’s security system, which adopted distribution mechanisms entirely disconnected from humanitarian principles, and created dangerous and degrading conditions for the dignity of the starving Palestinian people during their attempts to obtain a piece of bread, resulting in the killing and injury of thousands, through sniper operations and deliberate killing.”
They also called on international legal bodies to hold “this foundation and its officers accountable for their crimes against our people”.
US state department deputy spokesperson Tommy Piggot also said on X that the aid group “shared valuable lessons learned with us and our partners”.
“GHF’s model, in which Hamas could no longer loot and profit from stealing aid, played a huge role in getting Hamas to the table and achieving a ceasefire,” he added.
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