The leaders of the Wagner Group, the Russian mercenary group answerable to Vladimir Putin, now have as much political influence in the Kremlin as the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, a prominent Russian dissident and former political prisoner has told a British parliamentary group.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky told the foreign affairs committee that Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman who finally admitted in September 2022 that he had founded the group, had as much access to Putin as the formal government officials.
He said Prigozhin was behind the recent appointment of General Sergey Surovikin to head the military operation in Ukraine and was working in close conjunction with him in Ukraine.
Wagner Group’s popularity in Russia had surged in recent months since it was able to argue that its existence acted as an alternative to wider mobilisation, Khodorkovsky said.
However, he added that the Wagner Group, with only roughly 7,000 forces, would not take the blame if the military operations failed in Ukraine, since the Russian forces are 150,000 to 200,000.
The two that will take the blame will be Yury Kovalchuk, Putin’s financier and Shoigu, the men believed to have most often pressed Putin to launch the invasion and predicted Kyiv could be seized in three days.
Khodorkovsky accused Putin of using mercenary forces such as the Wagner Group, which often recruits people from prisons, because it allowed him to lie, deny responsibility and implement an illegal foreign policy. “They are engaged in terrorism and killing”, he said, adding the UK and other countries had been too slow to proscribe the group as such despite its clear “terrorist” activity in Africa.
Restarting troop conscription would be a very dangerous political decision for Putin, Khodorkovsky said, adding that resistance to the mobilisation had forced him to bring the process to a premature end.
He claimed 700,000 people had left Russia after the mobilisation and said this represented “a serious blow to Putin’s defence industry and for the economy of Russia”, potentially a more significant blow to Russia’s economy than any normal sanctions imposed by the west.
Khodorkovsky urged the UK to take in many of these Russian exiles saying: “These people are the most active and educated people with certain financial means including 30,000 Russian programmers mainly based in Cyprus. It has significantly hit Russia’s ability to pursue the cyber war.”
Similarly, he said many Russian engineers needed for the reproduction of high-precision weapons had left the country.
