Wagner Group is still recruiting new fighters, less than a week after the group’s rebellion prompted Vladimir Putin to fear civil war, writes the BBC.
Using a Russian phone number, the BBC made several calls to recruitment centers saying they were interested in their brother’s options. From Koenigsberg in the west to Krasnodar in the south, no one believed that the group was disbanded. The person in charge in Murmansk confirmed that applications are still being accepted to join the Wagnerites in Ukraine.
The Wagner Group’s long list of admission points is mainly related to martial arts schools, boxing clubs, and similar institutions. People who answered the calls emphasized that
the contract is with the mercenary organization, not the Russian Defense Ministry.
A man at the Sparta sports club in Volgograd emphasized: “It’s absolutely nothing to do with the Defense Ministry. Nothing has stopped, we’re still recruiting.”
The demand for mercenaries to obey the Defense Ministry was the basis of the rebellion on the 24th of June. The brief uprising was one of Putin’s biggest challenges in his more than 20 years in power, despite the Kremlin’s efforts to make everything look simple and under control. However, in a country where others spend years in prison simply for speaking out against the government, the case against Yevgeny Prigozhin and his group is closed. Prigozhin was allowed to go into exile in Belarus.
The mercenary group that went to the capital and shot down the helicopters and the plane is still not disbanded. A woman at the reception center in Krasnodar was blunt:
“We are working. If something had changed, they’d have told us. But there’s nothing.”
The salary of a fighter of the Wagner group is still more than two thousand euros per month, which is quite generous for Russia, and the contract must be concluded within six months. On Thursday, the 29th of June, the Chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian Parliament stated that nothing has changed regarding the deadline for the Wagnerians to come under the control of the Ministry of Defense. Andrei Kartapolov referred to the rebellion as treason and said: “The Defense Ministry said all groups…must sign contracts, and they all began doing that. Everyone except Mr. Prigozhin. He was informed that Wagner would not participate in the Special Military Operation. It also would get no financing or material resources.“
Putin, who has denied any connection with the Wagner Group for years, suddenly overturned his coat on the 24th of June and, apparently trying to downplay Prigozhin’s performance, announced that the Wagnerites are completely dependent on Russian government funding. In that case, the existence of the Wagner group is now uncertain. Also, Putin has signed an order stating that from now on
only the Defense Ministry can recruit prisoners, which was previously an important source for the Wagnerites.
Meanwhile, the recruitment of new Wagnerites outside the prisons continues.
After the coup, the leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, announced that he would gladly accept mercenaries in Belarus and allow them to train the regular army.
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