The Wagner Group is a Russian private military company and paramilitary group which was founded in 2014 by Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and former GRU Spetsnaz Lieutenant-Colonel Dmitry Utkin (callsign "Wagner"). Utkin was a neo-Nazi and a neopagan who supported the propagation of Slavic paganism among his group's ranks, and it came to have 1,000 members in early 2016, 5,000 by August 2017, and 6,000 by December 2017.
Most of the group's members were Russian Army veterans aged between 35 and 55, and they were paid between 80,000₽ and 250,000₽ a month. The Wagner Group trained its members at a Ministry of Defense facility in Molkino, Krasnodar Krai, and its members were banned from social media, communication device, or Internet usage, surrendered their passports in exchange for nameless and numbered dog tags, and paid $1,100 a month during their training.
By 2017, 95% of Wagner Group was Russian, and their ranks also included Ukrainians, Serbians, Armenians, Kazakhs, and Moldovans. While the group presented itself as a private military company, it answered to the Ministry of Defense and was connected to President Vladimir Putin through its chief financial backer, Prigozhin, who was nicknamed "Putin's Chef" for running Putin's catering.
The Wagner Group's mercenaries fought with distinction during the Syrian Civil War and the Donbass War, and, from 2017 to 2019, the group's mercenaries were also deployed to Sudan, the Central African Republic (where its strength reached 1,400 in May 2016), Madagascar, Libya (where 100 mercenaries were deployed to aid Khalifa Haftar's forces), and Mozambique (where 160 mercenaries fought in the Insurgency in Cabo Delgado). Wagner Group played a major role in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, during which it hired ex-soldiers and ex-policemen, offered freedom to prisoners in exchange for service (using them as their "forlorn hope" units in human wave attacks), and even recruited bodybuilders into their ranks. Wagner suffered heavy losses during the Battle of Bakhmut, which bled the group dry of men and ammunition; Prigozhin became a fierce critic of the Russian military establishment for its inadequate support of his group, which had been used as Putin's shock troops.