The mercenaries of the infamous Russian army who were killed

Evgeny Antipov was a mercenary for the Wagner Group, the notorious Russian private military group. Evgeny was killed near Homs, Syria, four years ago. About a month before he left, he had told his mother Svetlana that he was going on an unspecified three-month official trip. “I won’t have a phone with me,” he told her. “When I get back, I’ll call.” The call never came.

Evgeny's friends contacted Svetlana on the Russian-language social media platform VKontakte, telling her that her son had died.

Svetlana received the news of her son's death more than a month later. She was working in Poland. She says she doesn't remember what happened next or how she got back to Odessa and from there to Rostov to visit her son's grave. She was only allowed to stay there for 24 hours.

“If you want to maintain good relations with us, don’t ask us any questions,” she says she was told. If you ask questions, she was told, you won’t be able to cross the Russian border to visit her son’s grave.

Evgeny is one of 4,184 Wagner mercenaries that the SBU, Ukraine’s security service, and a research institute set up by a number of former senior SBU generals have identified. The Ukrainian Center for Analytics and Security, or UCAS, as the think tank is known, shared its data with News Lines, Estonia’s Delfi.ee and the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The collection of information provides the most comprehensive anatomy of Russia’s notorious military, built and paid for by the Kremlin-backed oligarch and hotel magnate Yevgeny Prigozhin. Known as “Putin’s chef,” Prigozhin has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for his role in the invasion of Ukraine and multiple instances of interference in U.S. elections.

Wagner mercenaries have fought on the side of separatists in eastern Ukraine, supported the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and warlord General Khalifa Haftar in Libya. They have also been deployed in Sudan, initially in support of the ousted dictator, Omar al-Bashir, and in Mozambique, where they launched a disastrous offensive against Islamist rebels.

On December 13, the EU sanctioned the Wagner Group as responsible for serious human rights abuses in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan and Mozambique, including torture, executions and extrajudicial killings.

Wagner is closely linked to and subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, a sanctions enforcement agency, has called Wagner a “proxies” for that ministry. The report also shows it is very close to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. One of the group’s training facilities is located in Russia’s Krasnodar region, near a heavily guarded GRU Spetsnaz (special forces) military base.

The group consists of more than four thousand people, coming from 15 different countries. According to the data provided, 2,708 are from Russia, 222 from Ukraine, 17 from Belarus, 11 from Kazakhstan, 9 from Moldova, 8 from Serbia, etc.

“Wagner is like a pancake,” says Vasyl Hrytsak, a former head of Ukraine’s SBU. “It consists of former and current military personnel, but also of money-hungry civilians and criminals who have been given a choice between prison or becoming a mercenary.”

The group had many more members during its existence, but hundreds of them were killed, like Evgeny Antipov. His epitaph today contains only the name and an emblem of the Wagner group.