Wagner group

At a small army field clinic outside Bakhmut, I watched as the body of a dead soldier was carried in. Two more soldiers followed, this time seriously injured – and this was what troops described as a ‘quiet day’. Ukraine doesn’t talk about its military deaths much and refuses to reveal any figures. There’s little in the way of victim culture here; the emphasis is on how brave its troops are, not how many have perished. Most people know someone who’s died in action, but treat the collective trauma as something to worry about when the war is over. In the meantime, there’s vodka. While Russia has used the conflict

It will be a matter of deep regret for Vladimir Putin that, in the wake of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated attempt to overthrow Russia’s military establishment, he has finally been forced to come clean about the Kremlin’s association with the Wagner Group. Deniability is a vital facet for a veteran spook like Putin. Even when Wagner’s band of mercenary cut-throats were spearheading the assault on the east Ukrainian city of Bakhmut earlier this year, the Russian leader rebutted claims of Prigozhin’s involvement. ‘He runs a restaurant business, it is his job – he is a restaurant keeper in St Petersburg,’ Putin told Austrian television. Putin’s challenge is to maintain Wagner’s global operations