The Wagner Group (Russian: Группа Вагнера, romanized: Gruppa Vagnera), officially known as PMC Wagner (ЧВК «Вагнер», ChVK "Vagner"), is a Russian state-funded private military company (PMC) that was controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin, and since then by Pavel Prigozhin. The Wagner Group has used infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces. Evidence suggests that Wagner has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing it to have plausible deniability for military operations abroad, and hiding the true casualties of Russia's foreign interventions.
The group emerged during the war in Donbas, where it helped Russian separatist forces in Ukraine from 2014 to 2015. Wagner played a significant role in the later full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, for which it recruited Russian prison inmates for frontline combat. By the end of 2022, its strength in Ukraine had grown from 1,000 to between 20,000 and 50,000. It was reportedly Russia's main assault force in the Battle of Bakhmut. Wagner has also supported regimes friendly with Russia, including in the civil wars in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali. In Africa, it has offered regimes security in exchange for the transfer of diamond- and gold-mining contracts to Russian companies. Some Wagner members, including its alleged co-founder Dmitry Utkin, have been linked to the far-right, and the unit has been accused of war crimes including murder, torture, rape and robbery of civilians, as well as torturing and killing accused deserters.
