Category: The News And Times – thenewsandtimes.com

The demise of Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin and the diminishing role of mercenaries in Ukraine has done little to assuage fears inside the North Caucasus of the return of thousands of mercenaries formerly convicted of robbery, rape, and murder.

In April, a 38-year-old resident of Tskhinvali (Tskhinval), South Ossetia, was stabbed to death in the streets.

Soslan Valiyev, known locally as ‘Tsugri’, was known to have developmental disabilities and was generally loved by his community, with current President Alan Gagloyev and former president Eduard Kokoity condemning his murder and offering their condolences to his family.

His killer, Giorgey Siukayev, was arrested the following day. Siukayev had already served time for murder in 2014 after shooting dead a soldier in Donetsk. He had barely spent a few weeks in prison before he was set free, after agreeing to serve in Wagner, a Russian state-backed private military company founded by the late Yevgeniy Prigozhin.

He has since gone by the callsign ‘Arbalet’ and had been stationed in Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, taking part in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Siukayev was among thousands of Wagner mercenaries to be given freedom in exchange for fighting in Ukraine. Many mercenaries were convicted of murder, rape, and other grave crimes, stirring concerns about their return to civilian life once the fighting dies out or their contracts expire.

In January, Prigozhin announced that the ‘first wave’ of formerly convicted Wagner mercenaries had completed their military service. Shortly after, many of them were decorated by President Vladimir Putin.

Prigozhin claimed in February that his group had stopped recruiting prisoners and later announced that 32,000 former convicts had fulfilled their contractual obligations with Wagner in June.

In a separate interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a pro-Kremlin political strategist, Prigozhin claimed that a total of 50,000 convicts had joined Wagner’s ranks, about 20% of whom had died fighting in Ukraine. 

Before this year, Russia’s penitentiary service, the Interior Ministry, and the General Prosecutor’s Office regularly published statistics about crimes committed, including by former Wagner members. The end of this has forced journalists to find different sources or to rely on information issued by the few remaining non-profit organisations in Russia.

Wife killer, drug addict, war hero

In another high-profile case in the Caucasus, the Wagner recruited a former North Ossetian police officer, Vadim Tekhov, from a penal colony. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the brutal murder of his ex-wife, violating restraining orders, and taking part in a mass brawl with Ingush people in North Ossetia.

CCTV footage shows Tekhov stabbing his ex-wife, Regina Gagiyeva, 21 times. She succumbed to her wounds six days later, having not regained consciousness. 

Thousands of people have attended Regina Gagiyeva’s funeral procession.

Thousands of North Ossetians took part in her funeral procession as local feminist activists condemned the authorities for not guaranteeing her safety. Gagiyeva had reportedly sought protection from the police since November 2017, and Tekhov, who was wearing an electronic tracker when he attacked her, was supposed to be under house arrest.

Fighting in Ukraine did not appear to rehabilitate Tekhov; as soon as his contract with Wagner ended, he was caught trafficking drugs in Ukraine. He dodged a prison sentence again by striking up another deal with Prigozhin’s forces.

Once his second contract expired, Tekhov returned to his home in downtown Vladikavkaz, the capital of North Ossetia. His ex-wives’ relatives fear retribution against them for having pushed for his incarceration.

‘We can’t get an answer from the prison warden where Tekhov was held’, Roksana Gagiyeva, Regina’s sister, tells OC Media. ‘How was he released?’ 

‘He is a particularly dangerous criminal, a repeat offender’, she added. 

Tekhov’s reception in Vladikavkaz after his return from Ukraine indicates concerns people feel about Wagner’s recruitment and subsequent release of dangerous convicts back to their communities.

Crimes committed by former Wagner members throughout Russia have been put under scrutiny, says North Ossetian journalist Rooslán Totrov, who refers to convict-turned-mercenaries as ‘loose cannons’.

‘These are absolutely unguided shells that are fired from the fiery furnace into as yet peaceful Russian cities’, Totrov tells OC Media. ‘These people will suffer from PTSD, which is not surprising, and, among other things, they have a record of especially grave crimes’.

Back to their old ways

Convicts released from their Wagner contracts have been known to have committed various crimes in Russia; these range from robbery to extortion, blackmail to assassination attempts, and murder.

In the Caucasus in late April, Kirill Chubko and Tatyana Mostyko, both 18 years old, disappeared in Krasnodar Krai. A search team of 500 volunteers set out to search for them after news of their disappearance, eventually finding their bodies a few days later.

The police apprehended Demyan Kevorkian, a 31-year-old former convict who had served a stint in Ukraine with the Wagner Group, on suspicion of their murder.

Many in Krasnodar Krai were left wondering how Kevorkian had his 18-year sentence commuted, despite serving time for extortion, robbery, car theft, and murder.

In Volgograd, Arsen Melkonyan, sentenced to 11 years in prison for beating a person to death in 2020, was given a new lease on life for serving with Wagner. He was sentenced to prison yet again on his return to Volgograd for threatening to murder his ex-wife and his daughter.

While in May, Sergei, a 42-year-old from Novosibirsk, was charged with raping two girls aged 10 and 12, mere days after his contract with Wagner expired.

Before his death, Prigozhin confirmed that the man had served in his private military company, dismissing the gravity of his allegedly committed crime.

‘Well, guys, these rapists, there are just immense numbers of them, rapes — they just happen 20–50 a day’, Prigozhin said at the time.

Prigozhin had always defended former Wagner members in the face of legal scrutiny, claiming that convicts employed by his group had only committed a total of 83 crimes as of June 2023.

‘[That is] 80 times lower than crimes committed by those released from prison for a similar period without a contract with the Wagner Group’, said Prigozhin.

With no open access to statistics about crimes committed by former Wagner members, some in Russia remain sceptical about the likelihood that former convicts who had fought on the frontlines would return to cause trouble in Russia.

But Yana Sherova-Ignatiyeva, a trauma psychologist based in Saint Petersburg, says that while war can contribute to increased violence in societies, especially if combatants do not seek psychological support after deployment, it is too early to tell how this could affect Russia.

‘We cannot know whether there is a difference in the number of crimes committed among convicts who were at war and those who simply served their time’, Sherova-Ignatiyeva tells OC Media.

‘The existence of a problem has to be recognised somehow, and there is no demand for it’, she tells OC Media. ‘This is not the problem of each combatant, but the problem of the society around them’.

‘There is no need for demonisation’, says Sherova-Ignatiyeva. ‘We all realise that horror happens and horror will happen. It never stays in a box; it spills out. War fundamentally changes society.’

‘Washing away their sins with blood’

With Prigozhin’s death, and his Wagner group appearing to have been neutralised, fears over the return of convicts to society have not disappeared. 

Prigozhin had already announced earlier this year that Wagner had stopped recruitment drives in Russian prisons. At the same time, reports indicate that most convicts who had served with Wagner had already fulfilled their contracts or were dismissed following July’s mutiny.

However, it appears that Moscow is unwilling to let go of Prigozhin’s legacy, with the State Duma passing a bill that would allow convicts to clear their criminal records in exchange for directly serving in the Russian Armed Forces.

Since the start of the war, there have been reports that ethnic and religious minorities in Russia — including in the North Caucasus — are being drafted disproportionately compared to those from predominantly ethnic-Russian regions.

For North Ossetian journalist Rooslán Totrov the return of convicts from the front is a real concern.

He says that try as they might, former convicts serving in Ukraine cannot ‘wash away their sins with blood’.

‘I do not believe that any “heroic” deeds in war, which involves the unjust invasion of someone else’s land, write off previous crimes’, he says.

 For ease of reading, we choose not to use qualifiers such as ‘de facto’, ‘unrecognised’, or ‘partially recognised’ when discussing institutions or political positions within Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia. This does not imply a position on their status.

By Robbie Gramer 

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Robbie here, flying solo as Jack takes some well-deserved time off. Happy Thursday! We’ve got news on lots of stuff today, including what the Pentagon knows about UFOs, so keep on scrolling.

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Putin loses ground in the South Caucasus, a blockade on Pentagon nominees in Congress continues, Russia gets caught recruiting mercenaries in Cuba for the war in Ukraine, and more.

There’s a geopolitical shift afoot in the South Caucasus that has U.S. officials (quietly) grinning from ear to ear and their rivals in Moscow fuming.

Armenia is having second thoughts about its longtime partnership with Russia and is beginning to shift in not-so-subtle ways toward the West, signaling an embarrassing setback for the Kremlin in the strategic region.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica this week that his country’s reliance on Russia wasn’t paying off, particularly as Moscow struggles to supply its own military, let alone partnering militaries. “Dependence on just one partner in security matters is a strategic mistake,” he said.

Armenia followed up by announcing its first-ever tranche of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, which Pashinyan’s wife personally handed over during a visit to Kyiv this week.

Then, just to add some salt to the Kremlin’s wounds, Armenia announced a new joint military exercise with the United States, dubbed “Eagle Partner 2023,” to be held in the coming weeks.

Hell hath no fury like a partner scorned. The volte-face comes after mounting frustration in Armenia that Russia has done too little to address the crisis between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave at the heart of a decades-old dispute between the two countries. (Russia deployed “peacekeeping troops” to the region after a deadly conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020.)

But Armenia’s decision also reflects mounting unease in the country over the costs of maintaining its close ties to Russia after its deadly war in Ukraine, four U.S. officials and regional analysts told SitRep.

And that, in turn, has led to an intriguing geopolitical opportunity for Washington and its allies to make inroads in a country that Russia considered one of its last reliable partners, in a region Russia claims to be its own strategically important backyard. (As an interesting sidebar for Washington insiders, the former top U.S. envoy for Ukraine from 2020 to 2022, Kristina Kvien, is now ambassador to Armenia, and the current U.S. ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy, was the previous ambassador to Armenia.)

The taming of the Russian shrew. Armenia, a longtime partner of Moscow’s, has been careful not to openly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but has distanced itself from the war and become increasingly wary of the costs of staying in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s orbit.

For years, Armenia prioritized its relationship with Russia, mainly because it was the only game in town for security on Nagorno-Karabakh. But that partnership with Moscow turned out to be a paper tiger during the costly 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan war. Armenia lost that war badly, and the feeling in Yerevan was that Moscow didn’t lift a finger to help until it brokered a costly cease-fire that heavily favored Azerbaijan’s territorial gains.

Azerbaijan gained control of more territory adjacent to the Nagorno-Karabakh region and has launched a new concerted campaign to wrest back the disputed territory from Armenia.

Azerbaijan has in recent months tightened the screws on Nagorno-Karabakh with a full-scale blockade that has pushed the small Armenian enclave into a humanitarian crisis and to the brink of famine. Armenian officials have publicly accused Russian peacekeepers of abetting, or at the least not doing enough to halt, the Azerbaijani blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenia’s government isn’t being very subtle with how it feels about Russia now.

A big yikes moment for the Kremlin’s foreign policy. It’s too early to tell whether this represents a permanent shift away from Russia by Armenia, or a temporary one serving as a shot across the bow to Moscow to get its act together.

But either way, Armenia’s diplomatic moves constitute an embarrassing setback for Putin, who is running very short on friends these days after his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022 unleashed a campaign by Western powers to isolate Moscow on the world stage.

“Of course, such news causes concern, especially in the current situation,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in response to the news of the Armenian-U.S. military exercises.

The South Caucasus has immense strategic and symbolic value for Moscow, and limiting the West’s influence there remains a key priority for the Kremlin. (Recall that Russia launched an invasion of Georgia in 2008 as the country pivoted toward the West and NATO, in grim foreshadowing for the war to come in Ukraine.)

In your face. “There is no way to interpret this in any other way but [an] ‘in your face’ signal to Russia,” said Volodymyr Dubovyk, director of the Center for International Studies at Odesa Mechnikov National University in Ukraine.

Armenia’s turn against Russia is an important symbolic win for Ukraine, too, even if the amount of aid it can provide Ukraine is limited, Dubovyk said.

“We do not expect Armenia to take our side openly vis-à-vis Russia,” he said. “But the very fact that one of the most loyal allies of Moscow in the entire post-Soviet space is drifting away is something that is pleasing Kyiv,” he added. “This illustrates how Russia’s invasion backfired terribly. This is important for Ukraine: that Russia’s isolation strengthens.”

The Netherlands has a new top diplomat, as Hanke Bruins Slot becomes the new foreign minister. (Notably, Bruins Slot is a former artillery officer who was previously deployed to Afghanistan as commander of a self-propelled howitzer platoon before she entered politics.)

Former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin has joined the Tony Blair Institute, an international nonprofit group, as a strategic advisor. (But she hasn’t ruled out her own return to politics.)

Defense expert Dara Massicot is leaving the Rand Corporation to join the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank as a senior fellow on Russia and Eurasia.

Oana Lungescu, the former longtime NATO spokesperson, has joined the Royal United Services Institute think tank as a distinguished fellow.

And last but not least, a kudos to ace CNN reporter Alex Marquardt, who was named CNN’s chief national security correspondent this week.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Tuberville vs. the Pentagon. Top Pentagon officials have launched a new PR salvo condemning Republican Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville over his monthslong blockade of senior military nominations and promotions. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro accused Tuberville of “aiding and abetting” communists in an interview as the impasse drags on. (Del Toro is a Cuban-born Navy veteran.)

Tuberville has held up an estimated 300-plus military nominations that require Senate confirmation over a dispute with the Biden administration on its policy of providing leave and a travel allowance for service members seeking abortions and other reproductive health services. He says he won’t lift the blockade until the Biden administration changes its policy.

The standoff has frozen a whole chain of military promotions, leaving officers and their families in limbo and leaving three U.S. military service branches without confirmed chiefs for the first time in U.S. history.

“This has gone on too long,” Mark Esper, Trump’s former defense secretary, said on Twitter. “It politicizes uniformed officers & hurts readiness. Both sides are guilty. [Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer should be clearing noms individually while GOP senators whip votes to end the bloc hold.”

Aliens? For anyone interested in what the U.S. military knows about UFOs (let’s face it, who isn’t?), we’ve got good news for you. The Pentagon just unveiled its new website dedicated to publicly disclosing what it can about unidentified flying objects, following some concerted lobbying by Congress.

Of course, it’s the Pentagon, so it has to make something that cool sound mind-numbingly dull with unnecessary acronyms. So, without further ado, here is the website for the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, whose mission is: “Minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas.” Yawn. But still. UFOs.

Caught in the act. Speaking of Russia alienating friends, let’s move on to Cuba. The Cuban government, another important ally of Moscow’s, has issued a rare statement accusing a “human trafficking ring” that just so happens to involve Russian military officials of secretly trying to recruit Cuban mercenaries to fight in Ukraine. The Intercept obtained hacked documents from a Russian military officer detailing how the recruiting campaign worked, from processing passport documents to the contracts and payments. The hacked Russian officer, Maj. Anton Valentinovich Perevozchikov, did not deny his role in recruiting the Cubans, as the Intercept reports: “He instead sent an expletive-laced reply to the Intercept denouncing NATO and declaring, ‘Russia will win.’”

Niger’s security officers stand guard as demonstrators stand outside an airbase to demand the departure of the French military from Niger after a coup ousted its president in Niamey on Sept. 3.

Niger’s security officers stand guard as demonstrators stand outside an air base to demand the departure of the French military from Niger after a coup ousted its president in Niamey on Sept. 3. AFP via Getty Images

Sept. 9-10: India hosts the Group of 20 summit, with U.S. President Joe Biden in attendance. (Chinese President Xi Jinping will be a no-show.)

Sept. 10: Biden visits Vietnam to roll out a new strategic partnership with the country.

Sept. 11: The 54th session of the U.N. Human Rights Council begins.

“When I was a student, my best hangover food was actually to go to McDonald’s.”

—Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, informing U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken of his hangover cures as the two diplomats shared a side of fries in Kyiv during Blinken’s visit to Ukraine this week.

Classic Florida man. Via USA Today: “Florida man arrested while attempting to run across Atlantic Ocean in giant hamster wheel.”

Actor Danny Masterson was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison Thursday after a jury convicted him earlier this year of raping two women 20 years ago, CBS Los Angeles reports. Prosecutors in Los Angeles said the rapes occurred in 2003 while Masterson, now 47, was starring in the hit sitcom “That ’70s Show.”

Masterson was convicted of raping a 28-year-old woman in April 2003 and a 23-year-old woman later that year, according to prosecutors. Both incidents happened at Masterson’s Hollywood Hills home.

The jury didn’t reach a unanimous decision on a third count that alleged Masterson also raped a longtime girlfriend. Deliberations lasted for more than six days before Masterson was convicted on the two other counts at the end of May.

Actor Danny Masterson arrives at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles on May 31, 2023. Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said the three women were brave for coming forward.

“Their courage and strength have been an inspiration to us all,” Gascón said in a statement after Masterson was convicted. “While we are disappointed that the jury did not convict on all counts, we respect their decision.”

Late last year, Superior Court Judge Charlaine Olmedo declared a mistrial after a different jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict on any charges. 

In this year’s trial, Masterson didn’t testify, and his lawyers didn’t call any witnesses. Masterson’s attorneys said what happened between him and the women was consensual.

Masterson and his three accusers were all members of the Church of Scientology at the time of the incidents. The women testified that they reported Masterson to Scientology officials but were discouraged from going to the police and feared being excommunicated. The church denied blocking anyone from cooperating with authorities.

“I think the jury believed that, they believed the narrative that the Church of Scientology and its members would have retaliated against them if they had reported this,” CBS News legal contributor Jessica Levinson said following Masterson’s conviction. “And that’s why they waited, and that’s why they interacted with Danny Masterson in different ways and continued to interact with him.”

More

First published on September 7, 2023 / 2:44 PM

© 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Police trying to ‘stress’ escaped Pennsylvania killer to give up