Not just Wagner anymore. The bowed head with which Evgheny Prigozhin responded to the attack on his St. Petersburg restaurant that claimed the life of blogger Z Maksim Fomin coincides with the spread of news on various channels about new private battalions at the front in Ukraine .
Defense Ministry sources reveal the news of the creation of the Ural Battalion, funded by copper magnate Igor Altushkin, whose fortune is estimated at $3.4 billion (Forbes), and “other private individuals” whose identities are not given. Little is known about the battalion either, except that it fought near Kreminna in February.
Altuskin, whose recent efforts to recruit men into prisons were stopped by the “veteran” Prigozhin, began his career as a scrap metal scavenger and eventually founded the Russian Copper Company in Yekaterinburg in 2004, now the third largest copper producer in Russia, with mines and plants in Russia and Kazakhstan.
The company lost an enormous amount of money last year due to the industry crisis triggered by the sanctions. Much like the families of many other members of the Russian establishment, the wife and at least one of the children hold British passports. In London he owns a £17million ($21million) townhouse formerly owned by Madonna.
He has been defined as “the orthodox billionaire” for financing the construction or restoration of churches in the Sverdlovsk region and Chechnya. He hosted Patriarch Kirill on his private plane to Yekaterinburg and is considered close to the Kremlin, particularly after donating funds to the Alexander III monument unveiled by Putin in Crimea in 2017.
The Moscow Times news site, which broke the news about the battalion today, points out that tens of thousands of Russians are fighting as volunteers in the ranks of private units organized by local authorities, Cossack groups and the so-called “special fighter reserve”. , some of which were funded by another pro-Orthodox tycoon, Konstantin Malofeev, patron of the ideologue Dugin, father of Darya, who was killed in an attack last August.
Among other things, the British Ministry of Defense, in its usual intelligence analysis of the situation in Ukraine, foresaw that alternatives to Wagner would be sponsored and developed in Russia. “It is a development taking place in the context of the high-profile feud between the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group. Russia’s military leaders are likely to want a replacement private military company over which they have more control. However, none of those currently known come close to the size or power of Wagner.”
The director of the Federal Agency of the Commonwealth of Independent States and Russians Abroad Rossotrudnichestvo, which controls the centers of Russian culture in the world, Evgheny Primakov, nephew of the former prime minister and foreign minister homonymous, used this zeal in recent days, announced the creation of the private military company to protect centers in “enemy” countries, including Italy, which hosts the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Piazza Cairoli in Rome.
“Rossotrudnichestvo is forced to respond to the deteriorating situation, since our offices are more and more often operating in hostile countries, while the hysterical accusations against us will continue – he explained on Telegram – We therefore have nothing to lose, realizing that we somehow need to ensure the safety of Russian homes and the rights of our compatriots, we decided To our private security company in one of the foreign jurisdictions. According to Primakov, “the presence of well-armed, robust and motivated people” in the offices will make the work that the agency does on a humanitarian and cultural level “more visible”. The director of Rossotrudnichestvo, founded in 2008 by then-President Dmitry Medvedev, then mentioned the two possible names for the company: Puskinisty, meaning the followers of the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin, or Whiskers, again alluding to Pushkin, because the poet had sideburns.