Wagner Group

The Wagner Group (Russian: Группа Вагнера, tr. Gruppa Vagnera), officially known as PMC Wagner[8] (Russian: ЧВК «Вагнер», tr. ChVK «Vagner»[62]) and as the Africa Corps (Russian: Африканский корпус, tr. Afrikanskiy korpus) in Africa,[63] is a Russian state-funded[64] private military company (PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia's president Vladimir Putin.[8][65] The Wagner Group has used infrastructure of the Russian Armed Forces.[66] 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.[66][67] The group emerged during the Donbas War in Ukraine, where it helped pro-Russian forces from 2014 to 2015.[8] Wagner played a significant role in the subsequent full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine,[68] for which it recruited Russian prison inmates for frontline combat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group