Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik via Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday held a meeting with a top former commander of Wagner Group to discuss how to use “volunteer units” in Ukraine, with a separate intelligence report claiming that “hundreds” of the organization’s fighters had likely started to redeploy to the battlefield.
The Kremlin meeting on Thursday between Putin and Andrei Troshev—the Wagner commander known as “gray hair”—comes a month after the plane crash death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner founder who led a failed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in June. The meeting appeared to be an attempt to highlight that the Kremlin is now in control of the organization which once posed the most serious challenge to Putin’s authority during his rule of Russia.
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who has recently traveled to several countries where Wagner has operated, also attended the meeting, parts of which were shown on Russian state television. The broadcast seemingly indicated that the remnants of Wagner will be under the control of Yevkurov and Troshev—and more importantly, the Kremlin itself.