Recruiters and propagandists working for Russia's Wagner Group have become the main conduit for organizing sabotage carried out by the Kremlin across Europe, according to European intelligence officials.
The mercenary group's status was called into question after a failed uprising against the Russian military leadership in June 2023 and the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin.
However, people who previously recruited young men from Russian provinces to fight in Ukraine are now being redirected to recruiting economically disadvantaged Europeans to carry out violent actions on the territory of NATO countries, the Financial Times writes.
Russia's GRU military intelligence service "uses the personnel at its disposal," said one Western intelligence official, referring to the Wagner network.
The GRU and the domestic intelligence agency FSB have become extremely active in efforts to recruit “expendable” agents in Europe to sow chaos, the FT reports.
The British newspaper writes that the Kremlin has expanded a campaign of destabilization and sabotage across Europe over the past two years, aiming to weaken Western powers' resolve to support Ukraine and foment social unrest. It adds that Russian intelligence chiefs, faced with a significantly weakened presence of covert operatives in Europe following a wave of diplomatic expulsions from EU capitals, are increasingly turning to intermediaries to do business on their behalf.
For the GRU, the Wagner network has proven to be a particularly effective, if crude, instrument for doing so, senior European intelligence officials told the FT.
The agents, at the behest of Wagner operatives, were given tasks ranging from setting fires to politicians' cars and aid warehouses for Ukraine, to posing as Nazi propagandists.
Those who are recruited most often do so for money, and they are often marginalized individuals, sometimes without a clear goal or direction in life, writes the FT.
Wagner had a pre-built network of propagandists and recruiters who “speak their language,” said one European official.
Russian intelligence services typically try to place at least two intermediaries between themselves and the agents carrying out tasks on their behalf, the same official said. "They always want some degree of ability to deny everything."
The FSB, meanwhile, has largely relied on criminal and diaspora networks with which it has developed ties in Russia's "near abroad," but these have proven less effective in mass recruitment, the newspaper's sources added.
Wagner and his supporters already had significant online content on social media channels aimed at Russian audiences, which was then relatively easily redirected into a broader, internationally oriented campaign.
Russian intelligence services usually try to place at least two intermediaries between themselves and the agents carrying out tasks on their behalf. They always want some degree of deniability.
The Telegram channels the group used were surprisingly professionally run and skillful in the way they presented themselves, another European official said. “They know their audience,” he added.
Prigozhin was also responsible for running the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, Russia's most notorious "troll factory," which began targeting Western audiences with disinformation more than a decade ago.
The FT recalls that the role of the Wagner network in the Russian sabotage campaign has been under scrutiny from European intelligence and security services since the beginning. It adds that social media accounts controlled by Wagner were used to recruit a group of British citizens in late 2023.
Dylan Earl, a 21-year-old petty criminal, was recruited through social media by Wagner. In March 2024, after recruiting four other young men, he set fire to a warehouse in east London. He was convicted last year and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
"The hidden hand of the internet brought results, as anonymous recruiters, operating through internet chat rooms, most often on encrypted platforms, found young men in the United Kingdom willing to undergo a kind of radicalization and betray their country for what seemed like easy money," said Judge Čima-Grab in her sentencing remarks.
After that attack, European services gradually built up a picture of a much more extensive network of Wagner's "expendable" operatives across Europe, according to the FT.
The paper points out that security authorities have at least one advantage in this - what Russian intelligence chiefs gain in scale and cost by using intermediaries like Wagner to recruit amateur saboteurs, they lose in competence and secrecy. So far, more attacks have been thwarted than succeeded.
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