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Recruiters and propagandists who previously worked for Russia’s Wagner Group have emerged as a main conduit for Kremlin-organised sabotage attacks in Europe, according to western intelligence officials.
The fighter group’s status has been uncertain since a failed rebellion against the top brass of the Russian army in June 2023 prompted a clampdown and the death of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
But Wagner recruiters who specialised in persuading young men from Russia’s hinterland to fight in Ukraine have been given a new task — recruiting economically vulnerable Europeans to carry out violence on Nato soil, the officials said.
Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) “is using the talent it has got available to it”, said one western intelligence official, referring to the Wagner network.
The GRU and Russia’s domestic intelligence agency (FSB) have both become highly active in seeking to recruit “disposable” agents in Europe to sow chaos.
In the past two years, the Kremlin has expanded a campaign of disruption and sabotage across Europe aimed at weakening the resolve of western powers in their support for Ukraine and sowing social unrest.
Faced with a much depleted deployment of covert agents in Europe following rounds of diplomatic expulsions by EU capitals, however, Moscow’s spy chiefs have increasingly turned to proxies to do their bidding.
For the GRU, the Wagner network has proved a particularly effective — if crude — tool to do so, senior European intelligence officials have told the FT.
Agents have been tasked by Wagner operatives with everything from arson attacks against politicians’ cars and warehouses containing aid for Ukraine to posing as Nazi propagandists.
Typically those recruited do so for money and are often marginalised individuals, sometimes lacking purpose or direction.
Wagner had a ready-built network of propagandists and recruiters who “speak their language”, said one European official.
Russia’s intelligence agencies typically seek to put at least two “cut-out” layers between themselves and agents they want to do their bidding, the official said. “They want some degree of deniability always . . . And Wagner and the individuals that were part of it . . . have a long and close relationship working for the GRU in this way.”
The FSB has meanwhile tended to turn to criminal and diaspora networks it has cultivated ties to in Russia’s near abroad, but these have been less effective in recruiting en masse, they added.
Wagner and its supporters already had a significant online output in social media channels aimed at Russians, which has been parlayed with relative ease into a more internationally focused effort.
Telegram channels used by the group in particular have been surprisingly slick and adept in how they have pitched themselves, a second European official said. “They know their audience,” they said.
Prigozhin was also responsible for running the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency — the most widely known Russian “troll farm” — which began targeting western audiences with disinformation well over a decade ago.
The Wagner network’s role in Russia’s sabotage campaign has been under scrutiny by European intelligence and security agencies from the beginning. Wagner-run social media accounts were responsible for recruiting a group of Britons in late 2023, for example.
Dylan Earl, a 21-year-old petty criminal, was recruited by Wagner through social media. In March 2024, having himself in turn recruited four more young men, Earl burnt down a warehouse in East London. He was convicted last year and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
“The hidden hand of the internet delivered results because anonymous recruiter proxies operating through internet chat rooms, usually on encrypted platforms, found within the United Kingdom young men who were prepared to undergo a form of radicalisation and betray their country for what seemed easy money,” said Justice Cheema-Grubb in her sentencing remarks.
In the wake of that attack, European agencies have slowly been assembling a picture of a much more extensive network of Wagner “disposables” across Europe.
In doing so, security authorities have at least one advantage: what Russia’s spy chiefs gain in scale and cost by using proxies such as Wagner to recruit amateur saboteurs, they lose in competence and secrecy. So far, more attacks have been thwarted than have succeeded.