Despite Wagner's rebellion, Russia still honors the mercenaries killed in Ukraine

The mayor's office in the southern Russian city of Volgograd announced on January 17 that part of a street in the city would be named in honor of Alexei Nagin, an ex-convict who had joined the notorious Wagner mercenary group. He was killed near the city of Bahmut, in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk in September 2022.

Despite Wagner's June 2023 rebellion against Russia's top military leadership and the mysterious death of the group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, municipalities across Russia are continuing to name public spaces in honor of mercenaries killed in Ukraine .

Prigozhin was killed two months after leading the rebellion, after the plane he was traveling in crashed.

However, it seems that the authorities are choosing their heroes more selectively than in the past and are increasingly forgetting their connections to Wagner. The aim, according to analysts, is to increase the ideological motivation to recruit more volunteers and to ensure that current mercenaries will not be forgotten.

"The glorification of mercenaries, whether by Wagner or other groups, is being separately supported by [pro-Kremlin] authorities and propaganda," said political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky. “This is because the Russian Army has essentially turned into a mercenary formation, either through contracts [with the Ministry of Defense] or various 'volunteer' formations. In essence, they are mercenaries."

"Right values ​​of life"

A few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Wagner began recruiting war convicts from Russian prisons, promising them remission of sentences if they served six months.

As a result, tens of thousands of prisoners, many of them serving long sentences for heinous crimes, were recruited. Of them, thousands were killed and thousands more returned to Russia as free men.

There has been outrage in many Russian cities over the official tributes paid to the slain, whom local residents fear as hooligans, troublemakers and criminals. Even the return of convicts, who were pardoned after serving a short time in Ukraine, has in many cases been accompanied by social tensions.

Nagin, unlike the others, had a less troubled past and had more military credentials. In 2014, he was sentenced to seven years' probation after stealing a car and forcing the car's owner to sign the car's sales documents under threat of violence. According to court records, the judge was lenient in his ruling because Nagin had already served military duties in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and Libya and had been awarded five military medals.

In Ukraine, he had been the commander of a Wagner unit. Before the full-scale invasion, Nagin had served in Moscow-instigated separatist conflicts in parts of eastern Ukraine, training those areas' fighters at a base in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian region of Crimea.

He was seriously wounded in May 2022, but returned to the front before he recovered. He was reportedly killed on September 21, 2022, at the age of 41. He was awarded the Hero of Russia order, as well as the highest military honor of the administrations installed by Russia in the occupied parts of the Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as the platinum star of the Wagner Group.

The funeral of Nagin, who was originally from Volgograd, was a major event in the region, with a service held at the Battle of Stalingrad museum under the iconic "Mother Earth Calls" statue. Prigozhin and the regional governor of Volgograd, Andrei Bocharov, attended the event, where it was announced that President Vladimir Putin had awarded him a posthumous Hero of Russia medal.

A classroom in a local school is also named in his honor and a commemorative plaque is placed at the school where he attended classes. Duma deputy from Volgograd, Andrei Gimbatov, has demanded that the school be officially named in Nagin's honor, promising to pay for the school's new nameplate himself.

"Undoubtedly, this will help to cultivate in the new generation, using the example of Alexei, love for the Motherland and instill in them the right values ​​of life," wrote Gimbatov in his letter to the municipal government.

"Citizen Diplomacy"

In the city's announcement about the naming of the street in honor of Nagin, the mayor of the city Vladimir Marchenko emphasized that the idea came "from a group of citizens of Volgograd". Denis Eliseyev, a former official in the Volgograd city administration who fled Russia after the invasion of Ukraine began, told Radio Free Europe that the claim may be true.

"It is possible that a group of wise citizens of Volgograd decided to rename their street, in the hope that they would benefit from public lighting, sidewalks and proper asphalting," he said. "After all, they will not be able to leave the snow without removing it or not collecting the garbage on a street named in honor of a Hero of Russia."

"I expect that within months other local residents, who live on unpaved roads, will demand that they be named in honor of the heroes of Russia," he added. "Let's call this 'citizen diplomacy'".

Maria Khudoyarova, an activist in the anti-war movement Dozor, said the practice of naming public spaces in honor of killed mercenaries is part of the normalization and legitimization of the occupation of Ukraine and is an important aspect of the Government's "overall propaganda algorithm". .

"Based on the posts on the pro-government Telegram channels... the authorities prefer to ignore the fact that he has committed theft," she said. "Some of them claim that he 'washed away his sins by serving the motherland'".

She pointed out that Nagini's name has been removed from the local court records.

"I think it is important to constantly remind people that these Putinist 'heroes' have committed crimes, many of them serious crimes," said Khudoyarova, adding that the future citizens of a democratic Russia would not hesitate to to reclaim these public spaces.

Retired army colonel Vitaly Votanovsky, who runs a Telegram channel focused on Krasnodar and keeps track of the number of Wagner mercenaries and Russian military personnel buried in the city, agreed with Khudoyarovan.

He noted that official attitudes toward Wagner have changed since the group's fighters, led by Prigozhin, staged a short-lived rebellion in the city of Rostov-on-Don in June 2023.

"I think this will continue as long as Putin is alive," he told Radio Free Europe.

"Then everything will be undone and no one will complain. "Earlier, there were panels showing the convicts who died in Krasnodar, but they were removed after the rebellion."

"In the first year of the war, before Prigozhin entered politics, the authorities did not distinguish between soldiers who have a contract with the Ministry of Defense and mercenaries," he added. "But when his group moved against the Government, they practically forgot all about" the mercenaries.

"At war for an idea"

In autumn 2023, a memorial plaque in the Stavorpol region honoring a Wagner mercenary killed in Ukraine was removed after local police accepted complaints that he had been convicted of the "horrific murder" of a police officer. .

Political analyst Sergei Zhavoronkov said the authorities have yet to create a coherent policy against Wagner's fighters.

"In general, the authorities are trying to follow a dualistic approach, like the Chinese authorities' approach to [Communist dictator Mao Zedong] that he was 'two-thirds right and one-third wrong,'" he said.

"The most scandalous murderers and rapists who have been pardoned by Putin will not be honored, but among today's 'heroes' there are people with a criminal past."

Analyst Preobrazhensky said that the authorities in Volgograd have selected Nagin because they want a patriotic example whose criminal past was not too terrible. The main objective is to motivate new volunteers.

"Volunteers go to fight for an idea more than for money," he said. /REL/