Mercenaries Hurt in U.S. Syria Strikes Are Treated at Russian Defense Hospitals

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-14/kremlin-stays-aloof-as-army-treats-wounded-in-u-s-syria-strike

February 14, 2018

Mercenaries said to be taken to Russian military hospitals

Russia denies link to fighters who struck U.S.-backed forces

Even as the Kremlin denies any official link to them, scores of Russian mercenaries wounded in U.S. strikes in Syria are being treated at Defense Ministry hospitals.

The wounded were brought to military hospitals in Moscow and St. Petersburg, according to two people in contact with them, after more than 200 fighters died in last week’s failed assault on a base held by U.S.-backed forces in Syria’s eastern Deir Ezzor region. The death toll’s rising as some of the wounded succumb to their injuries, according to one of the people.

Russia’s denied any official involvement. There’s no “specific detailed information” on what happened and while there may be Russian citizens in Syria, “they don’t belong to the Russian armed forces,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call Wednesday.

The incident shines a light on a little-known weapon in the Kremlin’s hybrid-war arsenal. Mercenaries, who’ve been active in the conflicts in eastern Ukraine and Syria, allow Russia to deny official involvement in operations when things go wrong. Fighters involved in the Feb. 7 assault in Syria were linked to Wagner, two people familiar with the matter said, a shadowy private military contractor which has a training camp at a commando base in southern Russia.

The U.S. Treasury named Dmitry Utkin as Wagner’s leader last June as it sanctioned him for sending fighters to eastern Ukraine. Utkin was photographed next to President Vladimir Putin at a Kremlin reception in late 2016, held to honor him and others for their service to Russia, for which they have received state awards, according to Peskov.

‘Putin’s Cook’

Wagner is made up of detachments that may be controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman who’s been dubbed “Putin’s Cook” because his company provides catering services to the Kremlin, according to the Fontanka news service. Prigozhin, who’s denied any links to Wagner, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2016, which said he has “extensive business dealings” with the Russian Defense Ministry.

In what may be the deadliest clash between citizens of the former Cold War foes, the Deir Ezzor attack involved hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian mercenaries, who were fighting for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, according to the two Russians. The fighters had no air cover or mobile air defense to protect them during the fighting, they said.

A U.S. official put the death toll at 100, with 200 to 300 injured, but was unable to say how many were Russian. Assad may have hired Wagner to recapture and guard Syrian energy assets in return for lucrative oil concessions, according to Russian media reports.

Artillery, Tanks

Around 600 fighters with artillery and tanks, most Russian-speakers, took part in the attempt to storm the base, according to one of the people familiar with the matter. They counted on the U.S. having too little time to target them without risking casualties among its mainly Kurdish allies, but strikes began when only half the force had made it to the base, Kommersant newspaper reported, citing a former comrade of the mercenaries.

Russia’s military has said it had nothing to do with the attack and the U.S. accepted the claim.

“The Russians may have allowed the attack to take place simply to make it clear to Assad that you can’t do things without coordination with Moscow,” said Yury Barmin, a Middle East analyst at the Russian International Affairs Council, a research group set up by the Kremlin.

Military Hotline

Two Trump administration officials said the U.S used a military hotline to communicate with the Russian side to warn that it was about to launch air strikes. The Russians later called their U.S. counterparts to ask if the strikes had ended so that the attacking force could recover the dead and wounded, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Wagner’s troops in Syria, which have numbered up to 2,000, took part in fighting to reclaim the ancient city of Palmyra in 2016 and 2017. It’s suffered substantial casualties, say activists who track the war.

The use of mercenaries, which remains illegal in Russia despite some talk of regulating it, allows Russia to avoid reporting casualties, according to Mark Galeotti, a senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations in Prague. Officially, 44 Russian servicemen have died in Syria, including the pilot of a warplane shot down this month by militants.

“Of course it’s bad when Russians die from American weapons and we can’t say it will have a good impact on our relations,” said Vitaly Naumkin, a senior adviser to the Russian government on Syria. “We’re dealing with an unusual situation,” though it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion, he said.

By Henry Meyer and Stepan Kravchenko

— with assistance by Ilya Arkhipov and Nick Wadhams

US strike in Syria kills Russian fighters in first such clash

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/13/us-strike-syria-kills-russian-fighters-first-clash

13 February 2018

A US air and artillery strike has killed Russian combatants in the first lethal violence in Syria between the two nuclear powers, according to sources on both sides.

The battle, which was briefly alluded to in a US-led coalition statement last week, took place in the oil-rich Deir Ezzor province in eastern Syria.

On 7 February, a large force loyal to Bashar al-Assad and supported by tanks and artillery advanced and fired at a Syrian Democratic Forces base manned by Kurdish troops and American military advisors, a US military spokesman said in a statement to Bloomberg on Tuesday.

The United States, which was communicating with the Russian side during the clash, drove the attackers back with aircraft and artillery fire, suffering no fatalities, the spokesman said.

On 10 February, a US drone destroyed an advancing Russian-made T-72 tank from the “same hostile force,” the US military said on Tuesday.

While reports have varied widely, claiming anywhere from a handful to more than a hundred Russians were killed and describing them alternately as military troops or private contractors, the 7 February clash nonetheless appears to have been the deadliest between US and Russian citizens since the Cold War.

On Monday, the Russia-based independent research group Conflict Intelligence Team published the names of four Russians who had been killed by the US strike. It said the men were mercenaries from the Wagner group, a highly secretive private military company whose alleged commander was photographed with Vladimir Putin in 2016.

Friends and relatives confirmed to RBC newspaper that the men had been killed in Syria on 7 February. Conflict Intelligence Team told The Telegraph on Tuesday that three other Russians were also killed in the attack, which it said was the only time Russians had been killed by the Western coalition.

The independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that 13 Russians had been killed and 15 wounded in the strike. It said Wagner troops had been operating with a special forces unit known as the “ISIS Hunters”.

Igor Strelkov, a nationalist with links to Russian intelligence who commanded Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said 100 Wagner employees had died in the strike.

Bloomberg quoted Russian sources as saying that 200 professional soldiers, most of them Russian, were killed, while an American official told the publication about 100 had been killed. 

If true, those numbers would easily eclipse previous Russian losses in Syria, which has been presented by Mr Putin as a largely bloodless conflict. Russia has insisted it does not have troops on the ground even as reports have mounted of small numbers of soldiers and mercenaries killed.

Surveys have shown Russians are largely lukewarm toward the Syrian conflict.

In other circumstances, such a clash would have likely sparked a diplomatic crisis, but the Kremlin did not appear to want to discuss possible casualties before Mr Putin stands for re-election next month.

After liberal presidential candidate Grigory Yavlinsky called on the president to comment on the Russian deaths, Mr Putin's spokesman said these reports “need verification” and argued that so many Russians were located in so many countries it was “difficult to have any detailed information”.

In a statement last week, the defence ministry said no Russian soldiers were in that area of Deir Ezzor and claimed that the US strike had hit Syrian rebels by mistake, injuring 25 of them.

“If public opinion paints a picture for itself that the Syrian war will require losses and those to blame are not terrorists but American soldiers, then they will have to react, and no one wants to react to this right now,” said Carnegie Centre Moscow analyst Alexander Baunov.

The clashes in Deir Ezzor bode ill for the future of the war, suggesting that conflicts between the many regional powers present in Syria could grow more frequent even as the terrorists are defeated.

“The fight with the Islamic State is being replaced by old and new conflicts amid the intersection of internal and external players' interests,” said Conflict Intelligence Team researcher Ruslan Leviev.

Alec Luhn

More than 200 Russians may have been killed in Coalition strikes against ‘pro-regime’ forces in Syria

https://thedefensepost.com/2018/02/10/russians-killed-coalition-strikes-deir-ezzor-syria

February 10, 2018

[Editor’s note: This story was updated on February 12, 2018 with additional information about the origin of the audio and identities of some of the men reported killed; on February 13, 2018 to include a video released by U.S. Central Command; and on February 14, 2018 to include information about the circumstances of the attack.]

As many as 215 Russian citizens may have been killed earlier this week by the Coalition and Syrian Democratic Forces in Deir Ezzor, according to information shared on Russian social media.

The U.S.-led Coalition against Islamic State said on Thursday that it responded to an “unprovoked attack” on a well-established SDF headquarters by forces aligned with the Syrian regime.

Military officials said Coalition aircraft including F-22A Raptors, MQ-9B Reapers, F-15E Strike Eagles, AC-130 gunships, U.S. Army Apache helicopters and U.S. Marine artillery ground forces engaged the pro-regime fighters.

A February 10 post on Russian social networking service VKontakte says 253 Russians were sent into a fight near Deir Ezzor, and 196 of them died in the attack. The force consisted of Russian Special Operations Forces alongside Russians employed by private military contractor PMC Wagner, equipped with artillery and tanks.

The Coalition and SDF attack lasted for four hours. The engagement began with artillery strikes, followed by Lockheed AC-130 Spectre and helicopter attacks.

“The wounded are already in Russia, most of them in serious condition. The injuries are terrible. Many have horribly mutilated faces and head injuries. Almost all have either lost their limbs or have them terribly wounded. We are not going to guess how many of them will stay alive, hoping for the best,” the post reads, noting that it is impossible to identify those who have been killed.

Audio recordings detail Russian casualties

Audio recordings of phone calls made by unidentified men have circulated on WhatsApp. The calls purport to describe the circumstances of the attack.

“I just called the guys. They formed a column and they didn’t make it to the position … some 300-700 meters to the position. One platoon went ahead, but the column wasn’t moving,” a man says, using a lot of expletives. “Those [forces] raised the American flag, and the artillery started hitting them hard, and then choppers arrived…”

According to the man, the SDF then began firing artillery at the column, and 200-215 people died in the assault.

“Look, 177 killed – that is just the Fifth Company. The Second remained basically intact. The Fifth one was all destroyed,” a different man says in a separate recording. “The guys had no chances.”

He blamed the attack on “the Kurds and the Americans.”

Mark Feygin, a Russian lawyer and politician who served as a deputy of the State Duma in 1994-1995, seemed to corroborate the account. Feygin tweeted on Saturday that, according to an individual in touch with PMC Wagner, the number of contractors who died east of the Euphrates river has reached 215.

However, Roman Saponkov, a Russian reporter in Syria, said that PMC Wagner lost 20-25 fighters, and questioned the veracity of information shared about the incident.

The Russian Ministry of Defence has not mentioned any Russian casualties in its statements.

“A pro-government militia unit, conducting surveillance and research activities near the al-Isba oil refinery (17 kilometers southeast of the Salhiyah settlement) to eliminate a militant group shelling the positions of government troops, was shelled with mortars and multiple-launch rocket systems,” the defense ministry said.

“The attack was followed by an air raid by the U.S.-led Coalition’s helicopters. As a result, 25 Syrian militiamen suffered wounds,” it added.

Update February 12:

The audio recordings of phone calls were originally posted on the Telegram channel WarGonzo. The channel is run by former Life News war correspondent Semyon Pegov.

Another Russian military correspondent, Aleksandr Kots, who is with Komsomolskaya Pravda, wrote on his Telegram account Kotsnews that he had received the recordings from his own sources on Friday.

There were many theories of where the recordings have originated, ranging from “this can be a provocation by ISIS” to “it’s all made up by Ukrainians.”

The latter version was “supported” by the fact that Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a Russian army veteran who played key roles in the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine, wrote multiple posts about the incident on his VKontakte page. Strelkov said there were hundreds of people injured and killed in the attack, with up to 644 people dead, according to some sources he himself doubted.

“I’m 100 percent sure in the defeat of the PMC,” he later wrote, noting that he received the information from “several channels” in Syria.

After publishing the recordings, Pegov wrote that the floodgate was opened and his military sources began sending him more information.

“Artillery was unable to help the destroyed Wagner column not without reason – it was attacked by the U.S. drones almost immediately and disabled. The guys had almost no chances, after artillery fire the remnants of the column were hit from helicopters,” he wrote quoting anonymous participants in the fight.

On Monday, Conflict Intelligence Team released four names of people who died in the Deir Ezzor attack: Alexey Ladygin from the Russian city of Ryazan, Stanislav Matveev and Igor Kosoturov from Asbest, and Vladimir Loginov, born in Khabarovsk.

The Baltic Cossack Union announced Loginov’s death on their website on Monday. The organization has a 25-year history and has been celebrated by Russian authorities.

Kirill Ananyev, a member of the unregistered Other Russia party, has become the fifth person known to have died near Deir Ezzor. Information on his death was published on Monday on the party’s VKontakte page.

Update February 13:

U.S. Central Command on Tuesday released a video of one of the strikes.

The video is captioned: “Syrian Democratic forces acted in self-defense with support from the Coalition to defeat an unprovoked Syrian pro-regime forces attack in eastern Syria late Feb. 7 and early Feb. 8, 2018.”

Update February 14:

Another member of the unregistered Other Russia party has disappeared in Syria, party chairman Eduard Limonov wrote on his LiveJournal page on Wednesday.

“One more of our National Bolsheviks disappeared in Syria, cannot get in touch [with him]. We hope he will be found,” Limonov wrote, adding that the death of Russian citizens in Syria was the result of a “betrayal.”

“It was not only PMC Wagner that was there, there were people from four PMCs, but the names [of the PMCs] will not add anything to your understanding [of the situation]. There were about two Companies there. They were really heading toward an oil field. But they were betrayed,” he added.

Limonov said all the people were experienced fighters who had participated in wars, “professionals,” and noted that it was still hard to say how many people actually died.

“Russian authorities did not send them there. In this case, Russian authorities bear irreparable damage to their reputation. That’s why they went far into defense. Our Ministry of Defense did not send them under fire either. They were betrayed by one of their own,” he argued.

Meanwhile, a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry told TASS on Wednesday that the reports of mass casualties were not true.

“Reports on hundreds, dozens fatalities in Syria disseminated by some Western media outlets are classic misinformation,” the source said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry told Kommersant, however, that it is probing the incident.  

“We are now checking the information on the victims, including CIS citizens. If the information is confirmed, we will surely publish it,” the ministry said.

According to the outlet’s source in the Russian military, the incident took place because local “big businessmen currently supporting Bashar Assad” attempted to seize oil and gas fields controlled by the Kurds.

Anna Varfolomeeva

Smolensk crash: Explosions on board before plane hit ground, investigator says

https://news.sky.com/story/smolensk-crash-explosions-on-board-before-plane-hit-ground-investigator-says-11233792

February 3, 2018

Frank Taylor says he believes Russian and Polish authorities "came to a conclusion early on and sought evidence to justify it."

A British air accident investigator has told Sky News he believes there were explosions on board a plane before it crashed eight years ago, killing Polish President Lech Kaczynski.

Frank Taylor's findings challenge the original reports of the Russian and Polish authorities which blamed pilot error for the crash in Smolensk, Russia, in April 2010 which killed 96 people.

In his first television interview, Mr Taylor said: "I think they did not do a thorough investigation. It seems to me they came to that conclusion early on and sought evidence to justify it."

Russian investigators concluded that in dreadful weather conditions the pilot flew too low, hit a birch tree, searing the wing off.

Mr Taylor was involved in the Lockerbie and Manchester air crash investigations. He's examined high resolution photographs of the crash site.

He said: "If the tip (of the wing) had been cut off by a birch tree the damage wouldn't have looked like this. It would have been bent back - consistently backwards, rather than up and maybe even forward.

"As far as I can see there was an explosion in the wing before the aircraft reached the birch tree.

"Possibly some of the bits hit the birch tree afterwards but the evidence is that this explosion caused the wing tip to come off. Then the aircraft rolled but at a higher altitude than the Russian report suggests.

"What I can say is there is no doubt there were explosions on board before the aircraft hit the ground."

Mr Taylor also says he believes damage to the left side cabin door is consistent with what he calls massive internal pressure.

Relatives have long complained that Russia failed to protect the crash site. Russia has refused to return any wreckage or the full flight data recordings.

Political activist Anna Walentynowicz was on the plane. In Poland her son says he was threatened with jail for speaking out after the wrong body was returned to him and that no relative can be sure they have actually buried their loved ones.

Those on board were on their way to the 70th commemoration of the Katyn massacre of Polish intellectuals, politicians and military officers by the Soviets in the Second World War.

A member of the Federation of Katyn Families spoke to us on behalf of the Smolensk relatives but wanted to remain anonymous for security reasons.

He said: "Some relatives have reported being threatened and abused by hooligans. I think it would be fair to describe it as they lived in a climate of fear.

"This is now no longer a Polish problem - this has become a European problem and perhaps an international problem. There now needs to be a cohesive effort to deal with both the air accident investigation side and the human rights violations that have clearly occurred.

"There are some important questions to ask Russia. Most of the relatives are utterly traumatised. They've been waiting for eight years to discover the truth."

Russia says the crash has already been fully investigated.

Lisa Holland