Why Are Mercenaries Driving Russia’s Best T-90 Tank?

It seems that Russian mercenary firm The Wagner Group is operating Russia’s best tank, the T-90M.

That would be yet another wrinkle in the increasingly befuddling story of The Wagner Group, an entity that legally doesn’t even exist, but which for six months has been fighting one of the most brutal battles of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.

The Wagner Group, which made its first appearance in a war zone in eastern Ukraine in 2014, is a useful tool of Russia’s foreign policy. In reality a network of closely related companies rather than a single firm, The Wagner Group fronted Russia’s intervention in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars and, under the guise of “peacekeeping,” also represents Russian mining interests in insurgency-riven Central African Republic.

Wagner offers the Kremlin plausible deniability—both at broad and at home. “This blurring of the lines between civil, military and peacekeeping operations during the hostilities creates confusion about the legitimate targets and increases the risks for widespread human rights and humanitarian law abuses,” United Nations experts warned.

In Ukraine, Wagner fights as a conventional force. Its best contractors—some 10,000 ex-servicemembers—lead battalions made up mostly of minimally-trained former convicts who Wagner recruited from Russia’s prisons. There are as many as 40,000 ex-prisoners on Wagner’s payroll. That’s a fifth of the Russian force in Ukraine.

Wagner since early summer has focused its efforts in Ukraine on a single town in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Bakhmut is a ruined ghost town. It lacks major industry or transportation infrastructure. It doesn’t seem to possess much military value.

But that hasn’t stopped Wagner from dedicating almost all its forces in Ukraine to the Bakhmut sector—and losing many of them in repeated, failed human-wave assaults on the town’s entrenched Ukrainian garrison.

Analysts have surmised that Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former sausage-vendor and close associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin who now is Wagner’s chief financier, views the Bakhmut battle as an opportunity to prove Wagner’s warfighting mettle and position the firm as an alternative to regular Russian forces in the Kremlin’s military establishment.

It’s apparent that Prigozhin and Russian generals are bitter rivals. When Wagner artillery batteries around Bakhmut ran out of ammunition, they blamed Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff.

What’s weird is that the Russian military and The Wagner Group clearly have close ties. Wagner pilots fly Sukhoi Su-24 and Su-25 attack jets that technically belong to the Russian air force and evidently benefit from air force logistical support.

The presence of T-90M tanks in the Wagner arsenal around Bakhmut, first reported by pro-Russia war correspondent Alexander Simonov, deepens the weirdness.

The 45-ton, three-person T-90 with its 125-millimter gun and steel-composite armor is Russia’s newest and best tank. Before the current war, the Russians on paper had more than 600 T-90s. But 200 were in storage—and in cold, wet Russia, modern tanks with their delicate optics and electronics tend to degrade fast while not in routine use.

So in fact, the Russian army had just 400 T-90s before attacking Ukraine in late February. And after February, it lost at least 36 of the tanks in combat with Ukrainian forces. That brings the total T-90 inventory down to around 360, of which at least 50 belong to Russian army battalions defending a key road around Svatove, 50 miles north of Bakhmut.

The T-90s are highly valuable and in short supply. So why would the Kremlin give, or sell, any of them to Wagner while Wagner directly competes with the Russian army for influence in Moscow?

No one outside of the Kremlin and The Wagner Group’s Saint Petersburg headquarters can explain the odd and seemingly paradoxical relationship between the mercenary company and the army. Those who do understand, aren’t saying anything.