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  • Los Angeles Times

    Russia's notorious private army tries to retool its image. Welcome to the Wagner-verse

    by Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times Apr 26, 2023 5 minutes
    Workers put final touches on the "PMC Wagner Centre," associated with businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner PMC mercenary group, ahead of its opening in Saint Petersburg on Oct. 31, 2022.

    KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — In the action movie "Tourist," military instructors with the Russian mercenary group Wagner deploy to the Central African Republic and find themselves reluctant warriors against rebels and a corrupt ex-politician ahead of a presidential election.

    Then there's "Granit," another big-budget action flick whose title character, a grizzled but idealistic Russian military trainer, sacrifices himself to protect the southern African country of Mozambique from ISIS-style bandits.

    And in the more recent "Best in Hell," Wagner fighters duke it out with an unnamed enemy — clearly meant to be Ukrainians — in an unspecified location that's an obvious stand-in for the Donbas, Ukraine's war-ravaged eastern heartland. The movie starts and ends with the lines: "We have a contract — a contract with the company, a contract with the motherland. … We know we're going to hell. But in hell we'll be the best."

    Welcome to the Wagner-verse, a multimedia propaganda project

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