Documents shared according to CNN suggest that a top Russian military commander, Gen. Sergey Surovikin, was a secret VIP member of Wagner, the private military company that staged a brief rebellion exposing disunity among senior Russian military officials.
The documents, obtained by the Russian investigative Dossier Center, showed that Surovikin had been assigned a personal VIP Wagner registration number in 2018.
Surovikin is listed along with at least 30 other senior Russian military and intelligence officials, who the Dossier Center said are also VIP Wagner members. The identities of those officials has not been revealed.
There is no evidence that Surovikin was on Wagner’s payroll but the VIP membership for so many senior figures implies an overly close relationship between the Russian military and the mercenary group.
Wagner has not answered request for a response.
This suspicion of divided loyalty between Wagner and the Russian military, which could have played a role in allowing the group’s fighters to take a key base in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don with little resistance, may fuel a purge of top military leaders.
Surovikin has not been seen in public since last Saturday, when he released a video in which he held a machine gun and nervously pleaded for Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin to stop his insurrection. His whereabouts are unknown since then.
