Wagner's state terrorists test West's reaction

With the stroke of a pen, the White House can strip Russia of its status as a sovereign state, after which international courts will have grounds to saw Russia into small pieces through numerous lawsuits. But instead of speeding up the dismantling of the Russian empire with legal tools, the West is looking closely at Ukraine's counteroffensive plans.

Recently, Putin pretended to be Taras Bulba with his famous "I created you, I will kill you": on camera, he admitted that the Russian state fully supported Wagner's terrorist PMC from its treasury.

“From May 2022 to May 2023, the maintenance of the combatants cost the treasury 276 billion rubles, or $4 billion. This amount includes direct financing of mercenaries (86 billion rubles), insurance payments (110 billion rubles), and income from the army's food supply by Prigozhin's structures (80 billion rubles)”

This is twice as much as Kremlin spent on culture last year, and four times as much as on sports.

The Kremlin's black mouth, Dmitry Kiselev, puts the scale of the mercenary empire in other figures: the accounts of the Concord company in Prygorye alone have received 1703 billion rubles (over $25.3 billion) from the regime since its inception, and this amount exceeds the annual expenditure on all healthcare in the country, as well as education. In this simple way, we get an answer to the question of why the cult of the prisoner is much more popular in Russia than a healthy lifestyle or education.

“The Kremlin has admitted to the creation of a transnational terrorist group... what's next?”

Everything is complicated in Europe. At the EU level, there is no legal basis for recognising countries as terrorist. More than a dozen countries and organisations have already recognised Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism: PACE, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, the European Parliament, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. But all these revolutions have one flaw: they are political and have no real legal consequences. The EU, with its phantom love for Russia, is in no hurry to prepare the necessary legislation.

The situation in the US is even more complicated. On the one hand, all these European resolutions are usually adopted with one goal in mind: to put political and public pressure on the White House, which already has a reliable tool - the recognition of a state as a sponsor of terrorism: having received this status, a country actually loses its subjectivity: its diplomatic relations are restricted, financial markets and international financial transactions are blocked, public and private assets outside the country are frozen, and can be confiscated through the courts. On the other hand, Uncle Sam is in no hurry to use this legislative sledgehammer to flatten this Putin's nest. Even Wagner's PMC did not receive the status of a "foreign terrorist organisation", but became just a transnational criminal organisation, which is a level lower.

There may be many explanations for this, but they all boil down to a simple one: even the United States does not want to aggravate relations with a nuclear power.  And it doesn't matter that the state itself is already on the decline.

The desire of the United States and Europe to solve the Putin problem mainly through Ukraine is quite understandable. But at the same time, our Western partners know a much shorter way to a common victory, but have not yet used it. At least not very noticeably so far.

Source

About the author. Orest Sohar, journalist, editor-in-chief of Obozrevatel

The editors do not always share the opinions expressed by the authors of blogs.