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2008 övervägde Nato att låta Ukraina gå med i alliansen, i en tänkt styrkedemonstration mot Vladimir Putin. Den amerikanska ledningen var för förslaget, men tyskarna – med dåvarande förbundskanslern Angela Merkel i spetsen – satte sig på tvären. Med hjälp av tidigare hemligstämplat material har Der Spiegel rekonstruerat hur det gick till när det bestämdes att Ukraina inte skulle bjudas in. Ett ödesdigert beslut, skulle det senare visa sig. In 2008, NATO deliberated on admitting Ukraine as a new member as a show of strength against Vladimir Putin. Washington favored the move, but the Germans thwarted the plan. A reconstruction of a decision that ended in disaster. By Klaus Wiegrefe 25 September, 2023 In April 2022, Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy stepped in front of the cameras, a severe expression on his face. In Bucha, the town near Kyiv, numerous murdered civilians had been found, their bodies lying on the streets, in homes or in hastily dug graves in the front yards. And when it came to assigning responsibility, Zelenskyy didn't just single out the Russians – the murderers who hunted down pedestrians and cyclists. He also mentioned former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and ex-French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "I invite Ms. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy to visit Bucha to see what the policy of 14 years of concessions to Russia has led to." Zelenskyy was referring to the NATO summit that took place in Bucharest in April 2008. DER SPIEGEL has spoken with a half-dozen people who attended the 2008 Bucharest summit. Some of them, like Latvia's then-President Valdis Zatlers, have agreed to be quoted on the record. Other diplomats and aides asked not to be named. They describe a kind of "High Noon" situation between Merkel and Bush, tears of anger from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and pointed attacks from Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski against his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who is today Germany's president and head of state. There were, say participants, wild threats coming from Putin. The German chancellor even spoke Russian on occasion with her Central Eastern European allies from the former Warsaw Pact nations in the attempt to negotiate a way out of the impasse, since it was the language they all had in common. And finally, say participants, Merkel – using the green pen that German heads of government use in day-to-day operations – personally added changes to the closing communiqué. Photos from Bucharest show an apparently high-spirited chancellor in the Romanian capital's Palace of Parliament, one of the largest buildings in Europe, with conference halls the size of half a football field. But there are also images of Merkel looking surly, the strain clearly visible. The summit lasted from April 2-4, a Wednesday to Friday. On the first evening, Merkel dined with the other heads of state and government, and the next day, the national leaders met together with ministers, advisers and military leaders in a large conference setting. On the last day, member state leaders welcomed Russian President Putin. Many witnesses also remember how Merkel wore a green jacket on that Thursday, making her stand out among the gray suits worn by all the men. The accounts of the summit also make it clear that Bucharest was the climax of a conflict that had begun in 2007 and first came to an end with Bush's departure from the White House in January 2009. And that Merkel wasn't alone. She had support from France in addition to Spain, Italy, the Benelux countries, Portugal and Norway. Even the British, normally so loyal to the U.S., were wavering. Merkel's opposition in Bucharest, in other words, was not the result of Germany going it alone. Perhaps Berlin was right after all? Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there have been demands that Germany's relations with Russia under Merkel, of the center-right Christian Democrats, and under Steinmeier, of the center-left Social Democrats, be closely reexamined. Yet very few steps to actually do so have been taken. Here, DER SPIEGEL is making an effort to reconstruct a key year in the Ukraine question from a number of different perspectives. It was possible for the first time to examine German Foreign Ministry documentation that had thus far been classified, including draft talking points for Merkel, dispatches from embassies in Washington and at NATO headquarters in Brussels, memos from the German Foreign Ministry's political affairs division for Steinmeier and "guidelines" for the German delegation in Bucharest, which outlined the German positions. Other source material used for this reconstruction include interviews, declassified U.S. records, documents published by WikiLeaks, memoirs and the results of a project completed by Southern Methodist University in Texas, where scholars systematically interviewed former members of Bush's staff about his Russia policy. Neither Merkel nor Steinmeier made themselves available for an interview when contacted by DER SPIEGEL. Kyiv, Fall 2007 A letter to NATO expressing a demand to start the accession process. That's all it would take. For several months, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko had been consulting with U.S. diplomats about sending just such a signal, signed by Ukraine's highest constitutional institutions: President Yushchenko in addition to the prime minister and the president of parliament. A signal of unity. Such a gesture would demonstrate to the West that Kyiv's interest in joining NATO had to be taken seriously – in contrast to the signals sent in previous years. Yushchenko was in favor of the step. A former banker, the Ukrainian president was married to an American woman who used to work at the U.S. State Department, and his fear of the Russians was based on personal experience. Just a few years earlier, the reformer had only narrowly survived a dioxin poison attack. He was convinced that Putin, a former KGB agent, was responsible. From Yushchenko's perspective, only NATO membership could guarantee sovereignty for his country. Otherwise, he feared, Ukraine would remain "in a semi-colonial state," dependent on Moscow. But the letter never came. It had been the same story for quite some time. In conversations with the Americans, leading Ukrainian politicians would insist that they aspired to NATO membership – particularly Yushchenko, a leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution, with its promise of freedom and prosperity. His one-time political ally turned bitter rival Yulia Tymoshenko also wanted Ukraine to become part of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Even the pro-Kremlin opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych, who would ultimately flee to Russia in 2014, would occasionally give the impression that he wasn't opposing Ukrainian NATO membership for all eternity. The problem, however, was that political reforms in Ukraine simply weren't progressing to the point where they would meet NATO standards when it came to the military, the judiciary and politics. That lack of progress could only partly be blamed on Russia, which was eager to weaken Ukraine wherever it could so as not to lose influence. On the Corruption Perception Index kept by Transparency International, Ukraine had fallen to 118th place, almost as low as Russia, and the trend remained negative. Yanukovych and Tymoshenko themselves were suspected of malfeasance. More than anything, though, they were not having success in reversing the populace's skepticism of NATO. Indeed, the efforts undertaken by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko to that end had been less than monumental, with opposition leader Yanukovych even using the September 2007 parliamentary elections to brand himself as the leader of the anti-NATO movement in the country. A strong majority of Ukrainians indicated in surveys that they weren't particularly interested in joining the alliance. Merkel's administration in Berlin believed that around two-thirds of the population "held negative views of NATO." Cold War prejudices fueled by Russian television continued to have an influence, particularly in the eastern and southern parts of the country. Furthermore, many Ukrainians had fought for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and were worried about being sent back, this time to fight for the West, should Ukraine become part of NATO. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO in Brussels, advised the Ukrainian government to launch an expansive information campaign in the country to dispel the image of NATO as a "four-letter word." To some observers, it seemed as though the Americans were more interested in Ukraine's accession to NATO than the Ukrainians themselves. Yushchenko and Tymoshenko were ultimately able to set aside their differences following the parliamentary elections for long enough to establish a coalition to prevent election victor Yanukovych from become prime minister. Instead, Tymoshenko took the position, the woman with the striking braid wrapped across her head. It was the fourth change in government in just three years for Ukraine. And in January 2008, Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and the president of parliament finally sent the letter to Brussels. In the letter, they requested from NATO a Membership Action Plan (MAP) for Ukraine. Normally, such plans outline the reforms that must be undertaken ahead of accession and are part of the standardized process that takes a number of years to complete. In theory, MAP status does not guarantee ultimate accession to the alliance, but in practice, it is widely considered to be a sign of almost inevitable membership. Yet the letter did not actually become the symbol of unity Kyiv had hoped to send. In protest against the request for MAP status, Yanukovych's people paralyzed parliament for several weeks. There were even fisticuffs on the floor. Ultimately, the government and the opposition agreed to hold a referendum prior to a NATO accession. Reformers Tymoshenko and Yanukovych also sought to block each other. Ukraine planned to hold presidential elections in 2010 and, as the German Embassy in Washington learned, Tymoshenko was hoping to win that election and wanted to wait to start the MAP process until that time. That desire translated into hesitancy from Tymoshenko when it came to pushing for her country's NATO accession during a visit to alliance headquarters in Brussels. German Foreign Minister Steinmeier warned his NATO counterparts in a confidential meeting of domestic political intrigue in Kyiv on the MAP issue. "Hidden agendas cannot be ruled out," he said. The Ukrainian reformers frequently bickered like children for all to see. "It's always the other one who is to blame for the situation," one Berlin diplomat said, describing the situation. When Merkel visited Ukraine later that year, Yushchenko tried to prevent the prime minister from meeting with the German chancellor. The Germans, though, found a cagey way to set up a meeting anyway: Merkel sat down in a restaurant and Tymoshenko came in through the backdoor. The situation in Kyiv is a "nightmare," Merkel's security adviser, Christoph Heusgen, told the Americans. But the letter sent to NATO by Kyiv did at least force alliance member states to reveal where they stood on Ukrainian accession. Brussels, NATO Headquarters, January 30, 2008 Things hadn't been going well for quite some time in the NATO-Russia Council, a body that provided a venue for the West and Moscow to discuss security issues. In the early 2000s, Putin had thought that Russia could ultimately become a NATO member, on a par with the Americans. At the time, he even said that he saw no problem with Ukrainian membership. But such sentiments had long since evaporated. In early 2008, Putin sent the ultranationalist populist Dmitry Rogozin to Brussels, a tall, bulky man with closely cropped hair. His nickname in Moscow was "The Hooligan." Rogozin's mission as NATO ambassador was to stifle the influence of Russia's critics, particularly coming from the new, Central and Eastern European NATO member states. Rogozin claimed that the Baltic states, the Crimean Peninsula and extensive regions of Ukraine belong to "traditional territory of the Russian nation." At the very first council meeting in which he took part, he made reference to the anti-NATO sentiment in Ukraine and threatened that Ukrainian accession to NATO could "be a threat to the very existence of Ukraine as a sovereign state." Britain and Hungary stood up to him. Attempts at intimidation were a frequently used tool in Moscow's political repertoire. Putin left no doubt about his desire to return Russia to its role as a global power. But from the perspective of several NATO countries, it wasn't clear what method Putin would choose to achieve this goal: old-style aggressive power politics; or economic strength coupled with technological prowess, as demonstrated by the West. "You could sense that the Russians themselves weren't totally sure," says one Merkel adviser. Secretary of State Rice spoke of two versions of Russia. The one accepts commonly held values, the other does not, a sentiment documented in Cable 359 from Germany's NATO representation. The Baltic states and Poland would regularly meet to harmonize their positions ahead of NATO meetings, says Zatlers, the former president of Latvia. Zatlers, a medical doctor and a former reserve officer in the Soviet army, exudes fearlessness in public. Immediately after the reactor meltdown in Chernobyl in 1986, the Soviet army sent him there for a two-month stint. "The Ukrainians like me because I'm the only head of state who has been to Chernobyl," says Zatlers, a brawny man with a friendly smile. Zatlers, who served in office from 2007 to 2011, doesn't harbor any anti-Russian sentiments and strove for friendly relations with his country's massive neighbor to the east. But Zatlers also spoke frequently with Polish President Lech Kaczyński about their countries' past experiences. In contrast to Zatlers, the archconservative Polish law professor had clear conceptions about who his enemies were: "Dangers? That would be our neighbors – Russia and Germany." One-time Solidarność activist Kaczyński was arrested when the communist regime in Warsaw imposed martial law with the support of Moscow. His parents had fought against Nazi Germany in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Stalin's advancing Red Army paused combat operations before entering the Polish capital, giving the Nazis the time they needed to complete their destruction of the uprising and the city. Zatlers says that even back in 2008, Kaczyński was concerned that Moscow might attack neighboring countries Ukraine and Georgia, which was also seeking to join NATO at the time. A powerful show of unity by the alliance at the Bucharest summit, it was hoped, would deter Putin and improve the strategic position of Central and Eastern European countries. But the alliance was divided. Nuland, the U.S. NATO ambassador, counted 14 countries of 26 in the North Atlantic Council that backed Kyiv's ambitions to begin the MAP process, but aside from the U.S. and Canada, almost all of them were Central and Eastern European countries. Alliance skeptics grouped around Germany's NATO ambassador, Ulrich Brandenburg, a typical proponent of Foreign Minister Steinmeier's restrained approach to diplomacy. A deliberate man who had once been a conscientious objector, Brandenburg sat between France and Greece in NATO's alphabetized seating arrangement and sought to hold together a kind of blocking minority of around 10 countries. NATO may adhere to the principle of consensus, but Germany on its own would not have been able to stand up to pressure from the Americans. The U.S., meanwhile, kept a close eye on what Steinmeier's representative was up to in Brussels – as he sought to prevent Ukraine and Georgia from even making it onto the agenda for the Bucharest summit. When Nuland and her team would manage to defeat Germany on a specific question, they would joyfully write to Washington that Brandenburg was "stone-faced" or was "visibly unhappy." The kid gloves had long since been taken off. "We aren't alone, but we are exposed. The result will have an effect on our status in NATO," Brandenburg noted. The Germans and their allies had to face accusations that they were primarily concerned about their economic interests in Russia, says Zatlers. Minor episodes he had experienced reinforced that impression. During his first visit to Berlin, he says, Merkel opened their discussion by asking whether he was opposed or in favor of the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. That was apparently the most important issue from the chancellor's perspective. And it was clear what she wanted to hear: The pipeline is a super idea. "Some harbor the suspicion that we and others have conceded zones of influence to Russia," Brandenburg wrote to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. Still today, all German participants continue to deny that such suspicions were at all justified. According to a U.S. cable from Warsaw, Polish diplomats at the time even went so far as to advance a claim that bordered on character assassination – namely that Foreign Minister Steinmeier was profiting financially from Nord Stream, just like his friend Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who Steinmeier had served as head of the Chancellery. Still, Warsaw wasn't interested in a blanket boycott of Russian natural gas, they just wanted the pipelines to run through Poland. Ambassador Brandenburg, for his part, introduced the horrific scenario of a political partitioning of Ukraine. The German diplomat told his American counterpart face-to-face that it was "impossible to have security in Europe without Russia, and foolish to try to have it against Russia." The sentiment was a classic mantra from Merkel's and Steinmeier's relations with Moscow – one that is today considered to be one of the greatest failures of the Merkel era. Washington, D.C., White House, February 2008 With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dominating the headlines, President Bush had long paid little attention to the issue of Ukraine. But the letter from Kyiv changed that. Fundamentally, the Texan received European countries interested in joining NATO with open arms. Bush was a believer in the American mission of bringing democracy to the world and had bipartisan support on the issue in Congress, with Democratic Senator Joe Biden, the current U.S. president, leading the way. Yushchenko was seen as a hero by many in the U.S., with influential Democrats and Republicans even nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize following the Orange Revolution. Bush was aware of Ukraine's corruption problems, but he hoped that the prospect of NATO membership would accelerate reforms in Kyiv and also prompt Moscow to pursue a less aggressive course against Ukraine and Georgia. The Americans told the Germans over and over again that under no circumstances could the impression be created that Kyiv and Tbilisi were being denied MAP status out of consideration for Moscow's sensitivities. There were, however, also warnings from intelligence agents, diplomats and ministers. U.S. Ambassador to Moscow William Burns, who is now director of the CIA, wrote that NATO membership for Ukraine was the "brightest of all red lines" for the Russian elite (not just Putin). The Russian president, he noted, had no flexibility on the issue. Burns recommended that MAP status for Ukraine be delayed, arguing that the West needed Russian cooperation on a number of other issues, such as Iran. Defense Secretary Robert Gates agreed with Burns. "One Cold War was quite enough," he said. He considered NATO membership for Ukraine to be a "monumental provocation" of Moscow and a dangerous weakening of the alliance. He doubted that Americans and Europeans were prepared to put their lives on the line for Ukraine, and that being so, an empty guarantee of security for Ukraine would damage NATO's credibility. Privately, Gates was hoping that the Germans and French would stand in the way of his president's expansion plans. Even Secretary of State Rice has said she had doubts about the advisability of pushing for Ukrainian accession. Doing so, she feared, could weigh on the alliance and even lead to a defeat for Bush in Bucharest. Was it worth the risk? At a National Security Council meeting in the White House a few weeks before the NATO summit, Rice only outlined the arguments in favor of and against Ukrainian membership, without making any recommendation. Still, Bush stayed true to his line, and administration staff believe that's because of the neo-conservative advisers lined up behind Vice President Dick Cheney. Still today, Cheney is seen as the black hat in the Bush administration who pushed the U.S. into the illegal invasion of Iraq and the torture program that damaged America's reputation for years. Even before German reunification in 1990, Cheney – who was U.S. secretary of defense at the time – was eyeing NATO's eastward expansion because he didn't trust the Russians. He also wanted to prevent a second superpower from ever again posing a threat to U.S. hegemony, and thus sought to pursue the enlargement of NATO, which had lost some of its importance with the end of the Cold War. It proved advantageous that Central and Eastern European countries sided reliably with the U.S. when it came to conflicts within the alliance. NATO Ambassador Nuland in Brussels had once been a member of Cheney's staff. Officially, the Americans insisted that Ukraine was making its own sovereign decisions on the NATO issue, but many German diplomats and politicians harbored suspicions that Washington was seeking to enlarge its own sphere of influence. When it came to the issue of MAP status, scoffed a Foreign Ministry staffer in Berlin, Ukraine was receiving "a lot of support, except from its own people." This impression was strengthened by a number of minor episodes. When the U.S. government learned that Prime Minister Tymoshenko was hesitant on the MAP issue, Secretary of State Rice took it upon herself to speak with her – the Germans learned from a source in the U.S. capital. Rice apparently wanted to get the Ukrainians back in line. A Merkel administration staffer says that on the Ukraine issue, the Americans were motivated by "ideology and great power aspirations." In the German guidelines for Bucharest, the first item in the list of German interests is the sentence: "Maintain a sense of proportion in expanding NATO's regional and functional role." It isn't clear from the historical record whether the rather artless Bush shared Cheney's viewpoint. According to contemporaries, he took a principled stance: If democratically elected governments sought MAP status, then he couldn't stand in the way. He wanted his staff to pile the pressure on America's allies. "I like it when diplomacy is tough," Fiona Hill, then a national intelligence officer, recently recalled Bush as saying in an interview with the New York Times Magazine. Bush and his team, however, faced a fundamental handicap in their efforts: The entire world knew that his tenure in the White House would soon be coming to an end. Berlin, Chancellery, March 2008 With the Americans firmly sticking to Bush's course on Ukraine, Washington took advantage of every tool in the diplomatic toolbox. They pressured the Germans, sought to maneuver and wooed them. When Bush's people learned that Heusgen's family was in Washington on vacation, his wife and children were invited to the White House for a tour. Seemingly by chance, the president turned up. They did everything they could to buy us, says a Merkel adviser. Secretary of State Rice tried her luck with her German counterpart Steinmeier. Rice speaks Russian and turned her expertise on the country into a career. She felt that Moscow needed to "know that the Cold War is over and Russia lost." But Steinmeier wasn't a fan of that kind of triumphalism. In the tradition of German Social Democratic Ostpolitik, he wanted to build bridges to Moscow and was hoping for "change through interconnectedness." That was a mistake, as he believes today. Back then, though, the German Foreign Ministry still thought that even Russian NATO membership was still a possibility in the long term. And then there was the Medvedev factor. According to the Russian constitution, the end of Putin's presidency was approaching, and the young lawyer Dmitri Medvedev, who presented himself as a liberal reformer (read DER SPIEGEL's 2009 interview with Medvedev here), had been elected to succeed him. Steinmeier knew Medvedev from his time as the head of Schröder's Chancellery, back when the Russian was head of the presidential administration at the Kremlin. And whereas Rice argued that when it came to pushing ahead on Ukraine, there was no better time than the Putin/Medvedev interregnum, the Germans felt that the timing was "particularly inauspicious." Looking back today, Medvedev's 2008 succession of Putin is seen as a having been a bait-and-switch operation from the beginning – Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012. These days, Medvedev primarily attracts attention for his incendiary rants. Was it then naïve to place hopes in Medvedev back then? Heusgen says that Medvedev "really tried to free himself from Putin's grasp." He just didn't succeed. In the German Foreign Ministry guidelines for the Bucharest summit, beneath the heading "our interests," is the sentence: "Minimize strains in the relationship to RUS," the abbreviation for Russia. In his public comments, Steinmeier would say that the West was already in conflict with Moscow on a number of issues, such as Kosovo. He therefore saw "no compelling reason" to open up an additional disagreement. Soon, it became clear to the Americans that Steinmeier could not be moved. Bush would have to negotiate with Merkel personally, at the top. He called her at least three times in the run-up to Bucharest, and he asked allies to also call Berlin. Merkel responded to the efforts with humor. According to someone familiar with the conversation, she told him: "George, I've noticed that you have asked other Europeans to call me as well. And when they do, I ask them: Are you calling on George's behalf? And then I know that they are. It makes no difference if you call yourself or if others do. I've thought things through carefully. It is not a tactical position, I am convinced of that. You shouldn't think that I am one of those people who say something different before the summit than they do at the summit." That's how someone present at the time recalls the conversation. Bush took her recalcitrance in stride. He had always told Merkel that he had no problem with being openly contradicted. His falling out with Gerhard Schröder over the war in Iraq, Bush said, only came about because Schröder had lied to him – which Schröder denies. And Merkel did contradict him openly. The chancellor had her doubts about Ukraine's democratic maturity. She was also concerned about Russia's Black Sea fleet, the contractually agreed headquarters of which was on the Crimean Peninsula, which would become NATO territory if Ukraine were to accede. She pointed to the North Atlantic Treaty, which founded the NATO alliance and limits membership to countries that can "contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area." Nobody, Merkel felt, could seriously claim that the clause applied to Ukraine and Georgia. Furthermore, countries involved in regional conflicts should not be allowed to join, she emphasized – and Georgia was involved in a spat with Moscow over two provinces that wanted to escape the clutches of Tbilisi. When Bush called, the Germans got the impression that the chancellor's arguments were having an effect on the American president. It was also true that Merkel, head of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, would be facing a re-election campaign one year down the road and had very little room for maneuver. Following a visit to Berlin, a senior U.S. diplomat reported that among leading members of German parliament, he was unable to find anybody who shared Washington's position on Ukraine. George W. Bush's America was seen by many in Berlin as violence prone and unpredictable – and many members of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) hadn't forgotten that when it came to efforts aimed at preventing the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Putin had stood by Germany's side. In 2007, SPD parliamentary group leader Peter Struck said that Germany should maintain the "same proximity" to Washington and Moscow. Or the same distance, depending on your interpretation. Bucharest, Palace of Parliament, April 2, 2008 On the German delegation's outbound flight to the NATO summit in Bucharest, many conversations centered on the French. Steinmeier was apparently concerned. Would Sarkozy cave to pressure from the Americans? If he did, it would be difficult for the Germans to prevent NATO's eastward expansion. The summit began with a number of dinners. NATO heads of state and government convened at Cotroceni Palace, the official residence of the Romanian president, while the defense ministers and the foreign ministers, including Steinmeier, attended separate dinners at the Palace of Parliament. The foreign ministers had been charged with discussing eastward enlargement – and, of course, with working on the Germans, who were seeking to block it. Steinmeier would later say that it was the worst evening of his tenure at the Foreign Ministry. There are no minutes available from the meetings, and events can only be reconstructed through the memories of attendees. According to those recollections, Rice asked her German colleague to speak first, then the Central and Eastern Europeans. She wanted to have the last word. The heads of state from Central and Eastern Europe had already taken a close look at how West Germany joined NATO in 1955. When Steinmeier said that Georgia could not become a NATO member as long as the "frozen conflict" with its two provinces remained unresolved, things started "getting ugly," according to Rice. The foreign ministers of Poland and the Czech Republic along with Rice attacked Steinmeier sharply. Divided Germany had itself been a "frozen conflict," they said, and the Germans should be happy that no one back then had the mindset that Berlin has now. The strongest attack on Steinmeier came from Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski, a former journalist who had lived in the U.S. for years, where he had worked for the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Sikorski's office says he spoke spontaneously and kept no notes of his remarks. Several witnesses recall him, at least indirectly, comparing Merkel's and Steinmeier's Russia policies with the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. He said the Poles owed it to the Germans that they had to live under the Soviet yoke for several decades after 1945. If Paris and Berlin disregarded Poland's strategic interests, there would be consequences, he grumbled according to accounts of the meeting, adding that Poland has a long memory. Merkel and Steinmeier were staying at the Hilton Hotel in Bucharest. That night, they sought to ensure that support from other delegations had not wavered. And by the next morning, it was clear: Merkel would not be on her own. Members of the German delegation say that Sarkozy's position was that if the chancellor was sticking to her guns, then he would too. Bucharest, Palace of Parliament, April 3, 2008 The working session of the North Atlantic Council began at 8:55 a.m. in a vast hall with a dove-blue carpet, marble columns and crystal chandeliers. Merkel vs. Bush, it was like "High Noon," recounts Volker Stanzel, who was director of the Political Affairs Division at the German Foreign Ministry at the time. Heads of state and government were sitting at the circular table, with Steinmeier next to Merkel. Behind them were the delegations, comprised of more than 100 politicians, military officers, diplomats and advisers. As the leaders gave their speeches up front, handwritten proposals were being passed around in the background, airing ideas on the search for a way out of the impasse. It is frequently the case at such conferences that there are as many versions of what happened as there are participants, and none of them can claim to be perfectly accurate. But it is clear from accounts that organizers had used a curtain to delineate the conference zone in the expansive hall, and behind the curtain, it was almost dark, with furniture scattered about. Secretary of State Rice, Merkel's security adviser Heusgen and others stood at a bar table. Russia by itself is just one country, the American argued, according to participants, whereas Russia plus Ukraine and Belarus is an empire. She stressed that such an empire, once established, would once again seek to dominate Europe, and that the Kremlin would again pursue an aggressive foreign policy. It sounded like the Cheney line: Keep Russia down. Heusgen is said to have countered with the legal situation in NATO. Rice reportedly then countered: It's not for you Germans, of all people, to deprive the Ukrainians and Georgians of a development that you yourselves have gone through and from which you have benefited. According to Heusgen's account, Rice even broke down in tears because the Germans were being so tough. Another witness says they were tears of anger. Speaking to the press later, the U.S. secretary of state praised the Central and Eastern European allies as welcome "new blood" in NATO. She described them as "people who understand what it was to live under tyranny" – clearly a barb against the West Germans. It was an unusual situation. Normally, staffers prepare summit agreements, leaving it to their bosses to resolve the final points of disagreement. In Bucharest, though, Merkel and the others had to do the groundwork themselves. But they made no progress. It was Bush with the Canadians and the Central and Eastern Europeans on one side, and Merkel with most Western and Southern Europeans on the other. There was talk of a serious historical mistake by the Germans, of ingratitude, of emboldening Russia. Bush let the Germans know that he had already promised everything to the Ukrainians and the Georgians and couldn't back out now. That, at least, was the version propagated by the Germans. Draft talking points for Merkel, in turn, proposed that her main argument should be that "every step this alliance takes should mean more security and stability," which is "very much in the common interest." Countries involved in regional or internal conflicts, the draft read, could not become members of the alliance. Around noon, everyone had to leave the hall except for the heads of state and government, the foreign ministers and the closest staff members. The sound in the side rooms, where some diplomats sat, was turned off. It was the last round in Bucharest. Merkel and Bush agreed that the Russians could be given no veto power over NATO matters. When Merkel said that Ukraine and Georgia could certainly become NATO members, just not now, Bush saw it as a possible compromise formulation. But Poland's Kaczyński intervened: "We want MAP now." The meeting was adjourned, at first for only 30 minutes, but then for an hour. Confusion spread through the room. Many noticed Bush slouching at the conference table – and his reticence. As the Central and Eastern Europeans gathered in the corner of the hall, the U.S. president remained seated, leaving the initiative to Merkel. The situation left one member of the German delegation later wondering: When the leader of the Western world really wants something, after all, he usually gets it. The chancellor finally joined the Central and Eastern European leaders. By all accounts, she showed understanding. She was a skilled mediator and she knew the region from her travels as a student during East German times. Her paternal grandfather was also originally from Poland. Then-Latvian President Zatlers recalls appreciatively that the chancellor was the only one who wanted to know why MAP was so important to them. Merkel, for her part, now claims to have recognized the danger posed by Putin. "I was very sure that Putin would not let this (Ed's: NATO membership) just happen." She also apparently didn't believe that Putin could be deterred. A crowd quickly formed, one that grew larger and larger. Rice also joined in. Proposed formulations were passed from the outside to the inside, and Merkel was at the center with a draft text. Zatlers was there, as was Poland's Kaczyński and Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus. He had fought in a volunteer unit against the advancing Red Army at the end of the war before later emigrating to the U.S. and pursuing a career in the civil service. He then returned to Lithuania as a retiree. Some also remember the Romanian host Traian Băsescu being part of the group, a former communist and informant to the feared Securitate secret service prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Kaczyński, Adamkus and Băsescu shared a dark past with Bush. The U.S. had used prisons for torture interrogations of terrorism suspects in their countries. Now, they were arguing that the future of Georgia and Ukraine was a "vital security interest" to their countries. At times, the discussion switched to Russian; Merkel and the others had, after all, all lived under Soviet rule. That, at least, is how some witnesses who were present tell it, but others contradict that version of events. With the situation growing heated, the German side would say afterwards, the impulsive Polish leader Kaczyński even sought to intimidate the German chancellor, despite her larger stature. But Merkel was already prepared to make compromises. A German draft explicitly stated that Ukraine and Georgia would "one day become members of NATO." Germany was not fundamentally opposed, but wanted the MAP process to be slowed down. Rice walked over to Bush. The president said he could live with that. But the Central and Eastern Europeans countered that "one day" actually meant never, and Merkel ultimately deleted the two words, though she also refrained from making any concrete promises. The Germans, after all, had plenty of experience with non-binding membership promises, having held Turkey's European Union bid at arm's length for decades. And thus, the upshot from Bucharest was that NATO would, at some point, welcome two new members. The foreign ministers were to deliberate again in December 2008. For the time being, the subject was closed. At 2:04 p.m., Merkel and Sarkozy appeared together before the press. Bush, together with the Central and Eastern Europeans, was able to claim that they had achieved more than expected. Normally, a commitment to allow a country to join NATO came at the end of the accession process – and not at the beginning. Rice and others later gave the impression that Merkel, as a German, had probably not properly understood what she had written in English, namely: a clear commitment. The Germans, in turn, could claim that they had prevented the immediate accession of Ukraine and Georgia. From the internal policy perspective of the West, Bucharest was a reasonable compromise, for which Merkel received praise from German media, from the mass-circulation Bild newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and also DER SPIEGEL. Bucharest, Palace of Parliament, April 4, 2008 The Russian president is notoriously late, and in Bucharest, he kept the assembled heads of state and government waiting for 40 minutes. NATO leaders should not have accepted the delay, Zatlers says today. And they certainly should not have accepted the speech Putin delivered, he adds. Bucharest, the Latvian says, "was a low point in the history of NATO." Putin described Ukraine as a "very complicated state," stitched together from Polish, Czechoslovak, Romanian and, particularly, Russian territory. A state with a Russian minority, the size of which he greatly exaggerated. Above all, though, he took aim at Crimea. He said it had wound up in the hands of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic through an arbitrary act by the Soviet Politburo which, although true, sounded disturbing in the context. Although Russia has no right to veto NATO membership, Putin noted, the Russian leader threatened that if Ukraine joined the alliance, it could jeopardize the existence of the state. The Poles were alarmed. The speech was "absolutely outrageous," Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski fulminated. While still in the hall he had, seemingly innocently, sent someone to ask the Russian delegation for a copy of the remarks and, to his astonishment, actually received one. He later gave it to the Ukrainian defense minister in the hope that he could use the text to push through a higher defense budget in Kyiv. It wasn't until weeks later that news emerged publicly of Putin's speech. Zatlers was also concerned. He viewed the speech through the lens of information he had received prior to the summit. The Russian national railway had announced an investment plan for its rail network. The history of two world wars had taught Zatlers to consider troop movements when examining Russian railroad construction. Bush, though, remained silent, which Zatlers still believes was a mistake. The leader of the free world, he says, failed to stand up to Putin. Bush continued onward to Sochi following the Bucharest summit for his last state visit to Russia, clearly eager to avoid controversy. In Sochi, Putin went even further in his talks with the American than he had at the NATO summit. "You don't understand, George, that Ukraine isn't even a state," he told Bush. Speaking to the press, the U.S. President said: "The Cold War is over." Some of the Texan's staffers had the feeling that his efforts before and in Bucharest had only served to allow the president to say afterwards that he had tried everything to get Ukraine into NATO. And how did the Germans react? "Putin's speech was largely brushed off," says one participant, adding that many seemed to think it was just talk. "Plus, everyone was looking at their watches because they wanted to get home." It was Friday, after all. Merkel told journalists that she had been unable to detect "any kind of aggression" in Putin's words and that the focus should be on the "constructive elements." It was a position that Berlin adhered to for far too long. Today, when the failure of Germany's relations with Russia over the past several decades is discussed, comments to the German public downplaying the Russian threat are already very much a part of it. The chancellor chose appeasement over deterrence. As ex-security adviser Heusgen writes in his bestselling book "Leadership and Responsibility," Merkel sought to reassure Putin after the summit by saying that Bucharest had prevented Ukraine's accession and that it was inconceivable that such a fundamental decision would be overturned. Another version holds that she referred to NATO's principle of unanimity and assured Putin that Germany would always vote against Ukraine's accession. One can interpret Merkel's statement as merely an expression of a German attitude of which everyone was already fully aware. But it can also be read as Merkel's betrayal of Germany's allies in Central and Eastern Europe, who had been promised that Georgia and Ukraine would join NATO sooner or later. Either way, it was most certainly a case of hubris – because Putin would not be appeased. Merkel, he is said to have argued, would not remain chancellor forever. Bydgoszcz, April 6, 2008 Steinmeier had long been scheduled to pay a private visit to his Polish counterpart Sikorski at his country estate in Bydgoszcz in northern Poland. The German foreign minister was keen to maintain good relations with his eastern neighbor and his staff said he was looking forward to the trip. Sikorski, on the other hand, seemed to have been hoping to score points domestically, according to media speculation. The German foreign minister traveled to Poland with his wife Elke Büdenbender. They enjoyed dinner together that evening, with Sikorski's American wife Anne Applebaum, a journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner and ardent Iraq war supporter, cooking a mushroom soup in front of the cameras. The German guests stayed the night. But the niceties proved deceptive: The relationship had soured following Sikorski's harsh criticism in Bucharest. To the outside world, the host tried to give the impression that everything was just fine. "In Bucharest, there was an honest discussion behind closed doors," he told waiting journalists. That's the nature of negotiations, he said. Afterwards, they "return to good relations." Steinmeier also made an effort and signaled that he intended to pay more attention to the concerns of Eastern European EU members in the future. The next day, they both traveled to Warsaw for a joint appearance at a university. But as U.S. documents show, around two weeks later, Sikorski described the Germans to the Bush administration as a "Trojan horse" inside NATO. Brussels, NATO Headquarters, August 14, 2008 The crisis in Georgia had escalated. Tbilisi had responded to Putin's provocations and attacked the breakaway province of South Ossetia. The Russians were quick to take advantage of the situation by occupying one-third of Georgia's territory. In the North Atlantic Council back in Brussels, alliance diplomats were left to bicker about who was responsible. The Americans and Central Europeans argued that if Georgia had been granted MAP status, the situation never would have escalated. They insisted on immediately correcting what they saw as past mistakes. The German side countered that it was actually the promise of NATO membership delivered to Georgia in Bucharest that had led to the Russian invasion. Only Putin knows which side was correct. Quite a few NATO member states began looking at Crimea with a certain amount of trepidation. When NATO foreign ministers gathered for a crisis summit to discuss the situation on August 19, the representative from Prague, Karel Schwarzenberg, warned of a "potentially looming Crimean conflict on the horizon." Because the Siberian wolf "will not be satisfied with vegetarian nourishment forever." The war in Georgia, though, demonstrated that the West could do very little in the immediate vicinity of Russia to stop a determined Putin. Unless NATO was ready to go to the extreme. During a meeting with Bush in the White House, a staff member asked advisers and cabinet members present if there was anyone in favor of sending U.S. troops to Georgia to stand up to the Russians. Not even Vice President Cheney was in favor of the idea. Burns, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, had apparently been right all along and could feel vindicated. Long before, he had warned his government not to overestimate the influence the West had when it came to Ukraine and Georgia. And the Ukrainians? After Bucharest, President Yushchenko tried to change public opinion in his country in order to address the concerns held by Berlin. The cabinet in Kyiv allotted additional funding to public relations work and established an inter-ministerial working group. And Yushchenko's party launched a campaign promoting NATO membership. The plan had been for the share of Ukrainians supporting NATO accession to rise – to 43 percent in 2009, then 50 percent in 2010, and finally 55 percent in 2011. U.S. Ambassador Nuland was ecstatic, and many member states said they would offer their support to the government in Kyiv, with Germany apparently among them. But the efforts fizzled out. In 2010, reformer Yushchenko failed badly in his re-election bid and Yanukovych, the Russian ally, beat out Tymoshenko in a run-off election – bringing the NATO accession project to an end. Latvian ex-president Zatlers nonetheless sees Bucharest as a "missed chance." He believes that Ukrainian attitudes toward NATO would have slowly shifted had the alliance sent a positive signal to Kyiv during the summit. The path laid in Bucharest in 2008 didn't necessarily lead to today's war in Ukraine. And yet the summit in Bucharest resulted in the worst of two worlds, Ambassador Burns believes. The Ukrainians and Georgians had been indulged in hopes of NATO membership, which the West was unlikely to deliver. And the summit also reinforced Putin's sense that the West was pursuing a course he saw as an existential threat. As such, Merkel, Steinmeier and their allies must live under a cloud of suspicion that despite their good intentions, they ultimately sacrificed both Georgia and Ukraine. Putin, at least, hasn't yet dared to attack a NATO member. When Yanukovych was officially inaugurated as the president of Ukraine in 2010, there was a delay and Zatlers had to wait with the other guests. By chance, he found himself standing next to members of the Russian delegation, who apparently either didn't recognize him or didn't realize that he spoke Russian. The delegates from Moscow openly congratulated each other on Yanukovych's success in Kyiv. "Everything is going according to plan," one said. For Zatlers, it is proof that Putin's so-called "special operation" against Ukraine had already begun. It just hadn't yet reached the battlefield. © 2023 Der Spiegel. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group. Read the original article at Der Spiegel.

Vittnen i Berlin slog larm när de såg en man på cykel slänga av sig sin peruk och kasta både den, cykeln och en pistol i floden Spree. Vadim Krasikov greps och fälldes för att ha mördat den tjetjenska separatisten Zelimkhan Changosjvili i parken Tiergarten. Men Moskva har sedan dess skickat ut flera trevare för att få ut Krasikov, skriver The Wall Street Journal som tecknar ett porträtt av hur betydelsefull lönnmördaren är för Putin. Västerländska tjänstemän uppger att 58-åringen är en central bricka i förhandlingarna för att Ryssland ska gå med på att släppa amerikaner som Wall Street Journal-reportern Evan Gershkovich och marinkårssoldaten Paul Whelan. Moscow seeks the return of a covert operative serving a life sentence in Germany, possibly in exchange for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others held by Russia By Bojan Pancevski September 10, 2023 BERLIN—Russian assassin Vadim Krasikov, riding a bicycle, followed his target to a crowded children’s playground at lunchtime, a popular summer spot in a central-city park filled with families and workers. As the man entered Tiergarten park, Krasikov pedaled close behind. Not far from the swings, he pulled a pistol from a rucksack and shot him in the back, leaving his victim, a former Chechen insurgent leader, slumped on the ground. Krasikov got off his bike and calmly fired twice into the man’s head, watched by children and parents, witnesses said during a court trial that ended in his conviction. The 2019 murder of Zemlikhan Khangoshvili, a man who Moscow alleged led a 2004 attack in Russia, was determined by a German court to be an intentionally brutal message by Russia to its enemies abroad: Even if you seek refuge in the West, we will hunt you down. Shortly before the 2021 verdict, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his top security adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, to explore a prisoner swap to free Krasikov, said a former European official with connections to senior Russian government figures. That underscored the high value placed on Krasikov by Putin, a former KGB officer who later headed its successor agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. Moscow has since brought up Krasikov’s case in prisoner-swap negotiations, according to Western officials. The officials said Krasikov is central to U.S. efforts to win the release of people held by Russia, possibly including U.S. Marine veteran Paul Whelan and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. Gershkovich, a 31-year-old U.S. citizen, was detained on March 29 by the FSB while he was on a reporting assignment. He is being held on a charge of espionage, which Gershkovich, the Journal and U.S. officials deny. A top Western official involved in hostage diplomacy with Russia said Putin was interested in trading only for Krasikov. Putin has sought the return of agents arrested during other clandestine operations abroad. In 2004, he thanked the Emir of Qatar for returning two men convicted there of planting a car bomb that killed a fugitive Chechen rebel leader. Russia denied responsibility for the killing. Officials in several countries said a multilateral deal to swap Russian detainees in Western countries for Western citizens held in Russia, as well as imprisoned dissidents such as Alexei Navalny, was possible. President Biden said in July that he was serious about pursuing a prisoner exchange for Gershkovich with the Kremlin but gave no details. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in April that Russia would contemplate a swap only after a verdict in the Gershkovich case. Berlin hasn’t said whether it would consider exchanging Krasikov. Such a swap could face obstacles in Germany, where government lawyers issued a legal opinion last year that said a convicted murderer can’t be traded. Any talks involving Krasikov would be sensitive and unpredictable, said Western officials, given the seriousness of his crime. The German court ruled that the Russian state had commissioned the murder, which was carried out at midday in a park near the office of the German chancellor. With Khangoshvili lying dead near the children’s playground, the assassin hopped on his bike and pedaled away. He stopped at the nearby Spree river, changed out of his clothes and peeled off a wig, revealing a bald head. He hurled his disguise, bicycle, pistol and silencer into the water. Then, he shaved off part of his beard with an electric razor. Two passersby watched him and called the police. Minutes later, Krasikov was arrested as he tried to mount an electric scooter. Police retrieved the tossed items, which carried his fingerprints and DNA evidence. German prosecutors had their man, but for two years they couldn’t prove who he was. Krasikov, now 58 years old, told authorities his name was Vadim Sokolov, a tourist with no connection to the Russian government. He had a Russian passport identifying him as Sokolov. He told interrogators that he was in Berlin to visit his lover, a married woman. The Russian embassy in Berlin said he was Vadim Sokolov, not Vadim Krasikov. When his murder trial opened in October 2020, Krasikov stuck to his story. With the help of police in Kyiv and the investigative platform Bellingcat, German prosecutors eventually confirmed his identity as a veteran of Russian covert operations. Prosecutors said Krasikov was likely working with the secretive Vympel department of the FSB, renamed V, which specializes in clandestine operations abroad. Krasikov denied both killing Khangoshvili and working for Russian security services. Asked by a judge if he had anything to tell the court before his conviction, he said, “No, thank you.” A German court found him guilty of murder in December 2021, describing the fatal shooting as an act of state terrorism. He was sentenced to life in prison. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the guilty verdict was politically motivated and the allegation that Moscow was behind the killing was concocted by Western intelligence services. “We insist that our citizen is innocent,” the foreign ministry said in a statement after the verdict. The ministry also said at the time that the convicted man was Sokolov, not Krasikov. Russia’s embassy to Berlin declined to comment for this article and referred to the statement by the foreign ministry, which didn’t respond to a request to comment. This account of the case is based on court files and interviews with acquaintances and relatives of Krasikov, as well as European and U.S. officials and people familiar with the murder investigation. Krasikov was born in the village of Kenestobe, in a region of Kazakhstan known for cattle farming and lead mining. He served in the Soviet army during its war in Afghanistan. He later joined elite military units in Russia’s Interior Ministry and the FSB, the country’s main domestic intelligence agency, according to his brother-in-law, who testified for the prosecution at the trial. Krasikov was married twice, the second time to Kateryna Krasikova, a woman from Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine. He told his wife’s family that he worked for Russian security services but gave few specifics, the brother-in-law, Aleksandr Vodorez, said in an interview. Photographs from Krasikov’s July 2010 wedding in Moscow that were in court files show FSB officers among the guests on the bank of the Moskva River. He and his second wife lived in an upscale Moscow apartment, and his wife told her family that he earned about $10,000 a month, plus bonuses for what he called business trips, which sometimes lasted weeks, Vodorez said. Krasikov often wore designer clothes and took vacations on the Mediterranean, Vodorez said. Krasikov’s wife complained to relatives that he traded his luxury cars so frequently—Porsches and BMWs—that she never had enough time to get used to them, Vodorez said. Krasikov, who compulsively washed his hands, once bragged about meeting Putin at an elite military training facility, Vodorez said. Putin, Krasikov told him, “shoots well,” he recalled. German prosecutors obtained surveillance-camera footage from 2013 that showed a man they identified as Krasikov killing a Russian businessman, an attack that mirrored Khangoshvili’s slaying. The video shows Albert Nazranov, the owner of businesses in the Caucasian Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, walking and then running in Moscow from a man approaching him on a bicycle. Nazranov collapses after being shot in the back and head. Shortly after the killing, Russian police issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Vadim Krasikov, which was later retracted. German prosecutors suspected that local police sought help arresting Krasikov but reversed course after learning of his connections to Russian security services. Krasikov’s in-laws in Kharkiv held a significant clue for German prosecutors in the Khangoshvili case—a photo of a tattooed Krasikov taken during a beach holiday. Forensics experts used the tattoos in the photo, a panther skull encircled by wings, the emblem of the Russian Interior Ministry’s special forces, on his left shoulder and a coiled snake on his forearm, to match the tattoos on Krasikov. Krasikov’s wife and child moved to Russian-held Crimea after his 2019 arrest and now live under the watch of the FSB, according to people close to the family. Before traveling to Berlin, Krasikov applied for a tourist visa from the French consulate in St. Petersburg. He used a Russian passport issued a month earlier in the name of Vadim Sokolov. On Aug. 17, he flew from Moscow to Paris. Krasikov booked a sightseeing tour and took selfies by the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks. He flewto Warsaw on Aug. 20, and checked into the Warsaw Novotel hotel. Krasikov took a tour with a Russian-speaking guide and snapped more travel selfies, including one at the Wilanów palace and museum, a baroque castle on the outskirts of Warsaw. Hotel staff described him to German investigators as a polite, elegantly dressed man with a groomed beard. Krasikov asked a receptionist to book him a manicure at a nearby beauty salon. He later told the receptionist he was happy with the manicure and gave her a generous tip. On Aug. 22, he left for Berlin, leaving his luggage and mobile phone in his Warsaw hotel room, which he had booked through Aug. 25, the day he planned to fly back to Moscow, according to court files. In Berlin, he met with people who provided him with new clothes, a black mountain bike and details about Khangoshvili’s daily routine, German investigators said. He also received a Glock 26 9mm pistol, along with a silencer and a reserve magazine. His helpers parked an electric scooter on the bank of the Spree river for his escape. Khangoshvili, the Chechen insurgent and a Georgian national, fled Georgia for Germany in 2016. He applied for asylum to escape what he claimed were repeated attempts on his life by Russian operatives. Germany rejected his asylum request but, like other refugees, he remained in the country. He had been in Moscow’s crosshairs since 2004 for allegedly commanding a raid by Chechen fighters, who took over much of the city of Nazran and killed top security officials, including FSB officers. Khangoshvili was on a Russian list of 19 wanted terrorists that Moscow shared with other nations, including Germany, in 2012. Russia complained the West didn’t take its extradition requests seriously. Moscow turned to killing suspects abroad, a practice Putin made legal in 2006. By 2019, five of the 19 people on the terrorist list had either been killed or had died by suicide, including Khangoshvili. At around 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 23, 2019, Krasikov watched the entrance of the apartment where Khangoshvili lived, on the third floor of a 19th century Wilheminian-style building with an ornamental facade lined with red bricks. Every day around noon, Khangoshvili, a practicing Muslim, would go to a nearby mosque and walk through the park. Krasikov waited. He wore a black, longhair wig and a baseball cap, Ray-Ban sunglasses, a gray hoodie, neon-green socks and cycling gloves. He carried the loaded pistol, a silencer screwed to its barrel, in a black rucksack. Khangoshvili left his home at 11:50 a.m., and Krasikov followed on his bike. Krasikov shot him just below the left shoulder blade. The first bullet ripped through his torso and exited through the chest. The attack was seen by dozens of park goers, as well as the customers and staff of two restaurants. Throughout the trial, Krasikov appeared uninterested, at times pulling off the headphones that provided the translation of witnesses testifying against him. Shortly after his sentencing, authorities moved Krasikov from Berlin to an undisclosed high-security facility in Bavaria. There were fears that Chechen inmates in Krasikov’s former prison would try to kill him. In his compound by the Danube River, Krasikov has the comforts afforded prisoners under German law, including daily walks in the garden and books in his own language. He has been reading Soviet-era novels glorifying the exploits of a Kremlin secret agent.

Någonting stämde inte. Belgiska spelkommissionen hade upptäckt märkliga satsningar på obskyra tennismatcher där de som spelade alltid vann, även när oddsen var kraftigt emot dem. Nicolas Borremans, en 45-årig polis i belgiska Flandern, tog på sig fallet. I en serie i två delar berättar The Washington Post om hur polisen lyckades avslöja en av de största spelfuskskandalerna i modern sporthistoria och sätta dit Grigor Sargsyan – inom tennisvärlden även känd som ”The Maestro”. Det här är den andra delen i serien. Den första delen, om hur Sargsyan byggde upp sitt spelarnätverk med 180 professionella tennisspelare på fem olika kontinenter, hittar du via länken här nedanför. (Svensk översättning av Omni). Strange betting patterns on tennis tournaments led a dogged Belgian police investigator to one of the biggest match fixing rings in sports history. By Kevin Sieff September 7, 2023 BRUSSELS - The briefing took place in a conference room at the federal prosecutor's office. A strange tip had arrived from Belgium's gambling commission. Officials had noticed irregular wagers on obscure tennis matches played around the world. The bets were made in small towns in the Flemish countryside. The gamblers appeared to be acting on inside information; they consistently won even when they bet against steep odds. At the time, the finding seemed mundane. But it would later help unravel the largest match-fixing scandal in the history of tennis - the world's most manipulated sport, according to investigators and betting regulators. Nicolas Borremans, a 45-year-old police investigator based in the Flanders region of Belgium, looked around the conference room. He could tell that none of his colleagues wanted the case. Sports-related investigations were often dismissed as insignificant. This one - revolving around a few small wagers - was a particularly tough sell. But Borremans believed that the links between sports gambling and organized crime were strengthening in Belgium. And there was something intriguing about this set of facts. "I'll take the case," he told the room. Borremans was a tall, slender man with searching blue eyes and a bald head who cycled 40 miles to and from work every day. He was the son of a cheese vendor. Borremans joined the police force at 19 and worked for years in a carjacking unit. Once, he broke up a criminal network trafficking luxury cars between the Belgian port city of Antwerp and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Borremans knew little about sports. He had never watched an entire tennis match. But even a cursory description of the case was enough for him to see how a gambling operation might be used to launder money. After the 2016 briefing, Borremans returned to his office on the second floor of a police station in Oudenaarde, a quiet medieval town an hour from Brussels. He began diagraming what was known about the bets in PowerPoint slides. Within a few months, he had traced the accounts of four men who had placed suspicious bets in Belgium, all Armenian immigrants. Their wagers were mostly small - a few hundred euros each - ostensibly to avoid scrutiny. Almost all of the bets were on low-level professional tennis tournaments, where players earned barely enough to pay for their travel. Borremans secured wiretaps on the gamblers' phones, and a team of Armenian interpreters listened in. It became clear that the gamblers were working for someone. They received detailed instructions about which matches to bet on. They weren't gambling just on the outcomes, but on specific scores for sets and games. "We heard them receive orders," Borremans recalled in an interview. "Someone would tell them, go now to the betting shop and place this much money on these matches." Borremans added more gamblers to his diagram. "Money mules," he called them. Eventually, he would uncover 1,671 accounts at gambling establishments across Europe. Many were registered by working-class Armenians: mechanics, a pizza deliveryman, a taxi driver. After months of wiretapping, Borremans began wondering whether his search for the gambling network's boss was approaching a dead end. The work was isolating; none of his colleagues seemed to care much about the investigation. He made an appointment with the judge who was overseeing the case. "I told her, 'If we don't get new information soon, we're going to have to close this,'" he said. Then, in 2017, he received a promising lead. The professional tennis tour - the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP Tour), the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the Women's Tennis Association together - had created its own investigation unit, hiring retired officers from London's Metropolitan Police. That unit, initially called the Tennis Integrity Unit, was formed in part because of pervasive allegations of match-fixing in the sport. One of the integrity unit's first investigators was Dee Bain. She was in her late 50s, a veteran of the London police. Unlike Borremans, she was a tennis fanatic who saw corruption in the sport creating what she called "reputational risk." In 2017, Bain heard through a contact at Interpol that Belgian police were working on a tennis-related case. The timing was interesting. She was closing in on one of her first match-fixing targets: Karim Hossam. Bain saw that Hossam was playing in an ITF tournament in Tunisia. Every professional tennis player, including Hossam, signs a contract agreeing to hand their phones over to tennis investigators at any time if required. Bain had uncovered Facebook messages between Hossam and another player about a match-fixing plan; it was enough evidence to act against Hossam. Typically, investigators follow their target before and during a match. When the match is over, investigators make their approach, often steering the player to an office where the phone is seized and interrogators are waiting. "Nobody thinks they are going to get caught, so their messages are not deleted," said Jenni Kennedy, the integrity unit's senior director of investigations. In Hossam's case, Bain and another investigator waited at the door of his hotel room for him to return from a match. "They were like, 'Can we please have your phone?'" Hossam recalled in an interview. "I just froze." He immediately admitted that he had been fixing matches. He handed over his phone. He told interrogators he had been communicating with a match fixer named Gregory in Brussels but didn't know much about him. It would become a common thread in the investigation: Almost every account of Grigor Sargsyan appeared to describe a slightly different person, adding mistaken details. "A white guy with black hair, around 26 or 27," Hossam said, according to a transcript of the interrogation. "He has a connection with Syria or Iran. He spends a lot of time in Barcelona and drives a Mercedes." After the interrogation, Hossam texted his brother from another number. "They caught me in my room bro," he wrote. "And I was stupid I didn't delete some things." Investigators sent Hossam's seized phone to an expert to decrypt. When it came back, Bain could see the messages that he had exchanged with a man named Gregory, along with the match fixer's cellphone number. She called Borremans and said a Belgian match fixer had just emerged in her investigation. He seemed to be based in Brussels and had been working with Hossam. "That could be the guy I'm looking for," Borremans said. As Sargsyan's legend permeated professional tennis, he had another problem to solve: how not to get caught. He did his best to remain inconspicuous. He often slept in his parents' apartment in the gentrifying Saint-Gilles neighborhood of Brussels, where the family had moved, even though he had his own place in the city. He took shifts at the brick-storefront Polish deli where his parents worked, just underneath their apartment. He also urged the players he recruited to keep a low profile. He gave them SIM cards registered anonymously. He gave more-detailed instructions about how players should tank their matches. "Please ask him not to start with a double fault," he wrote to an intermediary who had fixed a match in Casablanca, Morocco. He instructed players not to flash their newfound wealth, but they didn't always listen. One French player, after throwing a match, filmed himself tossing a pile of cash in the air at a nightclub and posted it on Instagram. Sargsyan lost his composure. "I told him, 'You idiot. People are going to start asking questions,'" he said in an interview. Sargsyan stayed off social media. He broke up with his girlfriend when she started inquiring about his income. Once, when he thought his phone was being tapped, he told his players that he had "chucked it in the sea." His mother began suspecting something was wrong. "I'm worried about him," investigators would later hear her say on a wiretapped phone. "I think he might be in trouble." Once she texted him: "I am your mother and I love you so much. Come home, my son." "Mother, everything is ok," he tried to reassure her. The players, too, began to sense something was up. One French player, Yannick Thivant, ranked 590th in the world, received 40,710 euros in 21 transfers from Armenia to his account in Skrill, a digital financial platform. Thivant, saved as "THIV" on Sargsyan's phone, received at least an additional 15,000 euros in cash, according to receipts and messages obtained by Belgian investigators. Thivant agreed to recruit more French players into the match-fixing ring. But he began to see that Sargsyan, for all his charm, could be tempestuous. Sargsyan lashed out when he thought his players were not adequately masking their thrown matches. "How many times do I have to say it," Sargsyan wrote to him once. "It is necessary that in the eyes of all they play thoroughly." Sargsyan's anger deepened when he heard about players leaking their plans to other fixers to make more money. "I have the concrete proof that they gave the full info to another person," Sargsyan, furious that one of his players was trying to double-dip, wrote to Thivant. "I warned you to tell them to shut up." Even paying those on his roster began to get complicated. Sargsyan had begun working with Arthur De Greef, saved as "LA GRIFFE" in his phone, who had reached a top ranking of 113th in the world. He was a member of the Belgian Davis Cup team, coached by a former Olympian. He had defeated players in the top 20 but mostly played lower-tier ITF and ATP Challenger tournaments as he tried to break into the sport's elite tier. But when Sargsyan discussed leaving 4,500 euros in De Greef's mailbox - the payoff for a thrown match - De Greef grew concerned about getting caught. "Sorry, you know me, I'm paranoid," he wrote in May 2018. Sargsyan, despite his own concerns, tried to reassure him. "You worry too much," he wrote. Later, De Greef would tell Belgian police he never communicated with Sargsyan. When investigators showed him a picture of Sargsyan, De Greef said he had never seen him before. But in 32 messages found on Sargsyan's phone, the pair spoke with familiarity, two men whose lives revolved around the lowest rungs of the tennis tour - an immigrant from Armenia and a member of Belgium's tennis elite. Sargsyan suggested they could exchange cash on the road. "Abroad would be better," De Greef agreed. Sargsyan responded with his itinerary. "I'll be in Marseille - Barcelona - Monaco." Borremans now had the match fixer's number from Hossam's phone, the one saved under "Gregory." But when he ran the number, there was no name attached to it. Borremans poured through Gregory's call records and noticed that he had been speaking with a German tennis player. Borremans then saw that, according to the phone's geolocation, Gregory had left Brussels for Berlin not long after the conversation. Borremans checked flight records from that day to see whether any of the names from his growing list of Armenian gamblers appeared on the manifests. There was one hit: Grigor Sargsyan. Borremans wrote the name on the PowerPoint diagram, next to the word "Maestro." "I was walking on clouds," he said. In mid-2017, Borremans launched an undercover surveillance team of 10 people. He dressed in blue jeans and a sweater, joining the team to watch Sargsyan from a distance. They monitored Sargsyan's movements through a telephoto lens and, in one instance, saw him accept a bag stuffed with cash that had just arrived in Brussels from Armenia. The police tracked Sargsyan's almost-daily trips to Paris, where he ducked into restaurants near the Gare de Lyon and Gare du Nord train stations to pay off his players. His phone's search history would later offer a glimpse into his life and concerns. Sargsyan scoured the internet for references to himself and his players ("maestro tennis," "match fixing tennis hossam"); he did some broader research into his world ("tennis corruption," "armenian mafia"); he searched for ways to spend his new fortune ("escort geneve," "villa rent close port mallorca") But, mostly, he searched for new bookmakers ("croatia betting shop," "usa betting," "mybet Australia"). Borremans began adding the names of Sargsyan's players to his diagram. The network revealed itself to be a global operation. Eventually, Borremans would count more than 180 players from more than 30 countries. Some of the most important players were French. Borremans knew he wouldn't be able to prosecute them in a Belgian court, so he contacted French authorities. French police launched their own investigation, eventually interrogating eight professional players. One of those, Mick Lescure, saved as "MIKKI" in Sargsyan's phone, was living with his parents on the outskirts of Paris. His tennis career appeared to be over. When he was interrogated by police, he opened up. Referring to Sargysan only as Maestro, he described him as "a man in his thirties, of medium height, quite corpulent, with short brown hair, bearded, of Middle Eastern appearance," according to a police transcript. "He has no particularly distinguishing features." The officers listened as Lescure spoke of the scale of his involvement. "Since 2015, I estimate that I have accepted to deliberately lose or manipulate the outcome of 20 to 30 matches for Maestro, both in singles and doubles," he said. But another comment from Lescure was more revealing, underscoring how Sargsyan retained his players' loyalty even as his network began to implode. "He became a friend," Lescure said. Almost two years after he took on the case, Borremans walked into the command center at the police station in Oudenaarde. It was June 5, 2018. For days, he had been meeting with police units across Belgium to prepare for Sargsyan's arrest and the takedown of the match-fixing network. "The intervention," he called it. By then, the same officers who initially shrugged off the case had heard about Borremans's work. "It was incredible what he had done, almost entirely by himself," said Guy Reinenbergh, head of the Belgian police's sports-crime unit. He had nicknamed Borremans "the bulldog." Borremans oversaw the operation from Oudenaarde while armed units across the country set off to make arrests. On their list were 28 people: 21 of them, including Sargsyan, were suspected of involvement in illegal gambling and paying players to fix matches. The seven others were Belgian players, including De Greef. The police unit got to Sargsyan's parents' apartment at 6:30 a.m. They were prepared to break down the front door, but one of the officers turned the handle. It was open. Sargsyan's father was sleeping in the living room. His mother was asleep in the third-floor bedroom. After spotting Sargsyan through an open door, the officers sprinted up the stairs to his room. Above the bed was an astronaut figurine and medals from chess championships. His phones were on the nightstand, just out of reach. The officers noticed the devices immediately. One officer nearly collided with Sargsyan as both raced toward the nightstand. But Sargsyan came up short. The officers placed the phones in an evidence bag and put their target in handcuffs. "We knew our timing was perfect," Borremans said. "We knew those phones had the information we wanted." Sargsyan was taken to a prison in Bruges, about 60 miles northwest of Brussels. A little over a week later, Borremans arrived to question him. They shook hands and chatted casually for a few minutes. "He's the kind of guy you want to get a drink with," Borremans said. Then Borremans turned to his questions. Why had Sargsyan done this? What was his relationship to criminal figures in Armenia? "He said nothing," Borremans said. "He just smiled. You could tell that this was a person who was not ashamed about what he had done." "For him, it's not a crime. It's being smart. It's using information." Sargsyan remained in jail for 10 months in 2018 and 2019. His sister brought him a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," in the original Russian. Reading it, he reflected on his own crime, once again regarding himself as the hero of his own narrative. "Honestly, it made me proud of what I'd done," he said. He was released in advance of his trial, which was delayed until 2023 by bureaucratic issues and then the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, Borremans traveled to Miami and Los Angeles to meet with the FBI about the alleged role of Sebastian Rivera, the Chilean coach based in the United States, and some U.S.-based players suspected of involvement in the match-fixing operation. He brought along a memo from the Belgian judge assigned to the investigation. "To the competent judicial authorities of the United States of America," it began. It named eight tennis players living in the United States as appearing to be part of Sargsyan's network, along with Rivera. The judge requested that Rivera's home be searched and that he be interrogated. "Rivera turns out to be a very important person having an intense cooperation with Sargsyan," the letter said. Sitting across from the FBI agents, Borremans sensed that they weren't interested in the investigation. The Americans interrogated Rivera, but that's where the case ended. A senior FBI official said in an interview that the agency reviewed the case as a courtesy to the Belgian police, but would not comment on the details. "There was no separate U.S. investigation," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to comment publicly on the case. Borremans had more luck in Europe. Slovakian authorities raided the home of Dagmara Baskova, one of Rivera's recruits. They handed her a document explaining the charges against her. "I asked the officers, 'Can I go to jail?'" she recalled in an interview. "And they said I could." She said she lied to authorities about the total amount of money Sargsyan had paid her, claiming it was $1,500 euros a match instead of 10,000, allowing her to avoid fraud charges. But in the interview she acknowledged that she was paid 10,000 euros for each thrown match, as the Belgian investigation showed. "Everybody thinks that I'm so dumb that I sold them only for 1,500 euros," she said with a laugh. "But it was not for 1,500 euros." Baskova is now a tennis coach based in Austria. In France, authorities briefly detained and questioned four players, including Lescure and Thivant. So far, none of them have been charged. Lescure is a tennis coach at an academy in Beijing, while Thivant plays club tournaments across France. Neither player responded to requests for comment. Recognizing how little players earn at the sport's lower tiers, the ATP Tour last month announced a pilot program offering a minimum wage for men and women in the top 250. The tour called it "a significant step towards ensuring a greater number of players can make a sustainable living from the sport." As a part of the initiative, players ranked between 176 and 250 would be guaranteed $75,000 a year. "Lol still not enough," wrote Australian player Nicholas Kyrgios on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The tennis tour has in recent months issued a raft of bans and suspensions. Younès Rachidi, the Moroccan player who recruited Hossam, was banned for life - for "the highest number of offences by one individual ever detected," the tour wrote in a news release. "I don't even know where my racket is," Rachidi said in an interview. "The sport has been ruined for me." Lescure and Aleksandrina Naydenova, a Bulgarian player, also were banned for life. So was Rivera, who now lives in Las Vegas, where he offers private tennis lessons. The ban, he said, has made it harder to find work. Baskova was suspended for 12 years and fined $40,000. Both Karim Hossam and his younger brother, Youssef, whom he brought into the ring, were banned for life, too, unable to play or coach on the tour, or even attend professional tournaments. In its 2020 ban of Youssef, the tennis integrity agency said he "conspired with other parties to carry out an extensive campaign of betting-related corruption at the lower levels of professional tennis." Youssef is on the professional padel tennis tour alongside other members of Sargsyan's ring. Karim coaches youth tennis in Cairo. When the tennis tour announced their suspensions, it made no mention of Sargsyan. The scale of his network has remained a secret until now, in part because the tour is still working on active investigations related to the operation, many of them led by Bain. It wasn't until late April of this year that Sargsyan arrived in Oudenaarde for his hearing, along with most of the 27 gamblers and tennis players who were part of his network in Belgium. The court is in a Gothic-style building on the bank of the Scheldt River. Sargsyan sat near the front of the courtroom. Mathieu Baert, a lawyer representing professional tennis, described in his opening remarks how match-fixing "takes away the essence of the sport" and invites organized criminals into tennis. And then he turned to Sargsyan, describing the scale of his network, which was larger than any other match-fixing ring in the history of professional tennis. "Biggest in size, biggest in money, and biggest in number of matches fixed and number of players involved," Baert said. "More than 181 tennis players are involved; more than 375 matches are involved." Sargsyan, in a blue sweater, a blue button-down shirt and jeans, sported an almost indiscernibly sly smile. De Greef, who had been provisionally suspended by the tour, sat on the same bench as Sargsyan and other Belgian players. When he took the stand, he denied his role in the ring. "I've been playing tennis since I was 5 years old. I spent about 20 years training and getting to the level I was at. I always gave everything for the matches I played," he said. De Greef declined multiple interview requests. He was found guilty of fraud and working with a criminal organization. Grigor Sargsyan, left, waits in the courtroom of the criminal court of Oudenaarde on April 27. (Sebastien Van Malleghem for The Washington Post) When the judge called Sargsyan's name, he approached the bench with his attorney, Dimitri Margery. Neither denied Sargsyan's role in the network. But Margery alluded to Andranik Martirosyan, the Armenian whose bank account had received millions of euros from Sargsyan's winnings, according to prosecutors. "This is a man who I don't think has ever been heard," Margery said, adding that Martirosyan was "a sort of pivotal figure in the whole thing." But Martirosyan, 35, was still in Armenia. When The Washington Post visited his home outside Yerevan, the Armenian capital, it was freshly renovated with beige limestone. A new truck sat in the driveway. His wife said she would ask Martirosyan if he was willing to be interviewed, but he refused. Belgian authorities told The Post they wanted their own case to conclude before pursuing his arrest. The judge paused and then looked at Sargsyan. "Do you wish to add anything of your own?" "I want to turn the page and live a more just life," Sargsyan responded. When Sargsyan walked out of the courtroom, a Washington Post journalist approached him. How did he feel about the proceedings? Sargsyan couldn't help himself. "If the prosecutor knew what I know, there would be many more people on trial," he said. About two months later, the judge held a sentencing hearing. This time, Sargsyan wore a black T-shirt and jeans. Some members of the prosecution were bracing for a light sentence, thinking the judge might see the case as unserious because it involved sports. She read the verdict aloud. "The court sentences Grigor Sargsyan to a … prison sentence of five years." He was convicted of leading a criminal organization, money laundering and fraud. Sargsyan was told to report to a Belgian prison on Aug. 11 to begin his sentence. Sargsyan's expression went blank. After court ended, Sargsyan returned to his parents' apartment above the Polish deli. He had resumed work there, hauling boxes of pickled cucumbers from the shop's front stoop as his mother yelled instructions from inside. It was the same job he had done before his match-fixing career took off. He went straight upstairs to the bedroom where the idea for his empire was born. He pulled out his phone and began composing an email about the verdict and what it meant for him. "A tragic end to this adventure," he wrote. © 2023 The Washington Post. 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Sällsynta mineraler som behövs i batteriframställning är koncentrerade till ett fåtal länder, som nu flexar sina muskler för att ta hem en större del av vinsten. Några av dem har varit föremål för exploatering som går tillbaka till kolonialtiden. Detta är deras chans att ta tillbaka makten över sitt öde, skriver Financial Times. Samtidigt är mineralerna inte lika oersättliga som oljan. Dels är de mer utspridda över jordklotet, även om utvinningen i nuläget är koncentrerad till ett fåtal platser. Dels sker utvecklingen snabbt och nya kemiska sammansättningar, som exempelvis koboltfria batterier, kan hela tiden vända på efterfrågan. In the first part of a series, countries that produce the metals central to the energy transition want to rewrite the rules of mineral extraction. By Leslie Hook, Harry Dempsey and Ciara Nugent

Financial Times, 8 August 2023 The red-brown landscape of Tenke-Fungurume, one of the world’s largest copper and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, is covered by tens of thousands of dusty sacks. The bags stacked up by the roadside and piled next to buildings contain a stash of cobalt hydroxide powder equivalent to almost a tenth of the world’s annual consumption — and worth about half a billion dollars. The haphazard stockpiles of this bright green powder, a key ingredient in electric car batteries, point to how the DRC, the world’s largest producer of cobalt, is starting to flex its muscles when it comes to the metals needed for the energy transition. CMOC, the Chinese operator of the Tenke-Fungurume mine, agreed in April to pay $800mn to the government to settle a tax dispute which had seen the company slapped with an export ban for the previous 10 months. And now the DRC government is undertaking a sweeping review of all its mining joint ventures with foreign investors. “We’re not satisfied. None of these contracts create value for us,” says Guy Robert Lukama, head of the DRC’s state-owned mining company Gécamines. He would like to see more jobs, revenue and higher-value mineral activities captured by the DRC. This is the first in a two-part series on how the shift to renewables is transforming the economics and geopolitics of energy. Tomorrow: How China came to dominate clean energy technology At the entrance to his office, a cabinet display of highly mineralised rocks makes his point about the riches on offer. Lukama also advocates government intervention to keep cobalt prices high: “Excess of supply needs to be organised properly. Some export quotas will be useful,” he says.  The DRC is far from alone. As the world moves from an energy system built on fossil fuels to one powered by electricity and renewables, global demand for materials such as copper, cobalt, nickel and lithium is transforming the fortunes of the countries that produce them. The mining of certain metals is highly concentrated among just a few countries. For cobalt, the DRC accounts for 70 per cent of global mining. In nickel, the top three producers (Indonesia, the Philippines and Russia) account for two-thirds of the market. While for lithium, the top three producers (Australia, Chile and China) account for more than 90 per cent.  Demand is only going to grow in coming years. Under current plans, none of these key commodities will have enough operating mines by 2030 to build the infrastructure necessary to limit global warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, according to the International Energy Agency. By the end of this decade, the nascent lithium market needs to triple in size, while copper supply will be short by 2.4mn tonnes, it says.  The growing demand for these commodities is starting to shake up both the economics and the geopolitics of the energy world. The supply chains for some of these metals are becoming entangled in the rising tensions between the west and China, which dominates processing capacity for lithium, cobalt and rare earths and is considering restricting exports of some materials. Governments from Washington to Brussels to Tokyo are assessing where they can reliably source critical minerals without going through Beijing’s orbit. This shift is also transforming some smaller and historically under-developed countries into commodity superpowers. And their governments are now intent on rewriting the rules of mineral extraction. Many are trying to capture more of the value of their minerals, by moving more processing and value-added manufacturing domestically. Some are also attempting to control the supply, by nationalising mineral resources, introducing export controls, and even proposing cartels. Where once some of these resource-rich countries were victims of exploitation that can date back to colonial times, now they are becoming empowered to take back control of their fates. Just in the past 12 months, Zimbabwe and Namibia banned exports of raw lithium; Chile increased state control over lithium mining; while Mexico plunged its nascent lithium industry into uncertainty with a new review of mining concessions. Meanwhile, Indonesia added export controls on bauxite (a key ingredient in aluminium) to its pre-existing ban on exports of raw nickel ore. “Every government will seek a deal with the mining industry that’s a fair one, that is a winner for the country and the winner for the industry,” says Jakob Stausholm, chief executive of Rio Tinto, which has itself recently been to the negotiating table in Chile and in Mongolia. While he dismisses the idea that rising ‘nationalism’ is behind this, he does acknowledge there has been a change. “It’s probably going to be more and more difficult just to mine and extract and export; very often a nation wants to have some processing facilities associated with the mining.” The subtle shift in power towards the producers of sought-after battery metals is similar to other commodities shifts of the past, like the rise of coal during 19th century or the rise of tin during the 20th. But how far will producers go to take advantage of this moment? And how long can they make it last? The poster child for harnessing value from materials is Indonesia, which produces nearly half of the world’s nickel, a key ingredient in electric car batteries. Years of export controls on raw nickel have already succeeded in building an extensive domestic smelting industry, as well as battery plants, and several electric vehicle factories.  After the country banned exports of raw nickel in 2014, it attracted more than $15bn of foreign investment in nickel processing, primarily from China. Today Indonesia has banned exports of everything from nickel ore to bauxite, with an export ban on copper concentrate coming into effect next year. Not everyone agrees with these policies. however: the EU has challenged them at the World Trade Organization and won an initial hearing. Indonesia is appealing against the verdict. But government officials say the country’s efforts to build domestic industry and encourage manufacturing are straight from the same playbook that western countries used a century ago. “This is not something we are doing out of the blue,” says Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia. “We are learning from our developed country counterparts, who in the past have resorted to these unorthodox policies.” He points to the way the UK banned exports of raw wool during the 16th century, to stimulate its domestic textile industry. Or the US, which used high import taxes during the 19th and 20th centuries to encourage more manufacturing to take place domestically. Lahadalia wants to take things one step further, by creating an Opec-style cartel to keep prices high for nickel and other battery materials. “Indonesia is studying the possibility to form a similar governance structure [to Opec] with regard to the minerals we have,” he says. Whether or not that happens, the rise of nickel has certainly given Indonesia a higher profile. When President Joko Widodo, or “Jokowi,” as he is typically known, visited the US last year, he met both President Joe Biden in Washington and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an out-of-the way stopover in Boca Chica, Texas. Jokowi later said he encouraged Musk to build Tesla’s entire supply chain in the country, “from upstream to downstream.” Not every country will follow the same trajectory as Indonesia, however. A new report from the International Renewable Energy Association finds that metals producers will be able to wield influence in the short term, while production is concentrated and demand is growing, but they are unlikely to have the kind of lasting geopolitical power enjoyed by oil and gas producers. One challenge is that battery metals like lithium are well distributed around the globe — at least in terms of geological reserves, if not in actual mine production. Today’s high lithium prices are making it efficient to develop deposits that were previously too expensive to access, and fuelling the broader expansion of hard-rock lithium mining in places like China and Australia. An example of how mineral production can shift is lithium mining in South America. Chile is today the region’s dominant producer, but neighbouring Argentina, which has more business-friendly mining policies, could eventually overtake it. Argentina’s 23 provinces control their own natural resources, and have enthusiastically courted mining business. With roughly $9.6bn of lithium investment announced in the past three years, and 38 projects in the pipeline, officials say Argentina’s production should go up six-fold over the next five years. “Investment in lithium has never stopped and I think that has to do with the fact that we are open to private investment, and with uncertainty about the policies being rolled out in other countries,” says Fernanda Ávila, Argentina’s mining minister. Argentina’s position as an anomaly among South American lithium-holding countries has helped it attract investment, even as it has dried up in other sectors of the economy amid triple-digit inflation. While some politicians in South America’s “lithium triangle” — Chile, Argentina and Bolivia — have floated the idea of an Opec-style lithium cartel, Ávila is less than enthusiastic about the idea. Although “we have a very good relationship with our neighbouring countries”, she says, “that’s not a topic that’s on the agenda.” This is another reason why producing battery metals is different than producing oil: it is very hard to form a successful cartel. During the 20th century, several key commodities were controlled by cartels. Tin was managed through the International Tin Council from the 1950s to the 1980s — and Indonesia, Bolivia and the then Belgian Congo were all producer members. Likewise coffee producers banded together in a cartel during the 1960s and ‘70s; and natural rubber producers maintained a cartel until the 1990s. John Baffes, head of the Commodities Unit at the World Bank, who has studied these groups, says successful cartels have three characteristics: a small number of producers, who share a well-defined objective, over a short timetable. He thinks it will be difficult for battery metals producers to form cartels. “You may have some countries that come together, to create an environment that may be beneficial for them, such as keeping prices high,” says Baffes. “But that will be the seeds of failure, because more entities will come in, from outside of the group.” The speed at which battery technologies are evolving, and their ingredients changing, could also undercut efforts at cartelisation. Unlike oil, which is very hard to replace as a fuel source, battery metals have a much higher risk of substitution. The laboratories developing new battery chemistries are constantly evolving their formulas to use less of the metals that are expensive or hard to acquire. This is already starting to happen with cobalt, which carmakers are trying to reduce in their batteries due to its high cost, as well as concerns about human rights in the DRC. In a cautionary tale of how quickly the demand outlook can change, the use of cobalt-free batteries in China has surged from 18 per cent of the EV market in 2020, to 60 per cent this year, according to Rho Motion, an EV consultancy. Manganese-rich batteries are also on the horizon, which could further reduce cobalt use. “One of the consequences of the rise in non-cobalt batteries is that shortages previously forecast for cobalt for around 2024 and 2025 may not materialise,” says Andries Gerbens, a trader at Darton Commodities. “It may suggest cobalt prices remain lower.” The recent fall in prices of cobalt, nickel and lithium could damp efforts by producer countries to extract more rent and build up domestic manufacturing. After cobalt and lithium experienced a huge price rally in 2021 and 2022, driven primarily by demand from electric vehicle batteries, the market this year has been much calmer. A slowdown in China’s production of electric vehicles, combined with an increase in production, has brought cobalt hydroxide and lithium carbonate prices down 30 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively, during the first six months of the year, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.  Veteran miners say this cycle has played out many times before. Resource nationalism tends to increase when commodity prices are high, or when elections are approaching, says Mick Davis, founder of Vision Blue Resources and former chief executive of Xstrata.  During these times, “[politicians] inevitably try to capture more of the rent than they initially envisioned and agreed,” says Davis. “The result always ends in tears. It means that the development of their mineral resources takes longer and longer to happen.” Yet while the cycle still allows producer countries to flex their powers, they are intent on seizing the moment however they can. Earlier this year Chile, the world’s second-largest lithium producer, announced a plan to semi-nationalise the industry: it will give greater control of two giant lithium mines in the Atacama Desert to a state mining company when the current contracts end in 2030 and 2043, with both those projects and all future ones becoming public-private partnerships. Chilean President Gabriel Boric said the plan to increase state control of lithium is the best chance Chile has to become a “developed economy” and to distribute wealth in a more just way. “No more ‘mining for the few’. We have to find a way to share the benefits of our country among all Chileans,” he said.  And many producers are succeeding in taking steps up the value chain, in a bid to create sustainable economic growth. In the DRC, the country’s second copper smelter is under way near the Kamoa-Kakula copper mine. Chile, meanwhile, is offering preferential prices on lithium carbonate to companies who set up value-added lithium projects in the country. The first taker is China’s BYD, one of the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturers, which announced in April that it would build a lithium cathode factory in northern Chile, with 500 jobs expected in the investment phase. Argentina is set to open a small lithium ion battery factory — Latin America’s first — in September, with a larger plant to follow next year. Owned by state energy research company Y-TEC, the plant in the province of Buenos Aires will use lithium mined in Argentina by US firm Livent, to produce the equivalent of 400 EV batteries a year. Indonesia’s attempts to build out an electric vehicle industry are bearing fruit at an even larger scale. Earlier this year, Ford announced an investment in a multibillion-dollar nickel processing facility. This summer, Hyundai broke ground on a battery plant, its second manufacturing facility in the country. As the energy transition starts to recast the systems of power and wealth that dominated the 20th century, the new battery metals producers are just getting started. Many see this shift in the power dynamic as a welcome change. “It is absolutely essential that we rewrite the legacy of the mining industry, so that mineral rich countries can capture more of the economic value,” says Elizabeth Press, director of planning at Irena, and author of the report on critical minerals. “We see a greater awareness from both sides that things cannot continue as they were.” ©The Financial Times Limited 2023. All Rights Reserved. FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.

Amerikanska storbankerna JP Morgans och Wells Fargos rapporter överträffar analytikernas estimat. JP Morgan slår sitt tidigare intäktsrekord, stärkta av Feds räntehöjningar och bankens förvärv av First Republic, skriver Bloomberg. Bolaget ökade det justerade resultatet 6 procent mer än väntat. Resultatet per aktie var 4,37 dollar jämfört med väntade 3,80. Wells Fargos intäkter var drygt 4 miljarder större än väntat och priset per aktie blev 1,25 dollar mot prognosen 1,15 dollar. Resultat per aktie: 4,37 dollar 2022: 3,80 dollar Totala intäkter: 41,3 miljarder dollar 2022: 38,8 miljarder dollar Resultat per aktie: 1,25 dollar 2022: 1,25 dollar Totala intäkter: 20,5 miljarder dollar 2022: 20,1 miljarder dollar Inflation, räntehöjningar och svängande börsrörelser – hur navigerar man det utmanande ekonomiska läget? Med Omnis systerapp Omni Ekonomi får du Sveriges mest heltäckande bevakning av börs- och bolagsnyheter. Lägg därtill att Sveriges främsta aktieexperter svarar på de svåra frågorna och hjälper dig att hantera marknaderna.

Att bankerna klarade det årliga testet är ett tecken på att USA:s bankväsende är motståndskraftigt trots den senaste krisen som ledde till att Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank och First Republic Bank kollapsade. Även om de 23 bankerna klarade testet manar Fed till fortsatt vaksamhet. "Vi bör förbli ödmjuka inför hur risker kan uppstå och fortsätta vårt arbete för att säkerställa att banker är motståndskraftiga mot en rad ekonomiska scenarier, marknadschocker och andra påfrestningar" säger Michael Barr från Fed i ett uttalande.

Den amerikanska banken JP Morgan höjer förväntningarna för ränteintäkterna under 2023 efter övertagandet av den krisande banken First Republic, framgår av ett pressmeddelande.

Wagnergruppen är ett experiment från Kreml som spårat ur. Den bilden tecknar Der Spiegel i ett långt reportage där man talat med tidigare medlemmar som beskriver gruppen som en slavarmé. Wagner var till en början en praktisk lösning för de styrande i Moskva: En privat elitstyrka som de kunde skicka till krigshärdar utan att själva få blod på händerna. När Vladimir Putin beordrade en fullskalig invasion av Ukraina blev Wagner det motsatta: En hel armé av odisciplinerade fångar som används som kanonmat och visar upp sina krigsbrott i sociala medier. Men när Jevgenij Prigozjin inte längre får det stöd han anser att Wagner behöver så ropar han ut sin frustration till Vladimir Putin inför världens åsyn. Frågan är hur länge Kreml låter skådespelet pågå. The Russian mercenary force Wagner Group has propped up autocrats from Mali to Syria in recent years. In Bakhmut, however, it now finds itself in the bloody spotlight of the war in Ukraine. Leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has long enjoyed Putin's support – but for how much longer? By Christian Esch, Christina Hebel, Alexander Chernyshev, Fedir Petrov, Alexander Sarovic, Christoph Reuter, Fritz Schaap, and Andrey Kaganskikh 17 May, 2023 The clip that Yevgeny Prigozhin recently posted to his Telegram channel could easily have been mistaken for a poorly made horror film. It shows a field at night, bloodied dead bodies lying in the light of Prigozhin’s flashlight. Also in the video is Prigozhin himself, a brawny, bald man wearing a pistol in a holster. "These are boys from Wagner who died today. Their blood is still fresh!" he growls. The camera pans further, and only now can viewers see that there are four grisly rows of bodies. Dozens of corpses in uniform, many of them with no boots. Then Prigozhin steps directly in front of the camera and explodes. His face contorted in anger, he hurls insults at Russian military leaders who, he says, are failing to provide him with the munitions he needs. "You will eat their entrails in hell," he yells. "Shoigu, Gerasimov, where is the fucking ammunition?" It is an outburst of rage against Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, but staged for better effect and loaded with profanity and contempt. Prigozhin sounds like a bandit challenging his rivals on the outskirts of town at night. Like he would like to turn both Shoigu and Gerasimov into corpses that he could then lay next to his boys. Russia last week celebrated its World War II victory over Nazi Germany with the usual military parade on Red Square, a speech by the president and marching music. But whatever uplifting images the Kremlin wanted to create in Moscow, they were overwhelmed by Prigozhin’s nighttime parade of corpses and his abuse, recorded in a field somewhere near Bakhmut in the Donbas, where he had sent the Wagner Group fighters to their deaths. Prigozhin, a businessman from St. Petersburg, has good contacts within Putin’s closest circle and is the leader of a notorious mercenary unit that is active from Syria to Mali. Prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he was very rarely in the public eye. Now, though, the war has given him a new role and a new stage. His is the story of one man's rise to unimaginable power. Within Putin’s dictatorship, it appears that Prigozhin can do whatever he likes. He can promise people their freedom or send them to their deaths, he can humiliate powerful men and openly threaten his enemies. And his story is also that of an outfit that fights without mercy – and, in this war’s longest battle in Bakhmut, is sacrificed without mercy. Prigozhin poses as Putin’s loyal bloodhound, but also threatens the very system the president has built up. He has turned the sledgehammer into a symbol of his politics, to the horror of the Russian elite and the pleasure of some Russians. He takes care of the dirty work for Putin – but he has decided to highlight that filth instead of doing his work in the shadows. He has given a face to the brutalization of the Putin regime. Many, though, have been left to wonder: Is this man powerful? Is he a megalomaniac? Desperate? All of the above? Hardly a day has passed in recent months without Prigozhin posting audio files, videos or photos to his Telegram channel. He has had himself filmed in an embattled salt mine and in the cockpit of a Su-24 bomber. He presented mandarin oranges to Ukrainian prisoners of war at New Year’s, only to then threaten that he would be taking no more prisoners. He has offered his services as a mediator in Sudan, insulted the family of the Russian defense minister, complained about competition from Gazprom mercenaries and said he should be given 200,000 troops so he could take care of Ukraine once and for all. He has talked and talked and talked. One week before his video of the dead bodies in the field, Prigozhin sat down for the most in-depth interview he has given in quite some time. In it, he presented a different version of himself: that of a jovial, even cheerful older man in reading glasses who is fond of talking about his own merits. Wearing an olive-green, Beretta-brand fleece, he was sitting in a windowless room, apparently his headquarters in the Donbas. "In this room," Prigozhin claimed in the interview, he and his people developed the battleplan for Bakhmut, the "Bakhmut Meat Grinder." The idea, he said, was to wear down a large part of the Ukrainian army during the fighting. Then, Prigozhin continued, they had invited Army General Sergei Surovikin – who was commander of the invasion force at the time – to join them. "Surovikin sat down, listened to our plan, and went 'Holy Shit!' and said, 'Boys, fuck it all, I graduated from the Military Academy for no reason at all!'" It was the kind of story one frequently hears from Prigozhin – and it is totally unclear where fact and fiction intersect. It was meant to show that the businessman, who never advanced beyond the rank of private, is on a level with Russia’s senior-most generals. That the battle plan came directly from him. And that the months of slamming into enemy positions, far from being a mistake, was actually part of a clever plan. It's just that the meat grinder is no longer working, because his troops are also being butchered – and because he is no longer receiving the munitions he needs. It is a complaint that Prigozhin has been making for quite some time. The fact is, Prigozhin has made the conquering of Bakhmut his personal mission. It was apparently his idea to attack the city before Ukrainian supply lines were cut, thus turning it into a battle of attrition – from the standpoint of both personnel and materiel. For weeks, this small town in the Donbas has been on the verge of being completely overrun. In recent days, however, the Ukrainians have begun to claw back territory from the Russians. The most surprising thing is not, however, that a businessman and head of a private mercenary army (which shouldn’t exist according to Russian law) claims to have developed this suicidal battle plan together with army commanders. It’s the fact that this man was also allowed to recruit his fighters from the prisons of Russia. One of his fighters was Rustam, 42, a man with a gray, haggard face and a weak, high-pitched voice. He spent a few days in the meat grinder of Bakhmut as a disposable soldier, a tiny figure on Prigozhin’s vast chessboard. Currently, he is waiting in a prison in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, waiting to be included in a prisoner exchange. It is there that he told DER SPIEGEL his story. Rustam, whose name has been changed for this story, wears two bracelets on his left wrist. The red one stands for HIV and the white for hepatitis – symbols used in the Wagner Group to identify the infections that the prisoners in its ranks suffer from. Rustam is now in the advanced stages of AIDS, and he estimates that he has just three or four years left to live. His prison sentence was far longer than that: 11.5 years for the possession and consumption of methadone. When Wagner representatives showed up in his camp in the Ural region, he still had a decade left to serve, and his calculation was a simple one: Serve six months in Ukraine and be released; or die behind bars. Of the 30 men who reported for duty from Rustam’s colony, he was apparently one of the most able-bodied. Only nine of them managed to complete the required fitness test, the sit-ups and the pull-ups. He says they were told they wouldn’t be used as fighters anyway and would instead be responsible for pulling the injured and dead from the battlefield. Rustam received three weeks of training from the Wagner Group in a camp in Ukraine, apparently close to the front. Rustam says that he could sometimes hear artillery fire. "You can ignore the rules you learned in prison," they were told. "We are now all one family." He went into battle for his first and last time on the night of February 9. Suddenly, there was no longer any mention of just recovering the wounded. Instead, they were ordered to take a bit of high ground near Bakhmut, and they immediately came under fire from grenade launchers and snipers. Rustam crawled back and forth, playing dead when drones flew overhead. He was a living bull’s-eye in the snow, which he ate to still his thirst. On the second day, he was shot in the arm and lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was a war prisoner. Rustam now says he never again wants to go into battle. Though that is a pledge he also made to himself two decades ago, back when he returned from the Chechen war. There are up to 10,000 Wagner fighters currently in Ukraine, according to a senior official in the Ukrainian military intelligence agency HUR, and most of them have been deployed in and around Bakhmut. The meat grinder has been in operation for months now. Housing block by housing block, destroyed home by destroyed home, the Ukrainians have pulled back. They observed Prigozhin’s battle tactics with horror. "They were like the White Walkers from 'Game of Thrones,'" says a Ukrainian soldier from the 113th Brigade in Bakhmut – referring to the creatures on the HBO series who rode out of the ice and into battle on undead horses, immune to fear and pain. "They would advance directly into our fire. Once the first wave was dead, the next one appeared. And the next. It sometimes went on like that for half a day or an entire night." The Russians continued launching such attacks, the Ukrainian soldier says, for two months, until the Wagner prisoners were replaced by soldiers from the regular Russian army. A Ukrainian junior officer shows a video taken by an infrared camera of men armed with assault rifles who, rather than running, apparently walked into battle unconcerned about cover. They simply strode onward, straight ahead. The HUR official estimates that up to 70 percent of the attackers died in such assaults. But in the battle for Bakhmut, it’s not just the many thousand Russian prisoners who have been crippled and killed. It is quite possible that the entire Wagner Group in its present form is currently experiencing its demise on the Ukrainian battlefield. Because Prigozhin’s attempt to blackmail the military leadership has failed. He vocally threatened to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut due to a lack of munitions. The supplies never showed up, but Prigozhin remained. He apparently overplayed his hand. That does not change the fact, however, that this man has permanently altered Putin’s regime, just as the Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov before him. Indeed, Prigozhin is frequently compared to Kadyrov: Both men have made blatant brutality a trademark. Both take care of Putin’s dirty work. Both are outsiders among the Russian elite. Both have contributed a fighting force to the attack on Ukraine – and have formed situational alliances. But Kadyrov has an official post and a clearly defined region under his control. Prigozhin is formally a businessman, nothing more. On the other hand, though, he has a nose for politics. In a system where open debate and political wrangling no longer exist, he has brought them back with his vulgar slogans and macabre videos. He has linked the issue of munitions with attacks on the bureaucracy, on the elites in their villas (as though he weren’t one of them) and on an alleged "deep state" of pro-Western liberals in Moscow. It is a message that many in Russia are eager to hear. Nothing illustrates that development more clearly than the sledgehammer story. In November 2022, Wagner mercenaries murdered a deserter in horrific fashion. As a prisoner of war in Ukraine, Yevgeniy Nushin had claimed to be a defector. He was handed back to his old unit after a prisoner exchange. To make an example of him, they bashed in his head in front of the camera. Prigozhin praised the clip for its "fantastic directing." The instrument of violence was not chosen at random: Back in 2017, Wagner mercenaries also used a sledgehammer to murder a Syrian, filming that scene as well. Two months after the public murder of Nushin, Sergei Mironov, a prominent member of the Duma, Russia’s parliament, posed for photographs with an autographed sledgehammer presented to him by Prigozhin. "For S.M. Mironov from the PMC Wagner. Bakhmut – Soledar," read the inscription on the shaft, along with a smiley. "A useful instrument," joked Mironov. Mironov is a typical product of the Putin system, a man who goes with the political winds. The parliamentary party he leads, A Just Russia – For Truth, has made sharp changes of course. It says a lot about the mood in the country when such a figure poses with a Wagner sledgehammer and there is hardly a peep from the public at large. Some have begun comparing Prigozhin’s role with that of the Oprichniki, the bloodthirsty special core deployed by Ivan the Terrible to keep his elite in line. Their emblem was a dog’s head and a broom, which they used to cleanse the empire of traitors. Prigozhin has replaced the broom with a sledgehammer. For now, Moscow’s elite is more fascinated by Prigozhin than afraid of him. "It's not like he walks the streets with a sledgehammer," says a former senior Kremlin official. "Prigozhin’s success has gone to his head, which is dangerous for him personally. He is still needed today, but tomorrow, they’ll tear his head off." "We all lived through the 1990s, a time when there were also a number of nasty bandits," says one businessman. "If people are afraid, they are less fearful of Prigozhin than they are of the secret service and of Putin." "Prigozhin has the role of a dog who barks at everybody and keeps the elite on their toes," says secret service expert Irina Borogan. "It’s clear that Putin quite likes it." She believes that Prigozhin is seeking a seat on the Security Council, side-by-side with Putin’s intelligence service partners – if for no other reason than for protection. After all, Prigozhin’s only powerbase thus far as been Putin’s goodwill. He hardly has any powerful allies, but no shortage of enemies. The fact that he still enjoyed Putin’s support until recently is clear: Nobody except Putin could have authorized the recruitment of mercenary fighters from the nation’s prison camps. But for how much longer will that support last? And might Putin ultimately see Prigozhin as a threat? "I don’t think that Putin feels threatened by him. But it’s a similar situation to Kadyrov: The two present no danger to the regime only as long as Putin is still in power," says political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya. "It is clear that Prigozhin is thinking to a time beyond Putin." But Prigozhin might already represent a danger to Putin’s system, even in his weakest moments. It is evident that the videos he produced in Bakhmut were made out of desperation, calls for help addressed to a president to whom he has no direct access. Prigozhin attacks publicly because he is unable to get what he wants behind the scenes. But that, too, is a danger to the system. "Prigozhin isn’t dangerous to the elite because of his sledgehammer. It's because he's the only big-name politician who says openly what people otherwise only whisper about among themselves," says the Moscow-based political expert Marina Litvinovich. It’s not easy to tell the story of Prigozhin’s mercenary army in retrospect because it is set in so many different places at the same time: in eastern Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Mali, the penal colonies of the Urals and the cafe's of St. Petersburg. Generally speaking, it is the story of an experiment that spun out of control. It began with the idea of establishing a mercenary operation to use force abroad but from which the Kremlin could distance itself. To delegate violence to an outsourcing specialist who had, as a caterer and service provider, already taken on a handful of other tasks on behalf of the Russian army. That was the first, successful phase of the experiment. Prigozhin’s mercenaries allowed the Kremlin to operate undercover in the Donbas, put boots on the ground in Syria and build a kind of low-cost empire in Africa. But with Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the original idea was suddenly transformed into its opposite. That is the second phase of the experiment: The small group of professional fighters turned into an army of untrained prisoners. Casualties that the Kremlin wanted to hide suddenly became grisly videos of dead bodies on Telegram. The army’s erstwhile helper became its most vocal critic. The experiment spun out of control. The story begins in St. Petersburg. Prigozhin’s headquarters can be found in a small, 18th century palace right on the banks of the Neva River at Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment 7. There is no company sign on the building and most city residents have no idea who has their offices here – even if the area hit the headlines not long ago. Just a couple of buildings down the road, the military blogger Maxim Fomin, aka Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed by an explosion. In a certain sense, the bomb also targeted Prigozhin: The café where Tatarsky died was once operated by Prigozhin before he gave it to the Cyber Front Z, a trolling group sponsored by the businessman and to which Tatarsky spoke that evening. Indeed, Tatarsky also received money through Prigozhin’s network. St. Petersburg is Prigozhin’s hometown, just as it is Vladimir Putin's, even if their lives took dramatically different paths. Putin once worked for the Soviet secret service agency KGB, and the fall of the Soviet Union was traumatic for him. Prigozhin, by contrast, who is nine years younger, focused his attentions on robbing apartments and spent several years in a penal colony. For him, the Soviet collapse was a liberation. He was released from prison in 1990 and dove headfirst into the new world, initially selling hotdogs before then opening the city’s first fine dining establishment called the Old Customs House. He got to know Putin’s bodyguard Viktor Zolotov and benefited from Putin’s rise. The media began referring to him as "Putin’s chef," even though Putin rarely visited his restaurants and Prigozhin wasn't a cook. "Shoigu’s caterer" would have been the more fitting moniker. Prigozhin’s wealth came from huge state contracts, including supplying the vast Russian army with food starting in 2012. He even built and operated entire garrisons. In parallel, he also constructed a gigantic media empire, including his own newswire. He also produced cheap movies and had plenty of money to influence public opinion on social media. Because Prigozhin already provided services to the army, the founding of a mercenary company was, from a business standpoint, simply an expansion of his portfolio. With the small difference that mercenary companies were, and still are, illegal in Russia. For that reason, Prigozhin consistently denied being behind the Wagner Group prior to the invasion of Ukraine, even disclaiming its very existence. That is no longer necessary: In November, he celebrated the opening of a Wagner Center in eastern St. Petersburg, a high-rise office building where he offers space to patriotic bloggers and drone builders. The façade of the building reads "PMC Wagner Center" in large letters in Russian. PMC is the abbreviation for "private military company." "I conceived PMC Wagner. I lead PMC Wagner. I have always financed PMC Wagner," Prigozhin announced in January. It was only in 2022, he has said, that he "naturally had to find new funding sources." Among those who were around during the early days of the Wagner Group and who are familiar with Prigozhin’s headquarters on the Neva from the inside is Marat Gabidullin, a former mercenary with a sun-tanned, thoughtful face. "Prigozhin believes that God himself gave him the right to lead people, earn vast quantities of money and be an important person. And he is 100 percent convinced that all of his decisions are correct. He knows no limits," Gabidullin says in a video call from his apartment in the South of France. He has left Russia and written a book about the time he spent as a member of the Wagner Group. Gabidullin's story is one of gradual disillusionment. His nom-de-guerre was "Grandpa." He was already in his late 40s when he joined the mercenary army in 2015 – a former airborne officer with a penchant for drink and a conviction for murder. The demand for irregular troops was significant at the time: Following the Euromaidan Revolution in Kyiv, Russia had annexed the Crimea and launched a war in eastern Ukraine, but the Kremlin was interested in covering up its involvement. When possible, Russia’s leaders preferred sending in volunteers, Cossacks, mercenaries and militias. On April 1, 2015, Gabidullin got a job with Evro Polis, a company belonging to Prigozhin. The unit’s training camp was located in Molkino, right next to a base belonging to GRU, the military intelligence service. That made it abundantly clear that Prigozhin was operating with permission from on high. Gabidullin was ultimately sent to the Donbas. Prigozhin’s troops have been in the eastern Ukrainian industrial region since 2014, not just fighting against the Ukrainian army, but also against pro-Russian rebels when they showed signs of getting out of control. There are rumors circulating that the Wagner Group has eliminated several separatist leaders over the years. According to Gabidullin, the mercenaries surrounded and disarmed the Odessa Battalion, among others. The relationship with local militia units was tense. Initially, though, all that took place in secret. It was Putin’s military intervention in Syria that launched the Wagner Group into the public spotlight. The fighting force was unofficially called "Wagner," after the nom de guerre of its commander Dmitry Utkin, a former Spetsnaz officer with a penchant for Nazi symbols and SS tattoos on his chest. In contrast to the Donbas, Russia’s leadership didn’t want to cover up its involvement in Syria, but it did want to minimize official casualties. Russia sent in its air force to help the country’s dictator, Bashar Assad, cling to power, but Moscow didn’t want to get involved on the ground. Prigozhin’s mercenaries were intended to provide a bit of assistance. It put Gabidullin and his comrades somewhere between Russia and Syria. They were fighting on the ground with Russian equipment, but they were under contract to Syrian business leaders. When they found success, such as in 2016 with the first storming of Palmyra, others would take credit. But when they died, even that could be disclaimed. In early February 2018, during an attack on a natural gas field east of the Euphrates, Gabidullin and his comrades came under fire from American troops. According to leaked Wagner Group documents, 80 Russian mercenaries died in the incident. Gabidullin believes the number was closer to 100. They were essentially victims of the distance that Moscow wanted to maintain from Wagner. The regular Russian army did nothing to try to prevent the disaster, even though they had been warned by the U.S. After all, the troops didn’t formally belong to the Russian military. Gabidullin left the group in 2019. "When I joined Wagner, it was still a mercenary force. But then, Wagner became a slave army," he says bitterly. He estimates that it had grown by then to between 2,500 and 3,000 fighters. The Wagner Group became so well-known due to its activities in Syria that denying its existence became increasingly untenable and absurd. When the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar met in February 2018 with Defense Minister Shoigu in Moscow, Prigozhin could also be seen in the background. Officially, he was just in charge of serving lunch that day. But the press photos from Haftar’s delegation make it clear that Prigozhin was at the table for the negotiations – that "Putin’s chef" was nowhere near the kitchen. The Kremlin, after all, needed him, especially in Africa. Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin wanted to demonstrate Russia’s return to the African continent, but with cheaper means. Prigozhin helped him do so. The country where Wagner’s expansion to the African continent began was Sudan, of all places. From here, they spread to more than a dozen other countries on the continent, frequently following the same script: Weakened autocrat needs help and is willing to pay with access to raw materials. It is therefore no coincidence that on April 20, 2023, Prigozhin published an open letter to the two conflict parties in Sudan who have been openly waging war against each other for the past couple of weeks – the regular army on one side and the Rapid Support Forces on the other. In the letter, Prigozhin offered his services as a mediator. He has, he wrote, "long had ties" with the country and has "spoken with all decision-makers in the Republic of the Sudan." And that likely wasn’t an exaggeration. Back in 2017, Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir presented his country to the Russians as the "key to Africa" in a meeting with Putin at the Russian president’s Black Sea residence in Sochi. The Kremlin was interested in returning to the continent following decades of inactivity there, and also wanted a naval base on the Red Sea. The internationally isolated al-Bashir, meanwhile, was looking for help free of onerous conditions. Following al-Bashir’s meeting with Putin, the Sudanese signed a contract with M Invest, a company from Prigozhin’s empire, giving it a concession for gold prospecting. Prigozhin sent in geologists, minerologists, trainers and weapons, and launched a disinformation campaign. The deal – gold in exchange for holding onto power – soon failed. Following a wave of protests in the country, al-Bashir was overthrown by his own military on April 11, 2019. A week prior to the putsch, Prigozhin would later say, he had personally warned al-Bashir in Khartoum of "an apocalyptic scenario" if he didn’t "take consequences." What he meant by "consequences" became clear through a leak: Prigozhin’s advisers had provided a few ideas for how the dictator could bring the protests to an end, with the suggestions ranging from denouncing the opposition as "enemies of Islam and traditional values" to public executions. The cooperation between Prigozhin and the rulers in Khartoum survived the fall of dictator al-Bashir and a further putsch in 2021. New military deals were signed with Russia. Moscow officials have close ties to both generals in senior leadership: General Burhan and General Daglo, known as Hemeti. The cooperation with RSF leader Hemeti was of particular interest for Prigozhin. The general controls the vast goldmines in Darfur and South Kordofan and is involved in smuggling gold abroad. Prigozhin’s company delivered weapons to Hemeti’s RSF troops and received access to the gold trade in return, with the gold being smuggled out of the country onboard Russian aircraft. The U.S. broadcaster CNN was able to identify at least 16 such flights from early 2021 to mid-2022. Wagner is also thought to be involved in uranium mining in the country. In the most recent power struggle between Burhan and Hemeti, Moscow has officially declined to take sides. Prigozhin, for his part, has offered his services as a mediator, but has also reportedly delivered shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles to Hemeti’s RSF troops. Whether Prigozhin’s mercenaries are also involved in the fighting is unclear. Prigozhin claims that Wagner forces haven’t been in the country for the last two years. If Sudan was the "key to Africa" for Prigozhin, then the neighboring Central African Republic has become his primary base. Nowhere else can Wagner Group forces feel as at home as here. They have managed to accomplish what experts refer to as "state capture," the almost complete infiltration of all state functions. Russian soft and hard power found ideal conditions in the country. A civil war has been raging since 2012 and the power vacuum grew even larger in 2016, when the former colonial power of France brought its military intervention to an end. A UN mission failed to provide much help. President Faustin-Archange Touadéra ultimately turned to Moscow, with the Russians officially sending trainers in 2018, in addition to light weapons for the army. The trainers were Wagner mercenaries who got involved in the fighting themselves. In December 2020, they stopped a rebel advance on the capital, a success that Prigozhin’s people quickly turned into an action film that had its premiere in May 2021 in the stadium of Bangui, the country’s capital. They managed to keep President Touadéra in office and were able to take back large towns and main traffic arterials. Before long, they provided the presidential guard and Touadéra’s senior security advisers. Prigozhin’s people have a say in passing laws and installing or deposing politicians. Sometimes, Wagner mercenaries even directly collect customs payments at the country’s borders. Prigozhin’s people organize cultural events in the country and operate a radio station. Since 2019, Russian has been taught in the country’s schools. And just as in Sudan, Prigozhin’s companies have gained access to natural resources in the Central African Republic, including diamond and gold mines, but also to tropical hardwoods. As DER SPIEGEL recently reported together with its partners from the investigative network European Investigative Collaborations and the non-governmental organization All Eyes on Wagner, the mercenary group relies on a convoluted maze of companies to do so, with names like Lobaye Invest, Diamville and Bois Rouge. French President Emmanuel Macron has referred to Touadéra as a "hostage of the Wagner Group," and France suspended military and financial aid to the country in 2021. Russia – with Prigozhin’s help – succeeded in driving the former colonial power of France out of the country. This pattern would be frequently repeated, most obviously in Mali. Wagner Group mercenaries have been active in that country since 2021 at the invitation of the governing putschists, with their number estimated at between 1,000 and 1,600. They have far less influence on the government here than in the Central African Republic, but they have introduced a new severity and ruthlessness into the conflict, in which both Germany and France have been unsuccessfully engaged for years. In March 2022, Wagner mercenaries fighting alongside the Malian army killed more than 300 people in Moura, many of them civilians. The Russians are allegedly helping the government fight Islamist terrorism. "The Russians have an extremely broad definition of what a jihadi is. Sometimes, pants ending above the ankle is enough," a high-ranking European military officer told DER SPIEGEL. The security situation in the country, meanwhile, hasn’t improved. But the Wagner Group has been able to celebrate a different victory: In August 2022, the last French soldier left the country, marking the end of an almost decade-long military intervention by the former colonial power. The future of the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA is also in question. Britain, Egypt and Germany have all announced their intention to pull out their troops. The Wagner Group’s real success in Africa, says Samuel Ramani of the British think tank Rusi, has not been of a military nature, but in the manner in which they have been able to push through their own interests and in the effect it has had on Russia’s image. A PR victory. "They’ve been very good at 'state capture,' autocracy promotion and advertising Russia’s brand continent-wide," Ramani says. "But they haven’t done very well at fighting terrorism and extremism, which is what they claimed they’re seeking to do." When Russian troops marched into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Prigozhin’s mercenaries were not part of the invading army. On social media channels, Wagner Group recruiters turned away those seeking to fight in Ukraine. "Boys, it’s business as usual, no changes. Africa hasn’t vanished from the face of the earth." All that Prigozhin could do was to write enthusiastic commentaries for his news agency Ria Fan. "Our military columns are driving through the streets of the almost liberated city of Kharkiv, the Nazis in Kyiv are completely surrounded," he enthused on February 27, comparing the "jeweler-like" tactics of the Russian military to "micro-surgery." It wasn't just Vladimir Putin and the Russian Defense Ministry who suffered in early 2022 under the delusion of a rapid victory. Prigozhin, who today is so heavily critical of the army leadership, did as well. It would take almost an entire month before his troops also entered the war in Ukraine, fighting their first battle on March 3 near Popasna in the Donbas region. The mercenaries were able to take the town in time for May 9, the day Russia celebrates its World War II victory over the Nazis. And it proved to be a triumph for the Wagner Group – not just over the Ukrainians but also over the Russian competition. The regular army, after all, had been forced to break off its advance on Kyiv and was only making slow progress in the Donbas. A short time later, Prigozhin was awarded the country’s highest honor "Hero of the Russian Federation." It was apparently his reward for his victory in Popasna. The order from Putin granting the award remains confidential, but the medal itself is not. In August, if not before, Prigozhin appeared in public wearing the golden star on his chest. But the real reward from Putin is more valuable than the golden star – it is one that has lifted Prigozhin far above his competitors and far above the Russian legal system: It is his license to recruit fighters from Russian penal colonies. Starting in summer 2022, Prigozhin began touring the country’s prisons to personally recruit convicts. After all, he was familiar with the camps. His recruitment trips began in June at the latest, but it was only in September that a video of him in a colony in the European-Russian republic of Mordovia appeared. It shows Prigozhin standing in front of men dressed in black prisoner garb introducing himself as a representative of the "private military company Wagner." "I will take you along alive. But I won’t bring you all back alive," he says in the video. His promise: No matter what happened, nobody would return to a prison camp. Those who survived would be pardoned. And those who deserted would be shot. Even for Russia, it was a bizarre turn, one which made Prigozhin the master of life and death, freedom and bondage. It violates the logic upon which any state – even a dictatorship of the kind created by Putin – is based. It devalues the judiciary. "Why continue to investigate and pass judgment when someone like Prigozhin can come along and simply take the convicts with him?" wonders activist Vladimir Ossetchkin, who promotes prisoner rights. It also devalues military service: Fighting for one’s land suddenly becomes a penalty rather than an honor. And, in the eyes of more experienced Wagner mercenaries, it harms their own fighting machine. "When I heard about it, it was immediately clear to me: That’ll be a fuck up," Andrei Medvedev, a Wagner mercenary who fled to Norway, recalled in a conversation with DER SPIEGEL. He was fighting near Bakhmut when the first of the prisoners arrived and says that their missions immediately became more reckless. "Human life no longer mattered." For Prigozhin, though, the recruitment of prisoners solved a problem: Mercenary troops aren’t made for wars between large, modern armies. Prigozhin needed the few thousand professionals on his rolls in Africa. He didn’t want to sacrifice them in Bakhmut. Putin, on the other hand, wanted to rapidly fill the gaps in the Russian lines without asking the Russian populace to make even greater sacrifices. He had promised in March that he wouldn’t send conscripts or reserve soldiers into battle. The war was still supposed to be a mere "special military operation." Addressing Russian society, Prigozhin said: "It’s either prisoners or your children. You decide." It's not entirely clear how many prisoners he ultimately recruited. Vladimir Ossetchkin estimates the 2022 total to be several tens of thousands. The highest estimates hold that 50,000 men were recruited from prison camps throughout the year. Vladislav, 26, is one of the men who was recruited in a penal camp by Prigozhin himself. He tells his story as a Russian prisoner of war, sitting in a basement room of the Ukrainian military secret service agency HUR in Kyiv. His face is concealed by a mask. Vladislav was doing time for aggravated assault in Colony IK-6 in Samara when, as he describes it, the camp began preparing for a prominent visitor. The mobile phones that the prisoners could use in secret suddenly stopped working. Guards had to turn in their radios. Surveillance cameras were dismantled. On September 27, 2022, Vladislav says, Prigozhin’s helicopter landed directly on the camp premises before he then held a speech before the roughly 1,000 prisoners on the mustering ground, with senior officials from the Russian penitentiary authority at his side. "He said: 'I can get every one of you out of here, no matter what your sentence is. You’ll be free after half a year. You will be fighting on the second line against Nazis.'" Prigozhin, says Vladislav, then explicitly said that he preferred murderers for the task, especially those who had killed more than once. Pay was to be 200,000 to 240,000 rubles, the equivalent of between 2,400 and 2,900 euros. Vladislav had never before heard of Prigozhin or his Wagner Group. He only had another year to serve, but he was attracted by the promise that his criminal record would be wiped clean. "I could start over again from the beginning, find work, travel out of the country," he says. He immediately volunteered, without even asking his wife – the telephones didn't work anyway. Just over three weeks later, Vladislav was already at the front, not far from Lysychansk. It was pure hell. He was ordered on five separate occasions to storm enemy positions, he says, and had to defend freshly conquered positions in the meantime. Suddenly, nobody was talking any longer about fighting on the second line. In the first attack he took part in, he says, one-third of the 60 fighters who headed out before him were badly wounded. "The rest were 200s," he says, using Russian jargon for fatalities. Two men had refused to advance any further, he says, and were "reset to zero" by the commander himself upon their return. That meant: shot to death. Vladislav was surrounded and wounded, but he managed to make it back. After two days in the hospital, he had to go into battle once again. The fifth advance, again with heavy losses, would be his last. Other Wagner prisoners of war with whom DER SPIEGEL spoke have similar stories to tell: Recruitment in penal colonies, transfer to the Rostov region near the Ukrainian border, training near the frontlines in the Donbas. Each fighter received a six-digit metal tag with the letter K (for "Project K") and a combat name, which was automatically generated by a computer. Discipline was tight, with desertion, stealing, drinking and drug use all punishable by death. The penalties were carried out by the Wagner Group’s own security service, feared for its brutality. "I saw with my own eyes what they are capable of," says Vladislav, though he didn’t want to say what it was. Even in Ukrainian captivity, his fear remained. The longer the war lasted and the more prominent Prigozhin became, the louder his critique grew of Russia’s military leaders. In September, the Russian army made a hasty withdrawal from the Kharkiv region; and in November, a more orderly one from Kherson. For a time, it seemed as though Prigozhin was the only one capable of delivering battlefield successes. In early January, his men managed to take control of Soledar, a town neighboring Bakhmut. But in the detailed victory announcement released by the Russian Defense Ministry, the Wagner Group wasn’t mentioned even once. Only several hours later, a "clarification" was reluctantly added, noting that the "immediate assault" on the city came thanks to "the volunteers from PMC Wagner." Another three months would pass before the army spokesman would again utter the word Wagner. Already in December, Wagner men had released a video in which they called Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov a "faggot" because they hadn’t received the munitions they needed. In Russian prison parlance, that was a deadly insult, and an apology was apparently demanded of Prigozhin before the munitions question would be resolved. That, at least, is what he said in February, asking indignantly: "Apologize to whom? Confess to whom? One-hundred-forty million Russians, please tell me who should I apologize to so that my guys die half as many times?" It isn’t clear where exactly Putin stands in the conflict. Last summer, he backed Prigozhin and allowed him to tour the country’s prison camps recruiting fighters. And as recently as October, he created a new command structure for the invading army and placed a Prigozhin ally, General Sergei Surovikin, at the top. But in January, Putin reversed his decision and swapped out Surovikin with Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov. U.S. military expert Dara Massicot described the move on Twitter as "demoting their most competent senior commander and replacing him with an incompetent one." "Putin decided at the time that Prigozhin had to integrate himself into the plans of the General Staff," says political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya. But the Wagner Group was not disbanded. It even became known that the son of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, had joined the Wagner Group – though not as a bit of cannon fodder like the prisoners, but as an artilleryman. In mid-February, a video found its way onto the internet showing Wagner fighters using a picture of Gerasimov as a target. On February 22, Prigozhin even published an internal document, including a list of munitions, on the internet. The infighting within the Russian army could suddenly be followed on Telegram. That same day, a meeting was apparently held between Putin, Defense Minister Shoigu and Prigozhin – at least according to a U.S. intelligence memo leaked by a U.S. soldier on the platform Discord. But the dispute has continued. Prigozhin may be louder, but the army has far more leverage. They can cut off his munitions supplies at any time, and they have also apparently taken away his ability to recruit prisoners. Prigozhin has said that he hasn’t been able to recruit in Russia’s prison camps since February. The Defense Ministry now reserves that privilege for itself. For the prisoners, that has meant that they are no longer subject to the brutal discipline imposed by the Wagner Group and its security service. But the inhumane system has remained. It's just operated by someone else now. On the search for what will one day remain of Prigozhin in Russia, the village of Bakinskaya is a good place to start. On a recent Sunday morning, the fresh graves of Wagner Group members can be seen from afar, row upon row upon row. On each grave is a plastic floral arrangement in black, yellow and red in the shape of the Wagner emblem, complete with golden stars glittering in the morning sunlight. The graveyard is located less than 10 kilometers from the neighboring village of Molkino, where the Wagner Group operates a training center. A chapel belonging to the group is also nearby, which is the reason why the tiny village of Bakinskaya is home to a vast cemetery of fighters: DER SPIEGEL counted 45 rows during a visit in early April, more than 600 graves bedecked with Wagner wreaths – 12 times as many as just three months earlier. And they keep coming: A filthy truck with Rostov license plates is standing on the gravel path that runs through the middle of the cemetery, four zinc coffins lined up on its bed, each covered in red cloth. A small digger is excavating in the damp earth, with the workers then carrying the first casket to the new grave. No priest is present. The graves are bedecked with a simple Orthodox cross or a wooden marker meant to recall an Islamic headstone, each with a name, birthdate and date of death. There is the convicted murderer Roman Tokarev, 30, from the Belgorod region. Alexandr Gavrilov, 23, from Rostov-on-Don, who had been sentenced to seven years for dealing drugs. Their paths led them from Russia’s penal colonies via Ukraine to a village where nobody knows them and where some would rather not have them. DER SPIEGEL contacted more than 40 family members of Wagner fighters buried in Bakinskaya, but very few were interested in speaking. One of those who did agree to an interview was Larissa, the aunt of Andrei Kargin, 22, who was imprisoned in a penal camp in Volgograd for repeated theft. "He called me and said: I’m going to war on September 30," Larissa says. Six weeks later, he was dead – she received the news over the phone from a Wagner commander. But she was left to find out herself where her nephew’s body was buried. She searched for months, until someone finally sent her a photo of his grave in faraway Bakinskaya. A death certificate still hasn’t been issued, and she doesn’t know why. "They sent Andrushka and all the other prisoners into the meat grinder and turned them into hash." It isn’t clear how many Wagner fighters have already died in the conflict. The BBC and the Russian outlet Mediazona have reliably established the identities of 3,621 dead prisoners, but that is just a fraction of the real number. Across Russia and in the occupied regions of Ukraine, there are seven devoted Wagner cemeteries, in addition to the uncounted Wagner graves in other cemeteries. In the Krasnodar region alone, DER SPIEGEL found four other cemeteries with fresh graves bearing Wagner wreaths. Yevgeny Prigozhin visited the cemetery in Bakinskaya in early April, and that is also documented by video. In it, he is wearing his usual military jacket, one of his favorite sayings on the sleeve, a macabre rhyme in Russian: "Cargo 200 – we stay together.” Cargo 200 are the fallen. Prigozhin scans the fresh graves he has left behind, a satisfied look on his face. "Yes, the cemetery is growing,” he says. "Those who fight sometimes die. That’s how life is.” He then continues on his way. The war is calling. © 2023 Der Spiegel. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group. Read the original article at Der Spiegel.

G7-ländernas finansministrar har gjort upp om att öka stödet till Ukraina och skärpa sanktionerna mot Ryssland. Ländernas centralbankschefer utlovade samtidigt fortsatt inflationsbekämpning. Tredagarsmötet i Niigita i Japan avslutades med ett gemensamt uttalande på lördagen, där man bland annat också utlovar stöd till de som tar mest stryk av prisuppgångarna. I uttalandet finns dessutom åtaganden om att samarbeta för att bygga upp värdekedjor för att främja gröna energikällor och stärka den globala ekonomins sårbarhet inför olika typer av störningar. Bland annat utlovades lanseringen av Rise – ett partnerskap på området – till slutet av 2023. Hundratals miljarder till Ukraina När det gäller sanktioner mot Ryssland diskuterades nya sanktioner mot det ryska finanssystemet, men även åtgärder för att förhindra att länder hjälper Putinregeringen att finansiera kriget mot Ukraina med affärer i strid med sanktionerna. G7-ländernas stöd till Ukraina lyftes till 44 miljarder dollar (cirka 460 miljarder kronor) det närmaste året. Detta möjliggör i sin tur för Internationella valutafonden (IMF) att klubba ett stödpaket med ytterligare 15,6 miljarder dollar (cirka 160 miljarder kronor). Företrädare för Indien, Brasilien och Indonesien var med närvarande under samtalen, vilket var första gången sedan 2009 som G7 på finansministermöten bjudit in andra länders regeringar att delta. Mer banktillsyn och reglering Förutom sanktioner, Ukrainastöd och inflationsbekämpning diskuterades finansiella stabilitetsfrågor efter vårens finansiella problem i banksektorn, som bland annat slagit ut de amerikanska nischbankerna Silicon Valley Bank och First Republic Bank lett till en kris för den schweiziska förmögenhetsförvaltaren Credit Suisse – som slutade med att omfattande stöd och att banken togs över av konkurrenten UBS i en omstridd affär. Det finansiella systemet är trots turbulensen i banksektorn stabilt, enligt G7-ländernas regeringar. De utlovar dock mer arbete med tillsyn och reglering av banksektorn. Mötet i Niigata är en förberedelse för ett toppmöte med G7-ländernas stats- och regeringschefer i Hiroshima, Japan, nästa vecka.

Inflationen i USA mätt konsumentpriser sjönk till 4,9 procent i april. Förväntningarna på dagens inflationsbesked var att den skulle fortsätta ligga kvar på samma nivå (5 procent). Den underliggande så kallade kärninflationen i april, där man rensar bort energi- och livsmedelspriser, landade på 5,5 procent. Analytiker hade i snitt räknat med 5,5 procent i underliggande inflation i april. I mars låg den på 5,6 procent. Ekonomisk oro på flera håll För att bekämpa inflationen har den amerikanska centralbanken Federal Reserve (Fed) höjt styrräntan till intervallet 5-5,25 procent. De senaste månaderna har flera regionala banker krisat i den nya räntemiljön – senast var First Republic Bank som togs över av amerikanska myndigheter förra veckan och sedan såldes till storbanken JP Morgan Chase. Ett annat orosmoln på den amerikanska finanshimlen är statsskulden. USA:s finansminister Janet Yellen har sagt att USA kan slå i skuldtaket så tidigt som 1 juni. Med bara tre veckor kvar innan demokraterna och republikanerna måste vara överens blir läget allt mer pressat.