Green Cargo

Mest tjänar Anna Borg, vd för energijätten Vattenfall, med i snitt 1 450 000 kronor i månaden under 2023. Vattenfall är helägt av svenska staten. Sedan faller lönen till tvåan Postnord, som ägs gemensamt av Sverige och Danmark, vars vd Annemarie Gardshol tjänar 935 000 kronor i månaden. SJ:s vd Monica Lingegård och flygplatsoperatören Swedavias vd Jonas Abrahamsson har 512 000 respektive 480 000 kronor i månaden. Därefter följer Henrik Dahlin (godstransportbolaget Green Cargo), Joachim Hallengren (vägunderhållsbolaget Svevia), Åsa Sundberg (Teracom, som driver marknätet för radio och tv) och Stefan Gustavsson (järnvägsentrepenören Infranord) med 360 000–290 000 kronor i månadslön. Telia är börsnoterat, men har staten som största ägare genom Telia Company. Dess förra vd, Allison Kirkby, tjänade 1 530 000 kronor. Hon lämnade tjänsten i januari i år. För att få fram lönerna har Seko-Tidningen hämtat chefernas årslöner från bolagens årsredovisningar och delat med antalet arbetade månader. Pensionsavsättningar och förmåner är inte medräknade.

Skulle det gå att fasa ut fossila bränslen? Uppgiften är enorm, men enligt många är den inte omöjlig. Magasinet Fast Company lyfter fram att det faktiskt pågår konkret forskning – och kommersiella projekt – som syftar till att ersätta oljan inom flera industrigrenar – som transport, tillverkning och tung basindustri. Kassie Siegel vid amerikanska Center for Biological Diversity säger att det visserligen skulle kräva en ”andra världskriget-liknande” mobilisering, men att liknande utmaningar har hanterats tidigare. – Det handlar inte om att vi behöver ny teknologi. Teknologin finns redan tillgänglig. Det handlar om att öka takten på att få lösningarna på plats. Climate activists—and the U.N. Secretary-General—are calling for an end to fossil fuels. It could happen faster than you might think. By Adele Peters 25 sept, 2023 The world just lived through the hottest summer on record. Off the coast of Florida, the ocean temperature hit triple digits, killing coral reefs. Greece battled record wildfires. The extreme rain in Libya—where at least 11,000 people died in floods after dams collapsed—was made 50 times more likely by climate change. Phoenix spent 31 days above 110 degrees. Sea ice in Antarctica shrank to a record low, prompting what scientists called a “five-sigma event” that killed as many as 10,000 penguin chicks. Despite the fact that extreme climate impacts are already obvious, most companies and countries are still making only incremental changes to cut emissions (or, in some cases, are moving backward, like in the U.K., where the prime minister now wants to slow down plans to move to electric vehicles). But what would be possible if we committed to actually moving fast on climate action beginning with the largest challenge: phasing out fossil fuels? It’s an almost unimaginably massive task. Fossil fuels aren’t just used in the obvious places, like the billion-plus gas and diesel cars currently on the road, or thousands of power plants running on gas or coal. They’re in an endless list of products and materials, from sneakers and laundry detergent to the production of cement, steel, plastic, fertilizer, and virtually anything else made in a factory. The United Nations is calling for the world to reach net zero by 2050, with at least an 80% cut in emissions and the remaining emissions captured by nature or technology to pull carbon out of the air. (The goal includes emissions other than fossil fuels, like methane from cows on farms, but fossil fuels are the biggest part of the problem.) We’re not on track for that goal. But it still would be technically possible to replace the majority of fossil fuels even more quickly than the middle of the century, if we had the political will. Doing so would take “an all-out, World War Two-style mobilization,” says Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Our country’s met these types of massive challenges before and it can be done. It’s not a matter of you needing new technology; the technology is available today. It’s a matter of speeding the deployment of solutions.” Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who studied what it would take to transition to 100% clean energy in 145 countries—including by using renewable electricity and electrifying buildings, transportation, and industry—argues that from a technical and economic point of view, it would be possible to make most of the changes by the end of the decade. “We have 95% of the technologies we need to transition right now, so if we just deployed as fast as we could, we could transition at least 80% by 2030,” he says. The changes we need to make include scaling up renewable electricity and battery storage, moving to heat pumps and electric appliances in buildings, switching to electric vehicles, and using electric arc furnaces or green hydrogen at factories. “In terms of what can be done, it’s right there in front of us,” Jacobson says. Even the hardest-to-decarbonize industries are finding new solutions. This summer, the shipping giant Maersk rolled out a cargo ship that runs on green methanol that can be made from food waste. As recently as 2020, the shipping industry only aimed cut its emissions in half by 2050. When the International Shipping Organization met this year, it agreed to aim for net zero instead. Maersk plans to reach net zero even sooner, by 2045. That’s because so many new innovations in the shipping industry have emerged in the last five years, says Ryan Panchadsaram, an advisor at Kleiner Perkins and coauthor of Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now. The same thing is happening in other industries. In Sweden, a green steel factory is beginning to use hydrogen to make steel instead of fossil fuels; a group of global steel buyers also recently committed to buy 2 million tons of near-zero-emissions steel to help push other steel manufacturers to make the switch. A long list of startups are working on ways to decarbonize cement, another major source of global emissions, in ways that can compete in cost with traditional cement. Startups like Solugen are finding new ways to make chemicals without fossil fuels. Electric and hydrogen-electric airplanes are getting close to commercialization for short flights. One of the most challenging transitions will be long-distance flight, though hydrogen fuel cell planes or sustainable aviation fuel made from captured CO2 could fill that gap. (And the pandemic demonstrated that it’s possible to replace business trips with video conferencing in the middle of an emergency, like, say, a climate crisis that threatens civilization.) Jacobson argues that from a technical standpoint, it’s theoretically possible to move to 100% clean energy as soon as 2035. The biggest roadblock to the transition, unsurprisingly, is the fossil fuel companies. “What’s really holding us back is that oil and gas companies are not reinventing themselves as energy companies,” Panchadsaram says. “And as long as that happens, there is a very strong financial motive to prolong the transition.” Fossil fuel companies had an opportunity, after making record profits last year, to invest in clean energy; instead, they gave the money to shareholders and doubled down on oil and gas. Governments also still heavily subsidize fossil fuels, even while they talk about climate action. The fossil industry is also holding back renewable energy companies from growing as quickly as they could. Renewable companies “have the capacity as an industry to triple renewable energy production in the next seven years,” says Catherine Abreu, founder and director of the nonprofit Destination Zero. “The main thing standing in their way is they don’t have the enabling policy to do it on the ground in country. And a big part of why that is is because of the way the fossil fuel industry has rigged the regulatory and permitting system.” In Canada’s Alberta province, where the oil and gas industry has a strong presence, the government has currently “paused” approvals on new solar projects. Lawmakers in Texas are considering a similar ban, as “the fossil fuel industry is getting behind politicians and regulators to make sure that they shut down their competitors,” Abreu says. In the U.S., there are enough renewable energy projects in the pipeline to meet 2030 climate goals, but the incredibly slow pace of permitting means those projects aren’t getting built quickly enough. New grid infrastructure also needs to be built, but that’s possible too, as China has already shown by quickly adding high-voltage transmission lines across a sprawling country. In some developing countries with little infrastructure, the challenge is less about transitioning from fossil fuels and more about building new clean energy systems from scratch. “The thing that enables that is finance,” says Abreu. “The political will of governments to make the transition to reality has to be paired with money on the table to allow for every country around the world to move away from fossil fuel dependence within the same timeframe.” Right now, the lethargic pace of the transition means that we’re not on track to cut global emissions in half by 2030—and unless things change dramatically, we’ll go past 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, a point at which climate impacts get even worse. “We’re six and a half years away at this point, and every day that’s squandered, the challenge of attaining that goal is harder and harder,” says Max Holmes, president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. But it’s still possible to move faster from this point on. And if we do pass the 1.5-degree threshold, we’ll need to work even harder to cut emissions to avoid higher temperatures, and ultimately to bring the global temperature down. “With every increment of warming, the impacts of climate change get worse, more people are impacted, more ecosystems are impacted,” Holmes says. Speed is critical. A fast transition is feasible, says Panchadsaram. “If we all set our minds to it, could we do it? The answer is absolutely yes,” he says. “This isn’t science fiction anymore.” © 2023 Mansueto Ventures, LLC, as first published in Fast Company. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Talibanerna anstränger sig för att bygga upp ett stabilt gränsförsvar mot Afghanistans grannländer – men frågan är om de ens vet varför de patrullerar. Det skriver The Diplomat i ett reportage. Förutom att de flesta saknar uniformer råder brist på både fordon och vapen. Dessutom tror de sig söka efter väpnat motstånd – trots att omvärlden ser helt andra hot i de karga bergsmassiven i Centralasien. While the Taliban are serious about protecting the country’s borders, border guards face many problems and see completely different threats than the international community. By Franz J. Marty 8 August, 2023 NUSAI & MAIMAI, BADAKHSHAN, AFGHANISTAN — The two Taliban walked along the deserted dusty road, dwarfed by the massive rock cliffs towering all around them. The steady rushing of the water of the river snaking its way through the mountains swallowed the crunching sound of their steps. As they wore no uniforms, it would have been possible to mistake them for two men on a stroll enjoying the scenery. But they were on a patrol to guard the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan marked by the P  – one of many patrols that they and other Taliban conduct day and night. At one point, the higher-ranking of the two stopped and gestured across the river: “There is a Tajik patrol over there.” On the distant road on the other side, there were three Tajik soldiers. Dressed in crisp light-green camouflage and determinedly marching at a set distance from each other, they contrasted starkly with their Taliban counterparts, who still looked mostly like ragtag rebels. “They are always following us,” the Talib remarked. Except that they were not. The Tajik soldiers only marched from one to another of their neat outposts along the border – facilities that the two Taliban, whose sub-unit even lacked a proper main base, could only dream of. This and other impressions from an exclusive embed with Taliban border guards at a forlorn part of the Afghan-Tajik border in May of this year show that the Taliban are serious about guarding international borders, but also that their forces are ill-equipped. What’s more, they have a completely different threat perception than their neighbors and the international community. After the Islamist Taliban marched into Afghanistan’s capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, culminating a lighting offensive with the overthrow of the internationally backed Afghan Republic, many worried what would come next. Would the Taliban and newly announced resistance groups start another chapter of the bloody war that has been haunting Afghanistan for more than four decades? Would the Taliban fail to govern and leave behind a chaos ready to be exploited by international jihadists and narcotics smugglers? Almost two years later, the Taliban still rule practically all of Afghanistan, and frequently pride themselves of having brought peace and stability to the country. The fact that it was the Taliban themselves who, in the months and years before the fall of the Afghan Republic, initiated most of the violence – as well as the fact that most Afghans I know, including some Taliban, complain in private about Taliban rule, especially the dire state of the economy and various forms of repression and mismanagement – is dismissed as false propaganda by the Taliban regime. While much of the criticism against Taliban rule is justified, the Taliban are right when they point out that concerns about another all-out civil war, state collapse, and utter chaos did not materialize. While the self-declared Islamic State and some resistance groups continue to conduct attacks, they are relatively few. Instances of major open violence are even rarer. The state also did not collapse. Almost all state institutions survived the fall of the Republic, with the Taliban simply taking them over, frequently continuing to employ old Republican staff – a decidedly unexpected development, given the Taliban’s radically revolutionary outlook and constant vilification of all things related to the erstwhile Afghan Republic. In the case of the army, including the border guards, it was only a bit different. Given that the armed forces of the Republic completely disintegrated during the Taliban takeover, the Taliban had to re-build them. However, they did so mirroring the organizational structure of the defeated army of the Republic. Re-established units have the same numbers, headquarters, and area of responsibility, with only few name and other changes, and for running the administration and other technical aspects the Taliban have regularly enrolled former soldiers and officers of the Republic. This was also the case for the unit guarding the forlorn stretch of the Afghan-Tajik border in the districts of Nusai, Maimai, and Shekai in the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan that I visited. The Taliban there take their newfound positions seriously. Officers in the battalion HQ in Nusai dutifully plan which unit and soldiers will patrol when and where or perform other tasks, doing this on pre-printed schedules and forms in ledgers that are either the same as the Afghan Republic used or very similar. Soldiers who have completed a task have to confirm so by stamping their fingerprints on the same forms, a common replacement for a signature given the high rate of illiteracy in Afghanistan. “The whole day is clearly structured,” one Taliban officer further elaborated. “Every morning after prayers, all soldiers with no special duties have to attend theory lessons and general exercise followed by various assigned tasks such as guard duty and patrols.” In the smaller units in the field, the atmosphere is less military and more improvised. But also in such outposts, there is no slack. For example, the men from the block in Tangshew, a side valley in Maimai and one of the most remote postings, are patrolling day and night, hardly ever sleeping more than a very few hours. “It is good that everywhere we go, there are mountain streams. If we get tired, one splash of their always ice-cold water in the face gets us awake again,” one Talib soldier said when asked whether they did not get exhausted. All in all, and contrary to common perception in the West, the Taliban indeed try to run a responsible government, including guarding Afghanistan’s international borders. The problem is that the Taliban are not as adept at governing as they claim – and that they have a completely different outlook on border security than neighboring states. While official slick propaganda videos frequently posted by the Taliban show their armed forces as impeccably uniformed, well-equipped, and professional soldiers, the reality looks a bit different. Most immediately apparent is the lack of uniforms of many soldiers. Most of the Taliban border guards in Nusai, Maimai, and Shekai, as well as along the 21-hour-drive to get from Badakhshan’s capital Faizabad to Nusai, lacked uniforms and still wore traditional Afghan tunics as during their days as an insurgency. And this only foreshadowed much more serious issues. For example, the battalion that is responsible for guarding the Afghan-Tajik border in Nusai, Maimai, and Shekai had in total only three functioning vehicles. “Only one, a Toyota Hilux, was officially provided by the chain of command; the other two, both Ford Rangers, are from the private war loot of Juma Khan [the main local Taliban commander],” one Talib explained. One outpost in Shekai used to have another Ford Ranger, but it has long sat on the side of the road, hamstrung by flat tires and other irreparable damage. “Please tell Taliban officials in the center of Badakhshan and in Kabul that we really do need a car,” a Talib commander there asked me. His prior pleas via usual official channels had yielded no results. A higher-ranking officer in the brigade HQ said he faced the same problems when he tried to secure additional vehicles for the Nusai battalion and other units. Others were even in a more dire situation. While on most outposts one or several Taliban at least have private motorcycles to travel along regularly long distances in the only sparsely inhabited sprawling mountain landscape, the outpost in Tangshew does not even have that. Also here a Talib asked me to help: “We need at least a motorcycle, as we cannot cover our whole area of responsibility on foot.” This lack of proper vehicles is also not limited to forlorn border areas. When asking in the Taliban army division in Faizabad whether I might hitch a ride on a military vehicle to Nusai, an officer replied that they do not have many vehicles and do not drive frequently there. “The majority of our soldiers go there by shared cabs [on this route, Toyota Land Cruisers], which are anyway better than our cars,” the officer added, seemingly not realizing what light this cast on the state of his division.

With respect to armament, in some smaller units at the border the situation is even more peculiar. “Our company has 41 men and we have a total of only nine assault rifles,” a Taliban officer in Chormaj Bolo in Maimai said. In the block in Tangshew, it was only 10 rifles for 25 men. They also face ammunition shortages. “I have only bullets in three magazines, each of which takes 30 bullets but none of which is full,” one soldier said. “For our only PK [belt-fed machine gun] we have only about 100 bullets left,” his comrade added. He then picked up the gun, mockingly aiming at a bridge spanning a tributary to the border river and the still snow-capped craggy mountains in the distance. “We would be swiftly shot out.” Taliban soldiers at the border in Badakhshan not only lack sufficient uniforms, vehicles, weapons, and ammunition, but also payment. Numerous Taliban border guards in Nusai and Maimai all told me that none of them had been paid their salary since September 2022 – a gap of more than six months at that time. And while some money continued to arrive to cover food and other expenses in the bases and outposts, Taliban officers in Chormaj Bolo and Tangshew said that they pay rent from their own pockets for the bare and simple mud-walled rooms that they lease from locals to use as rudimentary HQs. In Tangshew, this room is a 1.5-hour foot march away from the border, more than suboptimal for a border protection force. “We started building a small house for our unit right at the border, but then we did not receive any payments anymore and we could not complete the work,” one of the border guards said. Low unfinished walls of neatly stacked natural stones on one of the few even spots between the rock cliffs, the only road, and the border river bore witness to his comment. How Taliban border guards apparently nonetheless manage to pay rent and feed their families without salary is puzzling. Asked about it, almost all Taliban reply “Allah provides” or some variation of it. One Talib, when pushed, was more honest: “We get what we need on credit. But I cannot run up debts like this. I am in favor of the Taliban, but if I am not paid soon, I will be forced to quit and till my land or emigrate to provide for my family,” he eventually said. Others saw it the same way. For anyone who has spent time in Afghanistan, such complaints about supply and equipment shortages, soldiers not getting paid, and general neglect ring a not distant bell. Similar stories were widespread among soldiers and policemen of the toppled Afghan Republic, right up until the latter’s overthrow in August 2021. “We are aware of these problems, and they are being resolved, including payment of all past salaries,” Fasihuddin Fetrat, the Taliban’s Army Chief of Staff, replied to me later in May 2023 after I relayed the complaints of his soldiers. “The reason for all these issues is that we upgraded the border force unit in Nusai from a company to a battalion and the battalion has not yet been formally taken on the books,” he added. Why this could not be resolved during several months remained unclear. The difficult circumstances of having just established a new army – and transporting equipment to all corners of a hardly developed mountainous country – might explain some delay, but not one of over six months. This is all the more the case, as the Taliban frequently boast about how they face no notable issues, how many vehicles of the old army they have repaired, and how they have safeguarded the vast armories of the Afghan Republic. Even if the above problems were eventually resolved, all would not be well. While the Taliban in the units I visited were all dedicated to guard the border, most of them did not really seem to know what exactly they are doing. Asked about why they patrol, most Talib border guards replied that they are looking for mukholefin — meaning “opponents.” When I followed up, some clarified that they were talking about the Resistance, shorthand for the National Resistance Front. The anti-Taliban group is led by Ahmad Massoud, the son of late Ahmad Shah Massoud who famously put up armed resistance against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and later the Taliban during their first reign of Afghanistan that ended with the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. “Tajikistan shelters the Resistance. There are 300 soldiers from the old Afghan army in Tajikistan, trying to strike us from across the river,” one young blonde Talib border guard in Nusai gravely said, echoing statements of others. According to one Talib officer in Nusai, looking for the alleged Resistance presence on the Tajik side was also directly ordered. “In early 2023, a written order arrived from the brigade. It stated that the Resistance is a threat and that they were given places in outposts on the Tajik side right at the border river,” he elaborated. Some Taliban border guards even claim that the Resistance is a serious problem on the Afghan side of the border. “The main threat for us comes from up [Tangshew] valley, not from down [the border],” one Talib said. It was a peculiar statement for a border guard. The presence of some Resistance members up-valley, in a remote, large area known as Shewa, is possible. In September 2022, the Taliban launched a bigger operation against the Resistance in Shewa, which dealt a blow to the latter. Another Talib officer acknowledged though that, as of May 2023, 50 to 60 Resistance fighters still remained there. The assertion of the Talib soldier that these Resistance fighters would take over whole border areas if the block of Taliban border guards in Tangshew was not there and patrolling the upper valley is a clear exaggeration, though. This focus on Afghan resistance to Taliban rule in Badakhshan is not limited to Maimai and Nusai. In mid-May, Taliban notables in the provincial capital, Faizabad, referred to past explosions in their city and possible problems in Khwahan District, and were very concerned about the wounding of a Taliban soldier in Keron wa Manjon District. The Taliban soldier was shot three times by unknown perpetrators. “And that in his own house,” one of the highest-ranking Taliban in Badakhshan said in disbelief. Such open acknowledgement of concern about resistance from Afghans in Badakhshan is surprising as it not only contradicts the Taliban’s own propaganda, according to which there is no resistance to their rule, but also because it is objectively hardly justified. The National Resistance Front’s attempts to hold out in Panjshir, a province located between Kabul and Badakhshan, were short-lived. On September 6, 2021, about three weeks after the fall of the capital Kabul and the rest of the country, Taliban forces took over Panjshir with resistance fighters scattering into remote mountain areas. And while the National Resistance Front continues to target the Taliban in small attacks in Panjshir and elsewhere, such incidents are limited and currently no significant threat to Taliban rule. The same is true for other resistance groups, most notably the Afghanistan Freedom Front. Some of them indeed found shelter in Tajikistan. However, there is no credible indication that Tajikistan is providing additional support, not to speak of letting them use Tajik outposts right at the border. In view of all this, border guards have trouble articulating what, exactly, they are looking for when patrolling. “We look out for anything suspicious,” a Talib in Maimai asserted. Despite several efforts, he and others failed to say what this actually means. Most if not all border guards in Nusai and Maimai appear to patrol for the sake of patrolling, hardly looking out for anything. The only time a patrol did find something during my visit was rather peculiar. Driving along the border road in Nusai, the Taliban riding on the cargo load in the back of the Ford Ranger suddenly got agitated, beckoning the driver to stop. As soon as the car came to a halt, they jumped down, with two or three of them shooting five to six bullets into the mountain side. Eventually, it turned out that they had spotted – and shot – a snake. With Kalashnikov rifles. “All snakes here are poisonous, and it would have been a danger for passing people or cattle,” one Talib claimed. Even if the snake was poisonous, the response was an overkill, an assessment with which one Talib agreed. Locals and border guards on the Tajik side must have even wondered more what the shots were about. A Talib officer later recounted yet another questionable patrol episode that also took place in Nusai in mid-May. “In the darkness of one night, a patrol of the [Taliban’s] intelligence service mistook our men [i.e a border guard patrol] for Resistance enemies,” he said. “They had already laid an ambush and were in firing positions when they finally realized their mistake,” he added, laughing. The fact that they barely avoided a bloody friendly fire incident did not seem to bother him much. Checking the very few cars that pass along the road following the border is also affected by soldiers apparently mindlessly following questionable orders. At every one of the few checkpoints on the long drive along the border, as in any other place elsewhere in the country, Taliban soldiers dutifully stop cars, but then only ask “Where have you come from?” and “Where are you going to?” That the generic replies of drivers hardly tell anything of relevance and could anyway be easily made up does not seem to occur to the Taliban. Soldiers apparently simply have to ask these questions so that they are asking something. In at least one case, Taliban even missed one of the very few passing cars in Maimai, as the Taliban who were supposed to conduct controls, to escape the hot sun, rested in the only shadowy spot available – which did not allow a clear view of the road. While similar things arguably occur to some extent in any military, within the border guards in Nusai and Maimai, they seem more serious and the norm. And the outlined problems are apparently neither recognized nor addressed. In mandatory morning lessons in the battalion HQ in Nusai, which could be used to improve such issues, the focus certainly lies elsewhere. The lessons consist of listening to excerpts of the Holy Quran in original Arabic and translation and religious lessons whose topics range from practical, but hardly pressing (e.g. how to cover bodies for burial), to odd (e.g. prayers during a solar eclipse) and concerning (e.g. that Islam has no borders and that national borders should be torn down in jihad). In a stark contrast to their worries about the Resistance, Taliban border guards downplay or deny concerns of neighboring countries and the wider international community about narcotics smuggling and foreign jihadists residing in Afghanistan. “Our emir banned the production and trade of narcotics, so this problem has been resolved,” one Talib in Nusai asserted. While the Taliban indeed enforced this order from April 2022 and significantly reduced narcotics production, the Taliban in Nusai act as if the order alone magically and completely resolved this vast issue. Trying to have a more differentiated discussion about remaining narcotics production and trafficking – for example, pointing to detailed research showing that contrary to other places, in Badakhshan opium production has so far not been reduced – is a futile effort. Taliban simply reject any contestation of their assertions, which is obviously more than problematic for any serious engagement with their regime. Similar problems also affect worries about foreign jihadists inside Afghanistan. “There are no foreign fighters here,” one Talib said, repeating the constant refrain of the Taliban Emirate. Asked about a graffiti tag reading “M ARSALON,” the nom de guerre of a jihadist hailing from Tajikistan, painted on a rock in Nusai that is facing toward Tajikistan, two Taliban officers eventually acknowledged that Arsalon and some other fighters from Tajikistan used to be in Nusai. “He was a dangerous man,” one of the officers said. “He and other Tajikistanis left after our victory [over the Afghan Republic],” he then claimed, adding, “I don’t know where to.” According to a recent U.N. report, Mehdi Arsalon, whose real name was Muhammad Sharipov, was killed in Kabul in September 2022. Recently, though, one well-placed source mentioned that Arsalon might still be alive. That said, well-placed other sources corroborated that there are indeed no Tajikistani jihadists anymore at the border in Afghan Badakhshan. However, these sources also credibly stated that such jihadists had only moved – first to other places in Badakhshan and, in June 2023, to other Afghan provinces, first and foremost the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, which also borders Tajikistan. The same sources also said that the militants remain largely unrestricted and in close contact with the Taliban. The fact that Tajikistani jihadists are not located right at the border anymore, does also not mean that the threat has been neutralized. Tajik authorities as well as the independent Tajik news outlet Bomdod reported that, in late April 2023, a group of jihadists who hail from Tajikistan but have been residing in Afghanistan crossed the Tajik border river to conduct “terrorist operations” in Tajikistan. On the Tajik side, they were soon detected by Tajik security forces and a firefight ensued. While official Tajik statements implied that only two men crossed and were “neutralized,” a well-placed source as well as a Tajik local cited by Bomdod asserted that three to four more men crossed – and managed to escape. Confronted with this, several Taliban in Badakhshan rejected that any such incident took place. “It’s all lies,” exclaimed a Talib of the unit in whose area of responsibility the incident happened. The exact place of the reported crossing was between the village of Amurn on the Afghan side and the mouth of the Yazgulem valley on the Tajik side. The border river, Panj, flows quietly there, making it easier to cross. And it is also a good spot if one wants to avoid Taliban patrols: The place lies right at the border between the areas of responsibility of two Taliban border guard units, and is so far away from the responsible block that Taliban patrols visit it at best every two weeks or so. When I pointed this out and asked the Talib how they can be sure that nothing happened, if they only rarely go to the area, he evasively replied that they would have heard it from locals. Another Talib, more honestly, agreed with me: “He is right; we can’t know.” To be fair, even the most professional and best equipped border force in the world would not be able to control every spot along such a rugged and remote border. However, the fact that Taliban border guards in Badakhshan are indeed thinly spread and not only ignore but outright deny clearly existing concerns of illegal crossings (and there are other examples at the Afghan-Pakistani border), is a worrisome mix. All this – the Taliban’s paranoia about hardly active armed resistance and their blatant denial of other cross-border threats that worry neighboring states and the wider international community – do not bode well for any interaction between the Taliban and other states. The parties involved are talking at cross-purposes. A change in this is also unlikely. Most Taliban, like the ones who felt shadowed by Tajik patrols on the other side of the river, are convinced that everyone is actively plotting to overthrow their Emirate. Accordingly, the Taliban are set to continue patrolling their borders, looking for mostly imagined enemies. © 2023 The Diplomat. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Storföretag som Volvo Cars, Stora Enso, SSAB och Green Cargo vill att fler banarbeten ställs in i på grund av Trafikverkets planeringsproblem. Det rapporterar Dagens Nyheter som har tagit del av ett brev som företrädare för storföretagen skickat till regeringen. I brevet skriver företrädarna att det varit mycket debatt om inställda passagerartåg och sena biljettsläpp inför storhelger, men att tågstrulets ekonomiska skada är ”mångdubbelt större”. Företagen efterfrågar också ett möte om situationen.

80 procent av världens kol bedöms behöva stanna i marken för att världen ska ha en chans att nå klimatmålen. Och de flesta tycks överens om att det ska ske genom att stoppa finansiering av fossila bränslen. Men samtidigt går kolindustrin som tåget, rapporterar The Economist. I en kartläggning konstaterar tidningen att industrin är fortsatt vinstdrivande och välfinansierad. Förra året nådde efterfrågan 8 miljarder ton för första gången någonsin. The financiers saving the world’s dirtiest fuel from extinction By The Economist 4 June 2023 Mountains of coal are piled beneath azure skies at the port of Newcastle, Australia. Giant shovels chip away at them, scooping the fuel onto conveyor belts, which whizz it to cargo ships that can be as long as three football pitches. The harbour’s terminals handle 200m tonnes of the stuff a year, making Newcastle the world’s biggest coal port. Throughput is roaring back after floods hurt supply last year. Aaron Johansen, who oversees ncig, the newest, uber-automated terminal, expects it to stay near all-time highs for at least seven years. Rich Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, are hungry for the premium coal that passes through the terminal. So, increasingly, are developing ones like Malaysia and Vietnam. Halfway across the world the mood music is rather different. In recent weeks activists have made use of quotes from great writers, including Shakespeare (“Don’t shuffle off this mortal coil”) and the Spice Girls (“Stop right now”), to disrupt annual-general meetings of European banks and energy firms, as part of a call for an end to coal extraction. A broader chorus worries that the fuel is the biggest source of greenhouse gas, making up 42% of energy-related carbon emissions in 2022. The un says output must fall by 11% a year to keep warming less than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The International Energy Agency (iea), an official forecaster, argues against opening new mines and expanding existing ones. Climate wonks think that 80% of reserves must remain unburnt. This is mainly meant to happen by starving the supply chain of funding. More than 200 of the world’s largest financiers, including 87 banks, have announced policies restricting investments in coal mining or coal-fired power plants. Lenders representing 41% of global banking assets have signed up to the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, pledging to align portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050. At the cop26 summit in 2021, the un predicted that this campaign would “consign coal to history”. As recently as 2020 the iea believed consumption had peaked a decade ago. Yet King Coal looks brawnier than ever. In 2022 demand for it surpassed 8bn tonnes for the first time. This article will look at who is greasing the wheels of the once doomed trade. We find that the market is lively, well-funded and profitable. More striking still, the motley crew bankrolling it will probably allow trade to endure well into the 2030s, lining survivors’ pockets to the detriment of the planet. It is tempting to see 2022 as exceptional. Russia cut piped gas to Europe, and Europe banned coal imports from Russia. The bloc turned to liquefied natural gas (lng) destined for Asia and thermal coal from Colombia, South Africa and distant Australia. Meanwhile, Asian countries reliant on Russia’s premium coal also diversified. Prices for top grades jumped. Europe’s poorer neighbours, priced out of the gas market, gorged on lower-grade stuff. Now the storm has abated. After a mild winter, European utility firms retain good stocks of gas and coal. But as the need to power cooling units rises in the summer, coal imports will accelerate. China’s economy has emerged from zero-covid; India’s is going gangbusters. Traders expect global use to grow by another 3-4% this year. Coal is likely to remain sought after beyond 2023. True, demand in Europe will fall as renewables ramp up. It is already low in America, where fracked gas is cheaper. Yet last year’s crunch has reminded Asia’s import-dependent countries that, when energy is scarce, coal can be a lifeline. It is cheaper and more abundant than other fuels, and once loaded on pretty basic ships can be sent anywhere—unlike lng, which requires vessels and regasification terminals that take years to build. China is planning 270 gigawatts of new coal-fired plants by 2025, more than any country has installed today. India and much of South-East Asia are following a similar path. Even with a speedy Western exit from coal, Boston Consulting Group thinks thermal coal demand will fall by just 10-18% between now and 2030. Much of the demand will be met by domestic production in China and India, the world’s biggest consumers. But imports will still be crucial. Investment banks do not expect traded volumes to drop below 900m tonnes, from 1bn last year, for much of the decade. One, Liberum Capital, thinks imports will rise over the next five years. Will the global coal market continue to meet stubborn demand? Our research suggests it will. That is because there will remain cash for three vital links in the supply chain: trading and shipping; more digging at existing mines; and new projects. Financing trade is the easy part. Modelling for The Economist by Oliver Wyman, a consultancy, suggests high prices, together with the longer journeys made by rerouted exports, buoyed the working-capital needs of coal traders in 2022 to $20bn, four times the historical average. Assuming average coal prices remain above $100 a tonne, as many analysts do, those needs will sit above $7bn until at least 2030. Commodity merchants retain access to generous sources of liquidity to finance coal purchases. One is corporate borrowing, via multi-year bank loans or bonds, which gives firms a lump sum they can use however they want. Traders can also draw on short-term, revolving credit facilities, provided by clubs of banks. Many such lines have been expanded since the start of 2022—their limits often reach several billion dollars—to help traders cope with volatile prices. Banks that impose restrictions, specifying the money should not be used to buy coal, face a high risk that traders decamp to lenient rivals. So few do. Conversations with finance chiefs at trading firms reveal that banks in countries where trading is bread-and-butter, including Singapore’s dbs and Switzerland’s ubs, still finance coal purchases. Swiss cantonal lenders are happy to help. Banks in consuming countries, like China or Japan, also oblige, as does Britain’s Standard Chartered, which focuses on Asian business. (dbs and Standard Chartered both point out they are reducing their exposure to thermal coal.) Only European lenders—particularly French ones—have exited. They are being replaced by banks from producing countries, such as Australia, Indonesia and South Africa. Smaller, “pure-play” coal traders have faced a bigger squeeze. Banks, which never made much money from them anyway, can hardly claim to be unaware of how lent funds are put to use. Last year some traders were forced to borrow from private vehicles, often backed by wealthy individuals, at annual rates nearing 25%—about five times standard costs. Yet after months of booming business many no longer need external financing. A banker says some of his coal-trading clients saw profits grow ten-fold in 2022. One in London witnessed his total equity leap from £50m ($62m) in 2021 to £700m in 2023. To then ship the stuff to buyers, traders often need a guarantee, provided by a reputable bank, that they will be paid on time. Ever fewer lenders are keen to provide such “letters of credit”, but there are ways around this, too. Some traders charge their clients more to cover counterparty risk. It helps that exposure is limited. At today’s prices, a cargo of coal may be worth just $4-5m. By contrast, an oil tanker may carry $200m-worth of crude. Others insert trusted intermediaries in the trade, or ask for bigger guarantees on other wares being bought by the client. Some governments in recipient countries provide the guarantee themselves, or even pay upfront. Outside South Africa, where rail strikes have paralysed transport, there is plenty of infrastructure on land to move coal about. Soon there will be even more. Global Energy Monitor, a charity, reckons that India plans to more than double its coal terminals to 1,400 (today the planet counts 6,300). Seaborne logistics are more restricted: pressured by green shareholders, some shippers have started to shun coal. But smaller ones, often Chinese or Greek, have stepped in. Traders report no difficulty in insuring the cargo. Even sanctions-hit Russia is exporting most of its coal, using the same mix of obscure traders and seafarers, based in Hong Kong or the Gulf, that it employs to ship its oil to Asia. Financing more digging at existing mines—the second link in the supply chain—is no problem either. Last year coal production hit a record 8bn tonnes. It is not quite business as usual. Since 2018 many mining “majors” (large, diversified groups listed on public markets) have sold some or all of their coal assets. Yet rather than being decommissioned, disposed assets have been picked up by private miners, emerging-market rivals and private-equity groups. New owners have no qualms about making full use of mines. In 2021 Anglo American, a London-based major, spun off its South African mines into a new firm that instantly pledged to crank up output. Like traders, the miners have been printing money. Australia’s three biggest pure-play coal producers went from posting net debt of $1bn in 2021 to $6bn in net cash last year. They have repaid most of their long-term borrowing, so have no big deadlines to meet soon. “The conversation has gone from ‘How do I refinance my debt?’ to ‘What do I do with my extra cash?’,” says a finance chief at one of them. Coal miners can still borrow money when needed. Data compiled by Urgewald shows that they secured an aggregate $62bn in bank loans between 2019 and 2021. According to the charity’s research, Japanese firms (smbc, Sumitomo, Mitsubishi) were the biggest lenders, followed by Bank of China and America’s jpMorgan Chase and Citigroup. European banks also featured in the top 15. During this period coal miners, mainly Chinese, also managed to sell $150bn worth of bonds and shares, often underwritten by Chinese banks. The liquidity is not drying out. Urgewald calculates that in 2022 60 large banks helped channel $13bn towards the world’s 30 largest coal producers. This is possible because the coal-exclusion policies of financial firms are wildly inconsistent. Many do not kick in until 2025. Some cover only new clients. Others prohibit financing for projects, but not general corporate loans that miners may use to dig for coal. Policies that do restrict such lending often do so only for miners that derive lots of their revenue from coal, typically 25% or 50%. Many big firms, including Glencore, a Swiss commodities giant which produces 110m tonnes a year, fall below such thresholds. Some policies are vaguely worded to allow for exemptions. Although Goldman Sachs, a bank, promises to stop financing thermal-coal mining companies that do not have a diversification strategy “within a reasonable timeframe”, it has reportedly continued to lend to Peabody, a huge Australian miner that derived 78% of its revenue from coal sales in 2022 (it may have helped that the firm recently launched a modest solar subsidiary). Out of 426 large banks, investors and insurers assessed by Reclaim Finance, another charity, only 26 were deemed to have a coal-exit policy consistent with a 2050 net-zero scenario. Even fewer have said they will exit completely. Most of China and India’s state-owned banks have said nothing at all. In short, few banks are ready to hurt their top line or their country’s supply. Analysts reckon that this will help existing mines meet demand until the early 2030s. At this point, there may finally be a crunch. Western banks, many of which periodically revise their policies, will gradually tighten the screws. The paucity of new projects today—the third link in the chain—means there may not be enough fresh supply when old mines stop producing. Although finance for new projects is getting harder to attain, it is still available. As Western banks retreat, other players are coming to the fore. Capital expenditure by Western miners has been feeble for years. Having spent big in the 2000s, many suffered when prices crashed in the mid-2010s. Even though they are making hefty profits again, the majors prefer to buy rivals, reopen old mines or return capital to shareholders rather than launch new ventures. The investment drought is most severe in coal. Building a pit from scratch can take more than a decade. Years are spent obtaining permits, which in the West are increasingly refused. Financing for new projects in rich countries is a particular hurdle. Last year Adani Group, an Indian firm that runs Carmichael, a mega coal mine being built in Queensland, had to refinance out of its own pocket $500m in bonds it had issued for the project. Some opportunistic pots of money will continue to target juicy profits, especially if prices rise. The first deep coal pit to be dug in Britain in decades is ultimately owned by emr Capital, a private-equity firm incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Peter Ryan of Goba Capital, an investment firm in Miami, expects its coal assets, which span the whole supply chain, to grow eight-fold by 2030. The picture in Asia, though, is different. Banks are still on the scene. Asian investors are starting to back new mines at home. Family offices, set up to invest the fortunes of the rich, are increasingly interested. Any business dynasty in Indonesia, where mining is the backbone of the economy, has to have some coal in its holdings, says a trader who sources his wares there. In India obscure property firms are bidding for land that may be mined for coal. Eventually companies from the same countries may come to dig mines overseas, with banks following them. Chinese forays in the West will remain rare; Indian and Indonesian firms, which already own an archipelago of coal assets in Australia, are bound to increase their footprint. The coal market of the 2030s will thus look very different. “From ownership and operation to funding and consumption, coal will be a developing-market commodity,” predicts a boss of a mining major. Supply constraints will keep prices high, but the cast of exporters cashing in will shrink. Colombia and South Africa, which serve Europe, will no longer have a market. Russia will find it harder to flog cargoes to China, despite discounts. All three will export less coal for less money. Australia will appease critics by focusing on the most efficient coal: it may export lower volumes, but charge more. Indonesia could become the swing exporter, like Saudi Arabia is for oil today. It will sell more of its basic coal—often for more money. Although coal is on a downward slope, its goodbye is likely to be an uncomfortably long one. By the 2040s demand may finally crater for good, as enough renewables come on stream. Yet even then some countries may choose to keep their options open. More energy shocks will come. “And when there is one, the commodity no one wants is the one we need to use again,” says a big trader who serves Asia. “That feature of coal could stay for ever.” © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

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.

Kampen mot klockan fortsätter. I dag – vid 15.00 – kan det första steget i Sekos strejk starta om man inte når en överenskommelse om förbättrade arbetsvillkor. Strejken kommer ha stor påverkan på Öresundstågen. Den 2 maj varslade Seko, Service- och kommunikationsfacket om strejk för cirka 1200 medlemmar. I dag kan det första steget i strejken tas. Konflikten handlar om den, enligt Seko, bristande framförhållningen i schemaläggningen. Arbetsgivarsidan, Almega tågföretagen har tidigare sagt att de inte kommer kunna gå med på kravet om scheman som låses 14 dagar i förväg. Inte heller den arbetstidsförkortning som Seko krävt. Förhandlat via medlare Förhandlingarna har inte skett parterna emellan utan via medlare – och på torsdagsmorgonen har man ännu inte nått något avtal. Om Almega och Seko inte når en överenskommelse kan det första av tre planerade steg i strejken bryta ut i dag, något som kommer att påverka Öresundstågen. De 200 anställda i det första steget är Därefter kommer strejk att påbörjas i Stockholms tunnelbana, Green Cargo och SJ den 15 och 18 maj och kommer även att påverka Mälardalstrafik, Götalandståg, Pågatåg samt godståg.

Deadline för dagens förhandlingar är klockan 15.00.

Stora störningar i den svenska tågtrafiken väntas om fackförbundet Sekos strejkhot blir verklighet.
SJ har nu beslutat att stoppa biljettförsäljningen helt på flera populära sträckor. – Som en försiktighetsåtgärd tog vi beslutet att spärra avgångarna som berörs, säger Jonas Olsson, presskommunikatör på SJ. Seko, Service- och kommunikationsfacket, har varslat om strejk för omkring 1 200 medlemmar i tågbranschen. Fackförbundet meddelade tidigare i veckan att man fortfarande inte kommit överens med Almega tågföretagen om ett nytt avtal. Kollektivavtalet som nu förhandlas berör runt 10 000 personer och handlar om frågor om bland annat schemaläggning och arbetstidsförkortning. Parterna fortsätter att medla, men om en överenskommelse uteblir riskerar det att bli stökigt i kollektivtrafiken under veckan. I ett första steg kommer Öresundstågen att tas ut på torsdag. Därefter kommer tunnelbanan i Stockholm, Green Cargo och SJ omfattas av strejken. Spärrar biljettbokning Nu varnar SJ själva för störningar på flera populära sträckor. På sin hemsida skriver man att sträckorna Stockholm-Malmö-Köpenhamn, Stockholm-Göteborg, Göteborg-Kalmar och Göteborg-Duved-Umeå kan påverkas från och med den 12 maj. SJ har valt att tillfälligt spärra bokningar av flera avgångar. ”I dagsläget kan vi inte svara på hur en eventuell strejk kan påverka just din resa men det kan innebära att din resa ställs in med kort varsel” uppger SJ. Jonas Olsson, presskommunikatör på SJ, säger att underhållsleverantören Euromaint som servar SJ-tågen, signalerat att man inte kommer klara av underhåll av tågen. – Som en försiktighetsåtgärd tog vi beslutet att spärra avgångarna som berörs, för att kunder inte ska köpa biljett till trafik som sen behöver ställas in, säger han till TV4 Nyheterna. SJ: Följer förhandlingarna Det är fortfarande oklart när SJ kan öppna upp biljettförsäljningen igen. – Nu pågår förhandlingarna mellan parterna och vi på SJ förhåller oss till det som kommer ut därifrån. Så den frågan kan vi inte svara på, även om vi önskar att vi kunde, säger Jonas Olsson. Jonas Olsson understryker att man ännu inte ställt in några avgångar. Resenärer som redan bokat biljetter har fått möjlighet att boka om eller avboka på grund av det oroliga läget. Det är oklart hur många resenärer som drabbas av biljettstoppet. – Vi vet att helgerna är populära tider att resa med oss, säger han.

Fackförbundet Seko varslar om strejk bland tågförarna. I ett första steg kan strejken bryta ut den 11 maj. Varslet rör inledningsvis Öresundstågen, men även SJ, Green Cargo och tunnelbanan i Stockholm omfattas.

Seko, Service- och kommunikationsfacket, varslar om strejk för cirka 1 200 medlemmar, som tas ut i olika steg. Öresundstågen tas ut i det första steget den 11 maj, därefter följer tunnelbanan i Stockholm, Green Cargo och SJ i två ytterligare steg den 15 och 18 maj om ingen uppgörelse nås. Enligt Gabriella Lavecchia, ordförande i Seko, fanns ingen annan utväg. Vardagsliv och jobb – Det är vår uppfattning. Arbetsgivaren har suttit med armarna i kors sedan slutet av februari. En absolut majoritet av våra medlemmar uttrycker problem med att få ihop vardagslivet med arbetet. Enligt henne handlar det om synen på schemaläggning och arbetstid. Seko vill ha stopp för senare schemaändringar än 14 dagar i förväg och dessutom arbetstidsförkortningar. – Jag tror att allmänheten kan förstå att det är svårt att få vardagen att gå ihop om man får schemat ändrat dagen innan, från ledig till arbete eller från dag till natt. Det förutsätter en oerhörd uppställning runt om. Avtalet berör runt 10 000 personer. Nu kommer medlare att kallas in. Gabriella Lavecchia förklarar att de grupper som varslet gäller är de som har stora besvär av de olägenheter som arbetstid och scheman nu innebär. – De är inte plockade ur hatten. Arbetsgivarsidan, Almega tågföretagen, kan dock varken gå med på Sekos krav om scheman som låses 14 dagar i förväg eller den arbetstidsförkortning som facket vill ha, enligt Pierre Sandberg, förbundsdirektör på Almega tågföretagen. Mycket olyckligt Det beror på att schemaförändringar oftast grundar sig i Trafikverkets bristande framförhållning och på lokförarbristen, säger han. Att korta arbetstiden vid lokförarbrist går inte. – Jag tycker att det är mycket olyckligt och onödigt med varsel om strejk om syftet är ett nytt avtal. Men tågföretagen ställer upp på processen med medling. Arbetsgivarna är beredda att kompromissa, säger han. – Vi kan kompromissa inom det möjligas gräns, säger Pierre Sandberg.

Fackförbundet Seko varslar om strejk bland tågförarna. I ett första steg kan strejken bryta ut den 11 maj. Bland annat berörs tunnelbanan i Stockholm, Green Cargo och SJ.