RT
By Tarik Cyril Amar,
A historian at Koç University in Istanbul working on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory. He tweets at @tarikcyrilamar.
More than a year ago, Belarusian security forces detained 33 Russian mercenary fighters, almost all captured as part of a spectacular raid on a spa hotel outside the capital of Minsk, broadcast on the country’s primetime news.
Initially, the authoritarian leader Aleksander Lukashenko, then facing a serious challenge from the opposition in presidential elections, accused Russia of sending the soldiers of fortune to, in essence, topple him. The Kremlin rejected the accusation, and subsequently Moscow and Minsk quickly settled the issue: Lukashenko dropped his bizarre claim, and the mercenaries were returned to Russia.
For once, even the Western media displayed some caution. Often the first to point the finger at purported Russian meddling, even the New York Times and Washington Post – hardened veterans of America’s “Russiagate” disinformation campaign – noted that independent observers were not convinced by the Belarusian leader’s accusations.
So far so good, you might think. But the incident, commonly known as “Wagner-gate,” after the most important and well-known Russian mercenary company, has kept causing trouble. Not in Minsk or Moscow, but in Kiev. The reason for that outcome is that the whole mess was triggered by Ukraine with the knowledge and help of Western intelligence services.
No, that’s not speculation or a “conspiracy theory,” but a fact. As we have known for a while, the raid was the result of a Ukrainian sting operation, begun in 2018 and code-named “Project Avenue.”
The scheme lured the mercenaries from Russia to Minsk. The plan was to then move them on to within reach of the Ukrainian security services, to be captured and face a major trial on charges they had allegedly committed war crimes in eastern Ukraine while fighting on the side of local separatists.
If the allegations made against the mercenaries were true, then they certainly deserved to be brought to justice somewhere, just like foreign “volunteers” and mercenaries fighting on Kiev’s side should face scrutiny and prosecution instead of Western support.
Whether Ukraine would have been a good place for these men to be tried is another question. There can be little doubt that Kiev, which has undermined the rule of law substantially in recent years, would have also used the trial as a media event and information war resource.
Yet the plan failed. Instead of walking into the trap waiting for them in Ukraine, the mercenaries were first delayed and then arrested in Belarus. Since that failure, the question in Ukraine has been why. In particular, critics of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have tried to pin the blame for the botched operation on him.
Their allegation is, in essence, simple: Zelensky messed up the sting, thereby aborting a plan hatched under his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Even harsher, maybe less reliable, critics go further and accuse Zelensky of sabotaging the operation deliberately in cahoots with – you guessed it – “the Russians,” or, at least, the Belarusians.
