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Russia's Wagner Group is recruiting young people in Europe for acts of sabotage

2026-02-16 20:43:08Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX

Russia's Wagner Group is recruiting young people in Europe for acts of

Recruiters and propagandists who previously worked for the Wagner Group have emerged as a major conduit for Kremlin-organized sabotage attacks in Europe, according to Western intelligence officials.

The militant group's status has been uncertain since a failed rebellion against senior Russian military leaders in June 2023 prompted a crackdown and the death of its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

But Wagner recruiters, who specialized in persuading young men from remote Russian provinces to fight in Ukraine, have been given a new task - recruiting economically vulnerable Europeans to commit violence on NATO territory, officials said.

Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, is "using the talent it has available," a Western intelligence official said, referring to the Wagner network.

The GRU and Russia's domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, have both become very active in the "hunt" to recruit "available" agents in Europe to sow chaos.

In the past two years, the Kremlin has expanded a sabotage campaign across Europe, aiming to weaken the resolve of Western powers in their support for Ukraine and to sow social unrest.

Faced with a greatly reduced deployment of secret agents in Europe following a series of diplomatic expulsions from EU capitals, Moscow's spy chiefs have increasingly turned to intermediaries to carry out their orders.

For the GRU, the Wagner network has proven to be a particularly effective tool for doing this, senior European intelligence officials have told the Financial Times.

The agents have been tasked by Wagner operatives with everything from arson attacks against politicians' cars and warehouses containing aid for Ukraine, to posing as Nazi propagandists.

Typically, those who are recruited do so for money and are often marginalized individuals who sometimes lack purpose or direction in life.

Wagner had a ready network of propagandists and recruiters who “speak their language,” said one European official.

Russian intelligence agencies typically seek to place at least two layers of "intermediaries" between themselves and the agents who want to carry out their orders, the official said.

“They always want a degree of deniability…And Wagner and the individuals who were part of it have a long and close working relationship with the GRU in that way.”

Meanwhile, the FSB tends to turn to criminal networks and the diaspora with which it has cultivated ties in Russia's immediate neighborhood, but these have been less effective in mass recruitment, they added.

Wagner and his supporters already had a significant online output on social media channels aimed at Russians, which has been turned with relative ease into a more internationally focused effort.

The Telegram channels used by the group, in particular, have been surprisingly clean and competent in the way they have been presented, a second European official said.

“They know their followers,” they said.

Yevgeny Prigozhin was also responsible for running the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency – Russia's most notorious "troll farm" – which began targeting Western citizens with disinformation more than a decade ago.

The Wagner network's role in Russia's sabotage campaign has been under scrutiny by European intelligence and security agencies since the beginning. Social media accounts run by Wagner were responsible for recruiting a group of Britons in late 2023, for example.

Dylan Earl, a 21-year-old criminal, was recruited by Wagner via social media. In March 2024, after recruiting four other young men, Earl set fire to a warehouse in East London. He was found guilty last year and sentenced to 23 years in prison.

“The underhanded hand of the internet paid off because anonymous recruiters operating through online chat rooms, usually on encrypted platforms, found young people within the UK who were willing to undergo a form of radicalisation and betray their country for what they saw as easy money,” said Judge Cheema-Grubb in her sentencing remarks.

Following that attack, European agencies have slowly begun to build a picture of a much wider network of Wagner “disposables” across Europe.

In doing so, security authorities have at least one advantage: What Russian spy chiefs gain in scale and cost by using intermediaries like Wagner to recruit amateur saboteurs, they lose in competence and secrecy. So far, more attacks have been prevented than succeeded.


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