 Good morning everyone and welcome to this new America event for the launch of the Abu Dhabi Express Assessing UAE support for the Wagner group the report went live about three hours ago or a few hours ago online I do hope you'll get a chance to check it out today I'm delighted to be joined by the reports three authors Candace Rondu the director of the future of future front lines at New America Jack Margolin the program director at C4 ABS and Oliver Imhoff a freelance investigative journalist And my name is Amy McKinnon. I'm a national security reporter with foreign policy magazine So by way of introduction, I think to the event today You know quite often as journalists we put stories out into the ether and we have no way of knowing who's read them Or where they've gone or whether they've even had any impact and about this time last year my colleague Jack Dech Who's our Pentagon reporter and I we put out a report and put out a story Which was based on a single line buried on like page 40 something of a Pentagon inspector general report Which assess which included an assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that the UAE May be providing some financing for the Wagner groups operations in Libya And of course this was at a time when there was a lot of scrutiny of a 23 billion arms package Lined up to to go to the UAE and so, you know, so this was relevant This was interesting We put the story out and that was that but but little did I know that Candace Jack and Oliver had Grabbed onto that line from that Pentagon inspector general report and dived into it using a whole range of open source data Customs records social media to really assess what that relationship is between a Wagner group and the UAE in Libya You know, what's what are the transport links and whether there is any financing going on there? So I'm really excited to be here today for the launch of this report And just before we begin I just want to read you what I thought was the most striking line for me from the report just to kind of give you all A sense of the context and the magnitude and that is that Russia a permanent member of the UN Security Council with tremendous Way over the outcome of conflicts around the world has developed a seemingly durable model for conducting war on the chief In contravention of international law and a breach of UN resolutions, and it has done so with the help of an ostensible American ally So right before we begin I just want to remind you that you can submit your own question for our guests today We'll get to that about that the third section of the hour today You can use the slide box to to the right on the platform through which you're viewing us So Candace Oliver Jack welcome I'm really excited to hear from you all and I want to begin with a kind of a question of context to kind of set the scene for what we're looking at today and I think I'll start with you, Candace. Can you just describe for our audience watching at home? You know, what are the interest of Russia and Wagner group in Libya and what are the interests of the UAE and how did they seemingly align? Yeah, thanks Amy I you know We've been hearing about the Wagner group for so long and and you know for the last three or four years There's been so much reporting out of Ukraine out of Syria And they're good. This is kind of like a new chapter in some ways for some people who are less familiar with Russia's interest in the Middle East generally But what we know is that you know, there's been a long-term relationship between the UAE and Russia Dating back to all the way to the Soviet times in terms of arms production you know support for Development of the oil and gas industry in sort of the Middle East region more generally So there's a lot of synergies between Russia and the UAE that have been long-standing and we tend to kind of forget that right because You know for so long the US was the dominant player in the Middle East and these Relationships, you know with Gulf countries in particular have been very much defined by Predominantly the the Iraq war but then later of course the Syria war and we tend to forget that there is this kind of other set of mutual interests between these two countries and As far as Libya goes of course It was the first to fall in during the Arab Spring and Was a trigger point in many ways for Putin in particular Which I think you know sort of unleash this kind of almost regret and a pivot policy-wise in terms of cooperating with other UN Security Council partners on interventions and Certainly embittered him a great deal in terms of the promises that were made and seemingly broken and That shift also happened to happen in tandem With what I think many in in the Gulf States particularly the UAE perceived as a as a threat to their own Governments their own regimes the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt As well as you know the prospect of their rise in Libya and other places and of course in Syria was something that kind of Forced these these synergies to the center of the relationship and I think the US was a little bit distracted at the time You know in terms of what to do how to do it how to respond So that's kind of the scenes that are the context, but then additionally of course UAE is not a big country It doesn't have a giant army and so it has relied oftentimes You know certainly we know in Yemen in the context there on mercenaries from Sudan and other countries It should be no surprise to us that they have also found a pathway to mercenary support in Libya I think what is unique of course and what really stands out that stood out to us Is that you know the Wagner group is a group that is sanctioned? You have Guinea-Progosian at the extensible financier has been sanctioned by the US and the EU So the UAE is picking taking a really big risk in cooperating Or seemingly cooperating on the delivery of weapons and men into a theater that also is under UN embargo So lots of overlapping synergies and interests, but also lots of risks for the two countries And Oliver can you just talk us through you know at what point does the Wagner group appear in Libya? And at what point did we begin to see suggestions that there's cooperation with the UAE there? So the Wagner group appeared around mid 2019 in Libya and then at some point We already started seeing early Turkish and GNA air strikes on on Wagner positions in south of Tripoli and The Wagner Sorry, what was the second question? The UAE when does the when does the UAE start to come into the picture? Yeah, the UAE came into the picture when we started to see the the panzer air defense systems appearing around there at the beginning and only looked like the panzers where They belong to the Wagner group But then at some point we started seeing that some of them had had a chastis that was only used by the UAE others had a chest that said what was only used by By Russia, so we started seeing it at that point that there was something going on There were also several air bases in in Libya that were previously controlled by the UAE mostly so Al-Khadim air base or Jufra air base and then at some point we started Seeing Russian personnel and then later also Russian airplanes there Which was also pointed out by Africa on Twitter So Jack, how did you go about starting to assess this relationship? What what sources do you go to for this and how do you begin to unspool that? So early on I mean Candace and I have been talking about sort of different ways to pick apart the logistics pipeline behind Wagner, which I think is one of the most interesting but poorly understood part of that groups operations. How does a internationally active mercenary army manage to Sustain itself abroad, especially when we understand that it has some overlap with the Russian state What can that tell us about the relationship of Russian security services and this ostensibly private company or group of companies, right? So because of that we were already looking at this what we kind of started with here was where Where logistics activities needed to touch on sort of international systems of trade and finance, right? So that included looking at things like flight data and customs data Basically where people or material were being moved In terms of looking at people C4DS had already been doing a good bit of work on looking at flight data going into and out of Libya We did that for the support of the UN panel of experts on Libya and support of some other media partners Over the last couple years And of course a lot of that is built on a great work that's being done by a larger OSINT community, right? So if you go on Twitter, you'll find people like you'll kangaroo and your John and others who I can name by handle Who have done outstanding work on this and I think really like a larger sort of policy community It was a lot to these folks for shedding light on this activity That helped us to understand Russian traffic into the UAE particularly where the stencil be private aircraft were being used to move men and material I'd help us understand that from the UAE side and help us understand that as well from the Turkic side What you see in the report is really a focus on the UAE and that's very intentional because we were interested in Specifically how this pipeline moved from Russia to the UAE to Libya kind of chaining back from that air traffic and making reference to something Oliver alluded to which is Additional focus on the pan seer anti-air systems. We had seen this signature of kind of These pan seers that we knew had been sold by Russia to the UAE and we're being deployed in Libya There were some sort of signals that there these were being operated by Wagner personnel But I think Candace and Oliver can describe better than I can there was a very sort of striking shot of one that has some Ruins drawn on the side of it, which is of course an interesting signal to a lot of folks in this community that Tend to watch Russian mercenary activity So we wanted to understand the entirety of this chain having already got in a picture of part of how Russia and the UAE are able to Denyably transfer Personnel and material and Olivia we traced that back further using customs data and contract databases to make sense of how And specifically in Russia the tool of design Bureau Had sold pan seer anti-air systems To the UAE that gives us an idea of the scale of that trade that gives us an idea of the period that that trade was occurring And the types of components that might be sent on later after the fact so Without getting too into the gory details of what that actually consisted of we can see exactly how much these components cost It gives us probably not a comprehensive picture because some of this trade is military related trades So it's likely to have gaps in the publicly available information But we can see for example that Russia and specifically the tool of design Bureau is sending through specific private companies These components for pan seer anti-air systems that include radar components Different components for onboard computers, etc. We can see the sort of pace at which that happened We can see it happening up until February of this year so a lot of different elements here in terms of Where this logistics chain attaches between these different parties and how something a piece of hardware It starts off and Russia ends up in Libya But that was where we kind of started from and then we tied that together with the Context of what we knew of the sort of defense relationship here and of course the the work that Candice and Oliver have done to shed light on How these these systems were actually deployed in the field and how that changed facts on the ground So Candice why are they going to all this bother to To ship things via the UAE to set up these back channels. Why not just fly them straight from Russia to Libya? Well, I mean partly because of course the UN embargo Raises the risk for both Russia and the UAE or anybody who was supplying combatants in the Libyan theater And even though of course, you know the UN put out a report Earlier this year that you know basically called out all of the players you know from Turkey to Russia to the UAE and others Egypt even for You know busting the embargo sending weapons and men into the into the theater And it's it's almost impossible now to really say that there is a working, you know embargo in the Libyan case but the reason they're going to this trouble is because nonetheless a sort of bold open transfer of Men and weapons into that kind of theater Would certainly elevate the issue at the UN Security Council level Would make them sort of open to potential Accusations of breach of sovereignty You name it the list is long and the risks are high for both countries any country really filtering Sending material into a country like that. But I think they also, you know in the in Russia's case You have two different kind of prior experiences that have informed the kind of The push for deniability. So first is Ukraine and that's the most obvious case where It was a bit difficult to deny the presence of Russian security forces But very early, you know, it became very clear that there was a challenge But you know the downing of image 17 in 2015 2014 early in the beginning of the Crimean and Donbass war was a big Sea change for how the EU in particular viewed Russia It also led to a massive sanctions from both the United States and the EU and really kind of started this chain effect where it was very clear that any kind of Open proof that Russia was supplying combatants That were not within is its constitutional chain was going to be problematic for the Russian government and for the Russian economy And then and then Syria pops I should say in Syria has already popped right the civil war has already begun Russia already has a military presence in in tattoo at the naval base there and already had a Private security contractor presence in the oil and gas fields just from again legacy projects that they had and deals that they had with the Assad regime and It really kind of all all of this kind of Wagner group mythology begins to kick off After the introductions that began the UK and the US and a couple other NATO partners Bonded together and began Introducing shipments of weapons and goods on what is known as the Syria Express and it was those early incursions and Introductions around Cyprus and Turkey and then across near the Libyan coast as well. So basically the Eastern Med where essentially that sort of set off this new chain of Interest in making sure that there is even greater deniability And yet at the same time, you know, some of the elements of Of the kind of cooperation between Russia These of these private security contingents are pretty obvious on, you know, when you really think about it If you're moving a giant weapons platform like, you know, a pan seer into a country It's got to have a physical footprint, right? It has to be traceable on some level and You know what we've learned very quickly was this is an old deal. I mean this goes back to the late 1990s really when the UAE was again just beginning to kind of grow its its military forces trying to modernize it them and Position them within the region and Russia was like France like the United States only too happy to sell weapons, right and but the interesting part about Russia's kind of deal-making with the UAE at that time is that of course the UAE did have a lot of debt and This is one of the things one of the signatures that we see in all of Russia's relationships with Countries where they deploy the Wagner group Is there is some sort of prior debt service deal where essentially Russia writes off the debt in exchange for an agreement whether it's, you know, soft or then later hardened through military technical agreement to Facilitate the support of arms development either in that country or with Russia And then becoming a permanent customer of Russia for for arms And so that's where this really begins with a 734 million dollar deal That was hatched in I guess it was 1993 initially and then kind of grew over time That's a lot of money. And if you think about sort of, you know, each pens here is probably worth about 15 million dollars a piece You don't just sort of make those things and then deploy them. You have to train people to use them And you have then think, well, what in what context would the UAE ever use a pens here? Unless it was in some sort of context of a, you know, a pretty big war And right now we don't see that directly in the Gulf, right? And so in a way, this is kind of surplus material That has kind of evolved out of this relationship that goes back to the 1990s Interesting. And Oliver, what do we know about who's offering the pens here is on the who's offering the pens here is on the ground in Libya So that has always been a bit opaque. Penses aren't easy to operate. So we assume that the crews are mostly Russian or people who know how to deal with them, which also led us to the Wagner group being involved here. On the other hand, we also saw that, we also saw that some of the pens were extremely poorly operated because so many were lost in airstrikes So we assume also from from manuals that were found with LNA forces and so on later when they have to withdraw from Tripoli That's an LNA troops were operating the pens here, but were extremely poorly advised and how to actually use them. That's why so many losses occurred And Jack, I want to go back to you on, you know, on this kind of air bridge that was set up between the UAE and Libya. One of the more striking things I think in the report is that the C17s, the US made C17s were used as part of this air bridge. Can you talk this a little bit more about that? Yeah. So the air bridge that the UAE maintained with Libya, again, I should say with all this like you can see an airplane moving you don't know what's on board, right? So certainly by no means mean to imply that like we're looking at customs data we see pants your components get sent to the UAE and then we're able to see that get loaded onto a C17 or something. That's not it. But we are able to understand as part of how the UAE has built this deniable sort of logistics chain into Libya. I say deniable, but like as we've seen it's evolved over time, right? So attempting to use ostensibly private aircraft like genus air, maximus air, a score of other private sort of wet lease charter companies that have been cited in UN panel reports. Because those are cited in UN panel reports, they've been exposed. So we've seen over time that the UAE has kind of tended more towards using actual military aircraft. I think that this idea of using private airlift didn't quite provide the level of opacity that they'd hoped for largely because like we're in a world now where you have a dozen people on Twitter that are tracking this stuff and trying to make sense of it. So within that context, we see the UAE starting to use some US manufactured C17 cargo planes. Now this is obviously very interesting to us and again I stress that we don't know what's on board these plans, but what we do know is that in particular during our sort of period of study here which is around January to July 2020. We see 12 different flights where we can confirm that UAE C17s took this really high risk trip. And what I mean by high risk trip is not that I see a C17 leave out of Abu Dhabi and then you know land in Benghazi. It's a little bit more savvy than that and the data is unfortunately not quite so clean. But what we can see is that these aircraft apart from the UAE and then they fly to an area where they tend to drop off a reception of ADSB that is consistent with flights to either high risk air bases in western Egypt, or in or in Libya. So that tells us that these are the most likely flights that pose a risk of being UAE supply of material weapons, etc. into Libya, it's not conclusive but it does give us an idea and particularly when we look at it in sort of like the larger scale so within that same period, there's an additional 52 flights of concern by some of those private airlines that I mentioned earlier genus air as a fly sky. They're flying much the same pattern that these UAE C17s are to make matters more complicated. This is not the full picture of C17 air traffic into Libya in that period. While we have a lot of questions that remain about where these C17s might have landed after they flew this sort of high risk journey, we have some, we can make some inferred guesses based on timeline and when they returned it's likely that they flew somewhere within a specific radius it's extremely likely that they landed in western Egypt or Eastern Libya. We also know from the work of some other researchers that a score of other C17s made a similar journey. But without tracking themselves on on ADSB so they didn't broadcast their coordinates through the system that is traditionally used to monitor aircraft and air traffic. This is not totally unusual for a military aircraft. But they did broadcast enough information that we're able to tell which receiver pick them up right so an antenna on the ground that picks up the signal from this aircraft can tell which one did and based on that we can get a very rough idea 150 to 200 miles of where this aircraft might have been. Based on that, some other researchers and again I referenced your John earlier this again goes credit to him independent researcher on Twitter, identified about an additional 48 flights that he assessed as high risk based on based on how he was able to identify their location. Again, it's a measurement of risk, uncertainty. There's more certainty from things like satellite imagery that show these C17s landing and airfields like CD Barani and in western Egypt, but all of that is details on the investigation what does that actually tell us that tells us that American made military hardware and selling to UAE is being used an extremely high risk activity that may include violations the UN arms embargo rate. Now even if we can't confirm that it's definitely still very interesting and something that we should continue to monitor. Particularly, how does the balance of using these military aircraft bounce with using these ostensibly private operators that are involved in the same activity. I'm kind of pointing out also if I can jump in here. I mean, you know we, we mentioned this in the report that, and again, we cannot connect all the dots. We need to be really clear that, you know, we're not looking at causation, or even necessarily correlation except we're noticing that are interesting to us that seem to have some sort of alignment. So one of the things that's really notable in the customs data that we looked at is that there is the seeming uptick in, you know, roughly the kind of December, January, February period, when there's a ceasefire called in 2020, just a brief one before the big one that we're now sort of, I guess sort of sitting in right now. But there was this kind of small little window there of roughly three months where we saw more orders, seemingly, for more of this pansor material. And I think if we, if we probably had a little bit more time, and a little bit more resources, maybe some better satellite imagery might we might have been able to kind of assess actually well. You know, is there any relationship between the tempo of flights during this time, which also seemed to have an increase during that period. And then the customs data showing that there's these sort of pan sear replacement materials radar, you know electronic equipment and so forth. And also, you know the casualty rates that we also track right because we also saw as all of prevention. And of course there were strikes where we think potentially the LNA was operating the pan sears. But we also have documented it in the report. Well over 42, the Wagner casualties themselves including some of the commanders. And when we looked even closer at sort of like well who are these guys exactly like what are their qualifications and you know what jumps out at you of course is that a lot of them are electronic warfare specialists. And that particular jumped out at us as somebody who had trained in Kalina grad. So this is the kind of person you would expect to be on the ground operating, you know these types of air defense mechanisms. So there's so many different overlaps here that raise our curiosity but of course a lot more work and research would need to be done. So what does this tell us about the effectiveness of sanctions regimes that you know Libya is under a UN embargo that precautions network of companies have been repeatedly sanctioned by the US Treasury and yet I noted in the report that the two, the two companies which were involved in those logistics network are not sanctioned, even though they've been known to transport equipment to Eastern Ukraine or to transport something to Eastern Ukraine to the Don Pass I mean, what does that tell us. I mean, from my perspective and I know Jack has his own views. You know, it shows how difficult it is right to to implement a set of laws like cats right which is the country. America's adversary act, which is of course the sanctions on Russia and others. And there has to be kind of almost a political will to get that granular right the question is, you know we've talked a lot in the context of Russian sanctions about that one rung further up the chain which would be of course targeting the sovereign wealth fund of Russia. And I think that the express wealth of were suspected wealth, you know, different high flyers within the Russian regime. That's another kind of no go zone that we haven't seen the United States go to yet. I mean that's great that's really high stakes stuff, but it, my suspicion is that actually a much more kind of considered and systematic approach to understanding the supply chains would actually net you a little bit more in terms of actually stopping. The transfers of men and material into some of these combat zones of concern, but I think Jack probably has some views as well. Yeah, thank you Candace. I think that yes, especially what you just mentioned in the logistics chain. I'm totally in agreement there and not just kind of hop in from that perspective is what we're seeing here by both Russia and the UAE is like, you know, mercenary activities not new right that's the profession as old as time. The reliable plausible deniability military activity is not new. We saw that throughout the Cold War. It looks different today because the world and global finance are more interconnected and also because people like ourselves are able to get a better vantage on that type of activity. So, there are more avenues for countries like the UAE and Russia to conduct this activity, but they also have to be more considered of how they're hiding that activity. It's a bit easier to detect so explosion of data to hide in, but also for us to search through right. What this says to me and what I think kind of based on our organizational approach this means is we need to be some more sophisticated and how we're trying to detect this activity. Detecting like what I think would broadly term gray zone activity is really hard, because it is you have to distinguish illicit commercial activity from an entire universe of listed commercial activity. So I think there needs to be an additional focus on methods to do that to find that needle in the haystack. And this report I think gives some examples of how that can work in practice. And then in the implementation of that analysis, really looking at this with a broader toolkit right so treasury sanctions are one tool. And there are a lot of different considerations in their use. They're not the only financial measure that it's available to us, particularly if we're focusing on logistics chains, which I think are the most vulnerable parts of these networks. C4, the C4DS experience with sort of earlier reports, for example, the Odessa network which recently I think had its birthday. It's a report that's been out for this point almost five, six years. So I looked at how Russia was using private companies to move many material into Syria. And how they were doing that deniably and how a number of those companies had lots of listed business and through exposing those companies and through sharing that information broadly and with private sector and government, we were able to contribute to a campaign that resulted in those companies being unable to continue to take part in that activity or at least not at the same scale. So I think that the emphasis that I would that I would put on is really analytically thinking about exploiting the full scope of publicly available data because that's where these types of networks are hiding. And then thinking about a broader range of tools that includes not only OFAC sanctions but also Bureau of Industry and Security entity listing coordination with partners in the European Union. Something we've seen with some of these airlines is removal of them, they're removal from civil aviation registries and loss of their aviation licenses in the countries in which they're based, keeping these networks on the off foot, because while they're adaptable. If you use a kind of casual term here like you can waste their time right, you can make it more expensive for them to operate you can make their life a lot harder. And for some of these folks, particularly illicit entrepreneurs, they don't want to stay in a business if it's not profitable. And if you've just made it really painful for them. So you can close a lot of the options that are available to these networks. I can see audience questions are starting to trickle in so reminder to everyone that in about kind of 1050 minutes what we'll start to get your questions to please keep sending them in. However, I want to come back to you. I mean, how, how are you able to study who the Wagner fighters are and what do we know about, you know, how many are there and how many bosses they had. There are different methods. So there's been a lot of reporting in the Libyan media about them. There were a lot of reports, probably taken by by a citizen, a citizen supposed to pictures on social media of fighters they spotted were pretty easy, easily identifiable because they usually got more sophisticated fighting than Libyan fighters, and also physically more recognizable. So that was one thing that was posted on on social media. Then Russian media that was that's more critical of the Kremlin like Medusa or no via Gazeta they, they usually wrote a lot of stories about Wagner. And, yeah, you could find plenty of information there because they got more information on the Russian side of things. So they actually had the, they had the opportunity to research within the country. And then we also cooperated with the BBC investigation that came out a few months back, where she went into Libya and found the Wagner tablets and found information about various fighters in there as well. So there's always different sides to the investigation. And, yeah, some of the fighters particularly struck us. There was, for example, Alexander Kuznetsov, who was pictured in a photo with Vladimir Putin before and in a state visit. And he allegedly has some connections with the neo pagan scene in Russia. And that's sort of in the new fascist spectrum as well. Then there was another fighter, who's called volume back, back to Neff, of which a form was found. But other personal belongings and so on. So there was pretty extensive information about him out there. There was also uncovered by Libyan media. And then, for example, there was also Gleb Mostov, who was reported by Russian local newspaper from his area, when he died in Libya and yeah, there were, so that like shows you the local aspect of reporting there. I think that, you know, at least some of them have been found through their, their kind of social media presence to have an affinity for the far right. I mean, that is deeply concerning the thought of, you know, untracked mercenaries operating in a war torn country. I mean, what do we know about their, their ideology is that widespread throughout the Wagner fight. Well, what is Wagner right I mean Wagner, we have to talk about it. What is it exactly I mean it's, it's a contingents a set of contingents that are deployed with, you know, certain military technical agreements as the umbrella, and or certain oil and gas agreements under, you know, an umbrella with a given regime, Syria, we've seen that in CRL sort of so it's important to kind of understand what are these contingents exactly. Most definitely, you know, in some of the social media that we have been collecting for a very long time through our work at Future Frontlines and our cooperation with ASU and a couple of other partners. You know, the contact you, you know, telegram couple other social media sites are very big sources of information because they love to talk about their exploits. And what we found, you know, a Jack referenced earlier, one of the photos that's been out there it's been, you know, floating around for a while now of a pan seared cab and had a Viking ruin on it, basically. And what we know is that there's a subgroup, you know, known as Rusich that operates out of St. Petersburg one of the first contingents to show up in wag in Ukraine and then later in Syria. And I think that there are some of these interpersonal connections in large part because there's overlapping prior service in certain types of airborne units. So the VDBA airborne service tends to attract a certain type of folks who would have this kind of forward operating reconnaissance type mission in their past training. And these folks seem to have either overlapping former commanders. Jed Morose as it were sort of the uncle that kind of takes care of them in the military. And some of them also, you know, clearly have a long term affinity. There's a big, I think, node in St. Petersburg where we have seen overlapping friendship ties, not just, you know, via their social media, follow our friend platform to literally via pictures that they've taken in places with each other or videos, where for instance, Alexander Bora die, who was the former Minister of Defense, a prime minister I should say of in Don boss for a brief period, you know, appearing in videos with usage members who were also in Syria, we believe also Libya. Again, there's this kind of ideological melding of folks who are some pro Russian nationalist but you have to make some distinctions. Some are more oriented toward this kind of neo pagan fascistic, you know, old school revival of Nazi ideals, which is odd to think about it for Russians but true. And then some are more oriented toward kind of reviving the imperial empire. And then there's a lot of overlap there in St. Petersburg between these groups that we've seen online. And I think that yes, it is extremely frightening to think about them being deployed out into war zones, although maybe also not surprising, because these are guys who potentially have also experienced trauma in their prior military service, and kind of continue on in that vein, but have now an ideology to rally around. So let's jump in on that and this is certainly not to, I, not to minimize anything that Candice said I think it is difficult in some of these cases to distinguish earnestly held beliefs or people that are practicing religious specifically like neo pagan religious versus like also some of the imagery. And something that's really challenging about that within this group is, I can think of few communities that have developed such a strong and identifiable identity over such a relatively short period of time. Obviously they have a lot to draw off of there's like huge elements of like the sort of US like operator imagery that gets pulled in but then there's also this as Candice refers to like, usage sort of neo fascist imagery that really abounds and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that this plays at least some role in informing conduct of these forces abroad. And that kind of goes beyond these guys wearing patches that might have like an awful ruin on them or something like that. That includes things like, you know, for example we see and there's graffiti that is, you have some terms that I think would be considered pretty fascistic or far right. So at the very least Islamophobic that these individuals have been photographed and that are ostensibly you know that they've done this in places like Syria and Libya. And that's that's pretty alarming to us but also you know it's not inconsistent with what we can see in terms of their conduct regarding things like human rights abuses, I don't think there's any reason for us to believe that there's a whole lot of accountability for these and I think probably one of the whether or not it's associated with a sort of affinity for the far right. There is certainly within these communities a culture of celebrating brutality and cruelty. There's a I think sort of an outgrowth of like the worst parts of the internet that you see among some of these guys whether they be actual veterans of private military contractors or one of these. This is definitely I think something that should be concerning to us when we consider what type of impact, even small contingents of Russian private military contractors will have on the ground, particularly in places that already have really horrible situations as regards human security and really vulnerable civilian communities. So quick questions and then we'll get to our audience questions. Firstly, Jack, how does the networks that you identify in this report how do they compare to other Wagner logistics support networks elsewhere in Africa or Syria, other places that they offer it. I can provide a very long wind today I've answered this and I will endeavor not to. They are fairly distinct from others. As, as Candace points out. It's really difficult to identify one thing is the Wagner group, right, like, and I love saying this because like the one time I think Amy you and I talked about this and I made some comment about like there's no such thing as the Wagner group, specifically. And then that was of course like quoted on like, you know it wasn't south front but it's like a similar like Russian propaganda site. Right. There is no legal entity called the Wagner group. There are their Russian private military contractors that are engaged in activity, some of which may be illegal under international law abroad. Definitely. With that out of the way, how this is distinct from other operations in Africa. Some of this is like we don't know what we don't know but what I can say from what we've studied in other places. The typical sort of MO or package that Wagner would would offer really is establishment through a branch for the local company that's usually engaged in something involving resource extraction. I think that serves purposes that involve not only revenue generation, but it's also a really effective vehicle to have people in country that gives you something to stamp on a visa. And it gives you something with which to engage with local industry and politicians. So we see that everywhere from Madagascar Central African Republic, they incorporate a local company and that company does some kind of business. The other components here are political technologists to kind of use the Russian term, which are their sort of political consultants most infamously Maxime Chigolier, who is now the subject of several unwatchable activities and is was imprisoned previously in Libya for doing sociological work but as it's been pretty well documented was involved in political interference activities. A lot of these folks are either associated with the Internet Research Agency, or they're part of a larger sort of core of St. Petersburg St. Petersburg based political consultants in Russia. And finally there's the military component. And this piggybacks on top of that sort of more commercial slash political interference side of things they will use a lot of the same logistics, but they will not have quite the same level of footprint and publicly available information they're a little bit harder to detect their smart in that regard right. Libya is strange because there's a whole lot of two and three and not a whole lot of one. So there's a lot more visible sort of involvement of political technologists and and military forces or, you know, combatants essentially, and a lot less of the sort of commercial engagement at least that's available and publicly available information. And what that could suggest to us is either a different ML, or it could simply suggest that they're learning from experience that this makes them very detectable and they need to approach engagement in other countries differently than they have in the past. And I think that there's arguments for both. But I'd say that other things that kind of help us distinguish this which, again, I'm sure that Candace and Oliver can kind of speak more to this. Some of what we see in terms of activity and Libya is very different from what we see in other places. Specifically when we talk about operating panzer into your systems operating mix and sugoys. You don't see that level of hardware or that's that hardware that is that sophisticated or expensive being operated by these guys and a lot of other theaters. And that to me is really interesting when taken in the context of different sort of commercial models for their engagement. And we don't know we don't know it's possible that there is a larger commercial footprint that's not visible and publicly available information but they do seem to be leaning a lot more on Russian sort of state owned assets, the 223rd 223rd 224th flight wing, rather than a private companies to transfer this stuff. And there's probably also, I mean just another potential option to think about is, you know, in the case of Libya, most of the meeting players who were in the oil and gas industry were actually, you know, they had to leave exit very quickly. The Libyan Revolution popped off. And, you know, so TATNF I think they extracted like 300 to 400 of their own staff out of the country, which was the major player in Libya at the time in terms of oil resources and oil deals and gas deals. Libya is a little bit different than Syria, and even maybe the CAR or the places in the sense that there was so much decimation there at the outset of the civil war that there wasn't really a means by which they could actually kind of jump up a force very quickly, because they just didn't have that relationship. And I would say, I think it's relatively clear. There are some pretty good hints that the financing of certain types of infrastructure in Libya under various factions and then the destruction of that infrastructure has its own kind of paying price in terms of reinsurance, what we call war insurance basically. This is the theory I've been thinking about quite a lot. One way to kind of finance a group of mercenaries where you don't have access to necessarily have access to oil and gas resources is to find ways to to water money, and to kind of pump up value to get destroyed is one way to do that. But let's not forget also that there was a blockade that on oil resources in the east of Libya for quite some time. And that blockade certainly would have benefited anybody on the black market for bunker oil, which is really key. And I could keep you all talking all day about this but I'll have one one file question and I promise I will get to that in questions. Candice is there any suggestion that the Russians are learning from their experience and on the Libyan battlefield because you described in the report how you know the pantheon really kind of gave the Wagner group and half test forces and advantage until the Turkish drones came in and some of the pantheons were destroyed I mean, are they using us to look at and say okay, you know, these were destroyed how can we make them more robust for future conflicts or testing, you know, kind of strategies and things like that. Oh yeah, that's definitely happening I mean in their own analysts, you know, some of the best in Moscow have openly written about this and talked about it and given interviews about what happened with the pantheon so of course we saw. In Syria, a number of Israeli strikes on pansears clearly operated by the Russians, and that were quite successful. And that then kind of led to the shift in this armoring for new radar equipment for whatever reasons, you know, it seems like some of the panzer platforms in Libyan theater didn't come equipped with that I don't know if it's simply because we just didn't build them out that way. Lots of different reasons we can think of. And that also would kind of then point to maybe some of the rationale behind this uptick in orders for electronic radar sensing equipment that happened to kind of mid battle for for Tripoli. One thing we've learned is that, yeah, Russia has announced that it is, you know, upgrading the panzer S one to the I think is a panzer M, which is essentially mobile, more able to deal with drone swarms incoming strikes and so forth. In theory, it should make it a better weapon. But of course that's expensive. And so there's a really interesting kind of trade off here. And you do a deal where you have this synergy with the country like UAE is prior using military technical agreement. You develop this material this platform in just such a way but it's like it's kind of old now. And so it starts to actually have an impact on what you know the reputation of that particular weapons platform is one of the things we found that you know a couple of countries that Indonesia, Vietnam that would have normally been a prime client for some of this for a new set of panzers basically said you know we're out. And that could be a combination of things going on there you know sanctions pressures from the United States and EU, but also maybe the reputation of the performance in Libya had some effect on depressing the demand. So that's our audience questions now as as promised. The first one. I think I will put to Jack, but feel free all of you to jump in on these. This is this comes from Matt Sutherland who says, Do you think there's a danger in labeling semi state forces like Wagner as a PMC like lots of media love to do. That's a good question. Semi state forces right. A lot of PMC is I think would probably fall into this category of boy you'd sure like me to think you are a private company but I know in my heart of hearts that you are nothing like what we would think of as a conventional private military contractor. I would characterize this as perhaps not as semi state forces. Although there is an undeniable. I think rationale for identifying them as such but in making these distinctions. I would consider these as you have your sort of conventional private military and security company in so far as that as a category, which is you know, simply large companies that, you know, there's plenty than the US UK and the world, you know, canopy G4S, whoever. That, you know, run an effective business that's usually activities that are much more boring than the kinds of things that Wagner engages in, but are much more reliable and are much more listed. And then there is this sort of, there's this the community of malign private military and security companies, which are oftentimes smaller companies that you've never heard of, they're engaged in activity that we would consider something closer to mercenary activity. It's a lot more high risk that involves a lot more combat arms as opposed to logistics they're not there to clean latrines and cook food. They are there to their shooters. So that's obviously like a pretty simple distinction I think in some of these cases that we can kind of do illicit activity, less high risk, more high risk and certainly illicit activity like violation of UN arms embargoes. That is generally how I tend to bend these things. Those are still slippery concepts and becomes more slippery still and we consider the fact that there is some Russian state support for these forces right I know that they are integrated with the Russian security services to varying degrees depending on theater that the danger I think that we run of trying to lump in someone like Wagner, or Russian private military forces in general overall with the Russian Armed Forces is that it seems obvious but the line is really blurred and I think it's different in different places. So I don't think that we can say that the level of command and control that the Russian military exercises over private military companies and theaters like Syria is comparable to that that they exercise over them in places like Mozambique for example. So I think that we need to kind of maintain a spectrum with within which we can classify that level of command and control. I might differ a little bit on that. I think I probably disagree on some of this. Yeah. I would just say that you have to kind of then think about like, okay, let's let's think about all the touch points for the state in everything from recruitment to management. Not just the HR side, and then then look at the logistics chain, which we've been talking about you know quite a bit here. And how many touch points, you know, does the state have there. Quite a few. So in each in each category, the men themselves how they're recruited how they're trained how they're deployed. We know that the back end of this is what used to be called a Boron. Put on which is like the sorry the services arm of Ministry of Defense which is now semi privatized. We know that to get those contracts they have to go through the Ministry of Defense or Ministry of emergencies. And, and we know that most of them would have served at some prior time in the Russian military, the command and control I think I would agree with you that there is a there is kind of this logic skip there we don't really understand what's going on. And there have been clear situations like in Syria when there was the strike US strike on that column of Wagner fighters where there was clearly some sort of lack of coordination and communication between official Russian control and then the Wagner troops that kind of bedeviled them in some ways. But then you look at the other touch points which is like, well, you know you're delivering large scale platforms like pan sears. That's another state touch point. And we know that in each of these cases, the Russian states shareholder interest or stakeholder interest is pronounced. What we're missing from the picture is a granular analysis of the executive orders that have been issued since 2014 since the first incursion in Ukraine. We know that there have been some, and we know that they determine that there are certain strategic industries that have to be protected and that they operate under these very loose letters of Mark. And so from an IHL perspective, there's really a very little question that that that level of state stakeholder interest, certainly suggests that there, these are state forces. So maybe, maybe what we can arrive at in somewhere in a happy median is what I have kind of used the shorthand here, which is that they're a state leveraged illicit network. So we have a question from Mohammed who asks, did you come across any evidence that would potentially force the US to prosecute UAE officials? Previous evidence has been ignored and impunity has typically prevailed. I mean, I think you could kind of broaden this out and just, you know, what is the US response? You know, this is a sensible ally supporting a, as you outlined at the beginning of the report, this is an ally supporting an adversary, you know, in violation of UN embargoes, what are the consequences? I mean, there's an irony here if you really think about like, you know, sanctions on Turkey now considering potentially sanctions on India to long time steadfast allies that have actually been in combat in situations where US troops are in theater. A little bit different than the UAE, right? Like, not to say that there haven't been some sort of special forces coordination and cooperation in certain theaters, but certainly like a lesser ally in the sense of just its scope and its size and its imprint and importance, I think. So, you know, I guess you have to ask the question, why not more scrutiny in that case? Why treat, you know, these other allies differently when you've got some sort of clear indication from multiple different sources, even within the Pentagon, right? The UN, the State Department, you know, open source reporters and researchers like us are all kind of looking at this relationship and we've identified that there's something going on there. As far as proof, I mean, this is that's for the courts. We don't, we don't, we don't deal in proof. We deal in research and empiricism and trying to collect evidence where we can, where we see it. I think really now it's up to, you know, others in this kind of policy community to consider their position at this stage. But then we have time for one more. And I've lost track of where it was in the document. We had a question about where did it go? Yeah. From Pam DeLarge, who says the UAE has been supplying the Ethiopian government in the current civil war. You know, is the US, the US is concerned about the escalation of this conflict. Why is the UAE persisting? So kind of a similar question there. No, Tigray. Well, we have our suspicions about Tigray, but I think I'll let Jack speak to that. I also am not going to get super deep into this, because I think it is a, it is deserving. I'm going to talk about Tigray at all, and especially UAE involvement in Tigray. I'd better do it with enough rigor and depth. But I will, what I will say is to kind of allude to a point that I think has come up throughout this right. Alright, so like we're talking about, again, what could broadly be termed sort of Greyzone activity. I think the UAE is really good at this in ways that aren't fully appreciated. And we talk about this in the context of a lot of obviously Russia, right, China. We don't really talk about the UAE in this context, even though in some ways I think they're more sophisticated and honestly have like a better approach almost to incubate sort of like innovative attempts at a very free market for potential sort of Greyzone intervention, right. So if we looked at sort of past activities to make reference to another set of potential illicit activities in Libya, UN reporting regarding opus, which was related to reflex response which then relates back to Eric Prince and those operations. And that was in large part as identified by previous UN panels potentially an effort by the UAE to sort of incubate, or patronize a set of activities and entities that would explore the possibilities for deniable intervention particularly in places like the Horn of Africa. In addition to that the UAE due to its lack of transparency in some regards is an ideal is an ideal jurisdiction for this type of activity. So the UAE is has been and I think we'll be into the future, one of the central hubs of illicit airlift, which quite obviously is one of my bug bears but it is going to continue to be a place where companies and aircraft are registered that are involved in this activity whether or not their state act, and that is going to make it very difficult for us to disentangle in many cases, what is something that the UAE officially endorses and uses a policy priority, and what is something that is happening on their territory, either through negligence willful or otherwise. So again, not to get into the degree issue, but an understanding of how the UAE conducts this kind of activities important not just for the Libyan case and not just in terms of talking about integration with forces like a support for US adversaries but also involvement and other civil wars, particularly throughout throughout East Africa. We're bang on time so I'm afraid we are going to have to wrap there. A huge thank you to Candice to Oliver and Jack for sharing your insights and congratulations again on report launch for everyone watching at home I do hope you'll go and check that out it's available online now.