Wagner mercenaries tried to steal nukes during mutiny

Wagner Group mercenaries came dangerously close to entering a Russian nuclear base to steal nuclear weapons that could fit into a backpack to use as leverage during their short-lived mutiny last month, according to Ukraine’s chief spymaster.

While the main force of the rebels, directed by Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, rumbled toward Moscow on June 24, purportedly to capture Russia’s top military brass, a smaller group drove east en route to a fortified army base.

Kyrylo Budanov, the 37-year-old head of the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence Directorate, said the mercenaries’ target was Voronezh-45 — a well-guarded facility that purportedly stores small, Soviet-era nuclear bombs that can be carried by a single person in a backpack.

 “Because if you are prepared to fight until the last man standing, this is one of the facilities that significantly raises the stakes,” Budanov told Reuters in an exclusive interview.

The mutineers’ plot to get their hands on nuclear weapons only failed, according to Budanov, because “the doors of the storage were closed and they didn’t get into the technical section.”

The Ukrainian official did not say why Prigozhin’s fighters left the nuclear base without trying to force their way inside.

A source close to the Kremlin with ties to Russia’s military confirmed parts of Budanov’s account, saying that Wagner fighters “managed to get into a zone of special interest, as a result of which the Americans got agitated because nuclear munitions are stored there.”

The rebels’ attempt to steal nuclear explosives was apparently so alarming to the Kremlin that it prompted President Vladimir Putin to agree to a peace deal with Prigozhin, which was hastily brokered by Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, according to a source in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

Under the agreement, the Wagner rebels avoided prosecution for treason and were allowed to either follow their leader Prigozhin into exile in Belarus, or join Russia’s regular army.

Prigozhin’s fate remains unclear. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin returned to Russia on June 29 to meet with Putin to discuss the mutiny, and Lukashenko said last week that he was not in Belarus.

The Wagner boss was also recently sighted in St. Petersburg, arriving at the local FSB office to collect his arsenal of weapons that had been confiscated in June.

US officials questioned Budanov’s unconfirmed claims concerning Wagner fighters’ side trip to the Voronezh-45 base, insisting that Russia’s nuclear arsenal was never in danger during the brief insurrection.

“We are not able to corroborate this report. We had no indication at any point that nuclear weapons or materials were at risk,” said White House National Security Council spokesman Adam Hodge.

However, a Washington Post article published last month quoted an unnamed US official as saying that the Biden Administration was concerned about the safety of Russia’s nuclear stockpile in the event of a civil war between Wagner and Putin’s regime.  

Prigozhin began his rebellion, which he dubbed “a march for justice,” in the city of Rostov-on-Don, which his forces seized on the morning of June 24.

While a large convoy of heavy weaponry was moving along the M-4 highway toward Moscow, Reuters reported that a smaller group headed east, engaging Russian regulars in a firefight at the first village it reached, according to social media posts.

Reuters used surveillance footage and videos posted online by residents to track that smaller Wagner contingent’s progress to the town of Talovaya, about 70 miles from the Voronexh-45 base — one of Russia’s 12 “national level storage facilities for nuclear weapons,” which is under the protection of the defense ministry’s 12th Main Directorate.

A video provided by a resident showed at least 75 vehicles in a convoy on the edge of Talovaya, including five armored personnel carriers, two ambulances and an artillery piece towed behind a truck.

At Talovaya, Russian forces attacked the Wagner fighters, who returned fire and shot down a military helicopter, killing two crew members.

Once the convey reached more rural parts, Reuters said, it could not determine where it went next.

A local resident claimed that the Wagner column did not move any further and the following day — after the truce was announced — the fighters turned around and went back the way they came.

But Budanov claimed that an unspecified number of fighters did, in fact, press on to Voronezh-45 with the intention of seizing portable nuclear weapons.

Matt Korda, a senior research associate and project manager for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said it would be “virtually impossible for a non-state actor” to breach Russian nuclear security.

Korda added that it’s unlikely that any of Prigozhin’s mercenaries — many of them drawn from Russia’s prisons — would possess the sophisticated knowledge to assemble and detonate a nuclear bomb.

“If you had a malicious actor who was able to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, they would find the weapons stored in a state of incomplete assembly,” Korda explained. “They would need to be completed by installing specialized equipment and then unlocking permissive action links, and in order to do that they would need the cooperation of someone from the 12th Directorate.”

Backpack-size nuclear bombs are Cold War-era relics that the US and Russia had agreed to remove from their arsenals more than 30 years ago — but several former US nuclear nonproliferation officials raised doubts about whether Russia had fulfilled its promise to get rid of the weapons.

“I don’t believe the Russians still have them, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” said David Jonas, former general counsel to the US National Nuclear Security Administration.

Amy Woolf, a nuclear weapons specialist, said that even if the portable nukes are still around, it is highly unlikely they are in working order because they degrade over time and require maintenance.  

“It’s possible there’s still some old crap stuck in storage somewhere,” she said. “But is it operational? Almost certainly not.”

With Post wires