A lust for oil and gas profits and a brutal, hours-long battle in Syria may have been the catalysts for the mercenary Wagner Group’s bizarre “mutiny” in Russia late last month, according to five-year-old news reports that have resurfaced over the last couple of days.
The accounts of the deadly firefight for a major Conoco gas field and processing plant that pitted 500 Russian mercenaries and Syrian forces against a smaller group of U.S. ground troops underscore a constant, grim reality: that the real cost of the fossil fuels we still depend on every day is measured in blood and lives.
Invariably civilian lives, and in this case, dozens or hundreds of military ones.
There’s some speculation now that that past battle, amped up by more recent frustrations with Kremlin military leadership, motivated Wagner leader, apparent culinary genius, and now-fallen Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin to march his troops out of Ukraine and toward Moscow, before calling off an attack that riveted and confounded western observers while it was under way.
And in the end, it all traces back to oil and gas.
Get the rest of the story here.