Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed to Wagner fighters that a senior mercenary named Andrey Troshev now command the private military group, according to comments the Russian leader made to the Kommersant newspaper that were published Friday.
Putin appears to have created a split between senior fighters from the mercenary group and its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin — whose whereabouts are currently publicly unknown — at least in terms of the narrative emerging from his comments to Kommersant. The paper was reporting on a meeting held by the Russian president five days after Wagner’s short-lived rebellion collapsed at the end of June – a meeting also attended by Prigozhin and several dozen senior Wagner combatants.
Responding to a question from Kommersant, Putin said Wagner “does not exist” under Russian law, adding that the Russian government needs to determine how to handle the organization legally.
According to the paper, Putin outlined a number of options for the future of Wagner mercenaries, including continuing to fight under their direct commander, a man going by the call sign “Sedoy,” meaning “Gray Hair.”
So who is “Gray Hair”? Sedoy is the call sign of Andrey Troshev, a retired Russian colonel and a founding member and executive director of the Wagner Group, according to sanctions documents published by the European Union and France. He has also been sanctioned by Ukraine.
Troshev served as the group’s chief of staff for its previous operations in Syria, according to EU sanctions from December 2021.
“He was particularly involved in the area of Deir ez-Zor,” sanctions documents state, referring to an eastern city where Wagner fighters have had direct encounters with the US military during the Syrian civil war. “As such, he provides a crucial contribution to (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad’s war effort and therefore supports and benefits from the Syrian regime.”
United Kingdom sanctions from June 2022 also identify Troshev as a chief executive with the private military group who “has repressed the civilian population in Syria.”
Troshev is associated with top Wagner Group leaders, including founder Dmitriy Utkin, a former Russian GRU military intelligence officer, according to EU sanctions.
“Gray Hair” is a veteran of the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan, for which he was awarded several medals, according to Russian media.
Troshev was among those invited to a reception at the Kremlin in December 2016. A photograph, believed to be from that 2016 reception, emerged in Russian media and shows Putin alongside Troshev and Utkin, who are both wearing several medals.
Troshev was born in April 1953 in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in the former Soviet Union, according to sanctions documents.
CNN’s Andrew Carey and Josh Pennington contributed reporting to this post.
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