Why is Prigozhin’s Russian mercenary force named after Hitler’s favorite 19th-century German composer?
Among the many confusions about the private Russian army known as “the Wagner Group” is how to pronounce its name. Reporters and pundits seem to vacillate between “Wag-ner” and “Vog-ner.” Also, nobody seems to know how the group got its name.
Let me state this as simply as I can: Russia, invoking memories of the German invasion in 1941, has an internal (and separately funded) army named for an icon of its arch-enemy, Adolf Hitler. It is an army that claims to be fighting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, a country whose president is a Russian-speaking Jew. (You may need to read that again.)
If Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and George Orwell shared a cabin at the MacDowell colony, they might come up with this explanation, but only after a great deal of drinking.
Katharina Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter, wrote…
