KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — In the action movie “Tourist,” military instructors with the Russian mercenary group Wagner deploy to the Central African Republic and find themselves reluctant warriors against rebels and a corrupt ex-politician ahead of a presidential election.
Then there's “Granit,” another big-budget action flick whose title character, a grizzled but idealistic Russian military trainer, sacrifices himself to protect the southern African country of Mozambique from ISIS-style bandits.
And in the more recent “Best in Hell,” Wagner fighters duke it out with an unnamed enemy — clearly meant to be Ukrainians — in an unspecified location that's an obvious stand-in for the Donbas, Ukraine's war-ravaged eastern heartland. The movie starts and ends with the lines: “We have a contract — a contract with the company, a contract with the motherland. … We know we're going to hell. But in hell we'll be the best.”
Welcome to the Wagner-verse, a multimedia propaganda project encompassing action movies, documentaries, pro-war social media channels, animated shorts, comics and even children's cartoons — all aimed at building the brand of Russia's notorious private army, and promoting the Kremlin's policies while they're at it.
The group, a security contractor similar in some ways to the U.S. private military company Blackwater, is making headlines spearheading Moscow's no-holds-barred battle for the eastern Ukrainian…
