Conclusion: From War Crime to Internet Meme

Although the virtual sinews that connect the web of individuals and entities that have supported the Wagner Group’s activities in Syria and Ukraine may at times seem tenuous, the digital ties that bind them may also hint at another important dimension of Hamdi Bouta’s brutal killing in the summer of 2017. Videotaped for all the world to see and circulated widely on the internet, the incident at al-Shaer has emerged as one of the most emblematic of the Wagner Group’s dark mythos, and, not surprisingly, the men pictured in the video have become icons of Vkontakte’s militarist neo-fascist set.

In fact, not long after the second tranche of videos of Russian operatives decapitating and dismembering Bouta began making the rounds on Vkontakte, Instagram, and other social media platforms in late 2019, our team detected a disturbing trend in which dozens of users began swapping out their own selfie photos in favor of still images of Bouta’s assailants as their user profiles. The entire incident has taken on a macabre viral quality and in online forums that track Russian military affairs and developments in Russia’s private military security sector, the incident at al-Shaer has emerged as a sort of touch stone for the social movement that has begun to coalesce around the Russian mercenary lifestyle online. How this movement will evolve over time is anyone’s guess, but if the growth of the online networks that bind Russian paramilitary groups together are any indication, it seems highly unlikely that the killing of Hamdi Bouta will mark the last time so-called Wagner Group operatives are implicated in war crimes in the Middle East, Africa, or other places where Russia is keen to gain a strategic foothold in the local energy sector.