When doctors working at a St Petersburg hospital in 2017 looked through the belongings of the paralytic drunk that paramedics had just dropped off, they were amazed.
The comatose, stocky middle-aged man with a mop of grey hair was carrying five million roubles (£42,250) and $5,000 in cash, military maps of Syria, receipts for new weapons and electronic plane tickets.
This was Andrei Troshev, a tough former Russian army artillery colonel who Vladimir Putin says he has chosen to replace Yevgeny Prigozhin as commander of the Wagner mercenaries three weeks after they mutinied.
In June 2017, when he wound up in the St Petersburg hospital, Troshev had already been made a Hero of Russia by Putin for helping to lead a Wagner attack against Islamic State in Syria the previous year, which freed the ancient town of Palmyra.
Reports of the battle on Wagner-affiliated Telegram channels described how he swore at Russian army commanders, demanding to be given more artillery shells. They said that his leadership helped win the day for Wagner and impressed Putin.
Troshev helped set up Wagner in 2014 and has played a prominent role since, running its biggest military operations in Syria, Africa and Ukraine.
“Troshev is the Executive Director (Chief of Staff) of Wagner Group,” said the EU in 2021, when it sanctioned him.
The 62-year-old’s dreary call-sign “Grey Hair” disguises a career built on thuggish brutality. Troshev is a veteran of both the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Russia’s wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s.
These were particularly brutal. Thousands of people were killed, Chechnya was destroyed and soldiers on both sides were mentally scarred for life.
From there, he followed many of his colleagues into Russia’s Omon, a unit that meshes paramilitary and riot police duties. Its main job is to violently break up anti-government protests.
Since then, Troshev has played a key, but shadowy, role in Wagner.
As well as being its executive officer, Verstka, a Russian opposition website, also described Troshev as the head of the group’s “internal security service”, which metes out punishments.
It said that Troshev has also goaded Gen Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defence and Wagner’s nemesis, as a “woodcarver”.
However, Troshev likes to be close to the action. He is reported to have been involved in decisions taken by Wagner in Syria in 2018 to try to capture an oil field. US missiles destroyed the group’s attacking force, killing up to 300 people.
After Wagner deployed to Ukraine in 2022, Troshev directed its capture of Bakhmut. Once again, he kept to the shadows, with Wagner Telegram channels mainly referring to him as the chairman of the “League for Protecting the Interests of Veterans of Local Wars and Military Conflicts”.
Whereas Prigozhin was “Putin’s chef” with an instinctive media-savvy flair and an eye for a PR stunt, Troshev is the dour “Grey Hair” military man who has spent his career serving the Kremlin in its toughest trouble spots.
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