The way that Russia might be seeing it, Iran crossed several “red lines” by deceiving Moscow’s decommissioned servicemen into undertaking a de-facto “suicide mission” in order to provoke an interstate conflict with the US and “Israel”, all the while attempting to “poach” Russia’s Syrian partner out from its “sphere of influence” in order to “exploit” it as Tehran’s “cat’s paw” for carrying out this operation. Moreover, Iran’s implied intent of “hacking” the upcoming Russian elections through what may have been its secret attempt to influence the vote by engineering this scandalous scenario won’t be forgotten by President Putin, no matter how much his Foreign Ministry shrewdly deflects blame for the “Wagner” reports to “anti-government militants” in order to thrown Tehran “off the trail” of what it’s truly thinking on this matter.
http://www.eurasiafuture.com/2018/02/15/wagner-syria-iranian-tail-trying-wag-russian-american-dog/
Comment: This author, in a Russian deza magazine, is saying that Wagner PMC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group was again tricked by Iran. If that is the case Russia has a very big problem. On the other hand if Wagner PMC did this with the blessing of the Russians, that normally is the case, it is as well a big problem for Russia.
We will read much more about this later.
Last year, the Associated Press obtained a contract between a Wagner-linked company and Syria’s state-owned petroleum corporation, which promised a twenty-five-per-cent cut of the profits from oil and gas production at fields captured from militant control.
Complicating all of this is the fact that, at least technically, private military companies are illegal in Russia, and previous attempts in parliament to draft the necessary legislation to formalize their status have gone nowhere. “We’re at crossroads,” Ivan Konovalov, a defense analyst and the author of a Russian-language book on private military companies, said. “Either we’ll see the winding down of the operations of such companies or the passing of legislation to regulate their activity.” One deputy in parliament this week called for exactly that. Konovalov hopes a law will soon appear. “Without it, there’s no mechanism to deal with such situations, no one knows what to do,” he told me.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-shadow-army-suffers-a-setback-in-syria