Don’t know the article you reference, but Wagner troops for Russia are not “low level”. They are like Blackwater for US.
Turkey thinks no one will act against his takeover in Efrin and if not stopped there he will attack all of Northern Syria. Break with NATO? Align with Russia? Nobody knows.
The US is winding down operations at its huge airbase in Turkey, the Germans have already pulled all their air assets out of Turkey, and the Russians are giving the air support to the Kurds the Turks are attacking although so far only bombing the ISIS/Al Q proxies the Turks lead off offensives with.
At the moment, the only possible ally Turkey has is Israel.
“Vagner is a cruel fellow,” one of the Vagner commanders told RFE/RL. “He’s no fool.” The man added that Vagner has a swastika tattooed on his shoulder, wears a helmet with horns, and practices a form of paganism, a description that RFE/RL could not confirm.
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The Vagner fighters know that they mustn’t be taken prisoner. And their IS foes know it, too.
“It is the kind of war without ceremony,” one commander said. “Everyone knows perfectly well that being captured means death by torture.”
“I have specialists who remove eyes,” he added. “They take a spoon and dig around up and down until the eyeballs are just dangling there.”
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“If we have to fight with America, we will win,” he said. “They don’t know how to fight. As Putin said, you can invent all sorts of missiles, but you can’t invent people like we have. Our people — they know how to sacrifice themselves.”
https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-mercenaries-vagner-commanders-syria/29100402.html