"Soon, he was cooking up a lot of trouble: His Internet Research Agency became a tool of Russian disinformation, helping to attack the 2016 U.S. election, and his Wagner Group became a tool for Putin to project power in Africa and the Middle East with a patina of implausible deniability. When Putin decided in 2014 to seize Crimea and foment an insurgency in eastern Ukraine, Wagner — full of former special forces operatives from the Russian military — was one of the instruments he used."