Berlin, Riga On Saturday of the Uprising, Wagner Collection advertisements have largely disappeared from the cityscape in the capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The stickers were quickly removed. Notices of the regular army were hung on some of the walls immediately afterwards.

But now Wagner is advertising again, and some posters are back. On the site, the group continues to extol “the best job in the world” – paid the equivalent of around 2,500 euros a month, on a “victory-focused team” and without the typical army bureaucracy. The map shows dozens of recruiting sites across the country, each with a small skull and crossbones on it.

Experts don’t think Wagner will go away. “Why should the state destroy it completely?” says political scientist Andreas Heinemann Gröder. “In principle, this is a money-printing machine,” says a professor at the University of Bonn, who studies Wagner’s militia.