Among the many confusions about the private Russian army known as “the Wagner Group” is how to pronounce its name. Reporters and pundits seem to vacillate between “Wag-ner” and “Vog-ner.” Also, nobody seems to know how the group got its name.
Let me state this as simply as I can: Russia, invoking memories of the German invasion in 1941, has an internal (and separately funded) army named for an icon of its arch-enemy, Adolf Hitler. It is an army that claims to be fighting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, a country whose president is a Russian-speaking Jew. (You may need to read that again.)
If Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and George Orwell shared a cabin at the MacDowell colony, they might come up with this explanation, but only after a great deal of drinking.
Katharina Wagner, the composer’s great-granddaughter, wrote...