February 17th, 2026: Wagner Group's Secret Comeback Inside NATO & Iran Talks Resume
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It's Tuesday, the 17th of February. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. And if I might say R.I.P., rest in peace to Robert Duvall, the absolute great actor. Now, look, if all Mr. Duvall had done was Tom Hagen in the first and second Godfather movies and Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now and, of course, Lonesome Dove, then he would be considered legendary. But he did so much more during his career. Incredible. So again, rest in peace, Mr. Robert Duvall. All right, let's get briefed. First up, Western intelligence says Russia's shadow war inside Europe may be entering a new phase, with former Wagner recruitment networks allegedly helping coordinate sabotage operations across NATO states.
And in some cases, the recruits include teenagers. I'll have the details later in the show. Talks resume in Geneva as Iran floats potential energy and aviation deals alongside a renewed nuclear agreement. We'll explain what's on the table and what's not. Plus, Ukraine's former energy minister has been detained after allegedly attempting to flee the country as a sweeping corruption probe expands and reaches into the upper ranks of the Ukrainian government. And in today's back of the brief, a bipartisan funding deal falls apart, no surprise, over immigration policy, triggering a partial government shutdown that directly impacts the Department of Homeland Security. But first, today's PDB Spotlight.
We're starting today by returning to Russia's shadow war inside Europe, something we've been tracking here for quite a while on the PDB. The shadow war is basically Russia's covert effort to create chaos across Europe without triggering open conflict. Its rail lines disrupted, its warehouses torched, its assassination plots, its cyber intrusions and influence campaigns. But what we're learning now suggests that part of this campaign may be evolving. According to an investigation by the Financial Times, Western intelligence officials say individuals linked to former Russian Wagner Group recruitment networks are helping coordinate sabotage operations across NATO countries. And in many cases, the recruits are not trained operatives or ideological extremists.
They're seemingly harmless civilians, including teenagers. Let's start with Wagner. The Wagner Group was Russia's most notorious private military contractor, a deniable arm of the Kremlin, led by a man named Yevgeny Bogosian. Now, Wagner fighters operated in Syria and Libya, across Africa, and most visibly in Ukraine. They became known for brutal tactics and for recruiting prisoners to fight in some of the war's bloodiest early battles. After Bogosian's failed mutiny in 2023 and his subsequent death in a mysterious plane explosion that only people with no clue about how Putin operates considered mysterious, many observers assumed Wagner's influence would fade. Its formal structure was fractured and many thought the group was essentially finished.
But its recruitment networks, propaganda channels, and digital infrastructure didn't simply disappear. That's because they proved to be useful to the FSB and the Kremlin. According to recent reporting, some of the same online ecosystems once used to recruit mercenaries are now allegedly being used to identify and task individuals inside Europe. The pitch is different, the mission is different, but the model, remote recruitment, layered deniability, and disposable manpower, well, that remains familiar. In Ukraine, authorities have detained multiple teenagers accused of carrying out reconnaissance and arson on behalf of Russian intelligence handlers. Officials say the pattern is consistent. Contact is made through encrypted messaging apps like Telegram.
The initial task is small, take photos, observe a location. Payment is offered, sometimes in cryptocurrency. Then the assignments escalate. Western intelligence officials say similar tactics are being used in numerous NATO states. The targets vary, infrastructure, logistics nodes, symbolic sites, but the broader objective appears unchanged.
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