You can hear people shouting “Wagner Group” on this video:
Taking up the original question regarding Richard Wagner: he certainly had anti-Semitic and racist views to a degree unusual even for his time. However, it’s worth pointing out that there are no references to Jews or Judaism in any of his 13 operas. This is not to to diminish or downplay his attitudes, which are definitely unacceptable and disgusting today. But they did not make their way into his music dramas. The closest he comes, IMHO, is the finale of Meistersinger, where everyone comes together in a paean against pernicious foreign influences and in favour of holy Roman art. But of Jews, there’s not a murmur.
The entire association of Wagner with Nazi ideology is based on the facts that
a) Hitler loved his music;
b) Hitler was besties with Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred (a fervent anti-Semite, who made Wagner’s views seem moderate); and
c) the Wagner clan used to roll out the red carpet for Hitler and all the top Nazis at Bayreuth. (The latter were mostly bored stiff at being dragged along to all these 4 or 5 hour operas.)
But to lay this at Richard Wagner’s feet is irrational and unfair. He had long since gone to his reward when these things started happening.
People are probably going to accuse me of Holocaust denialism, or something. The association of Wagner’s music with the Third Reich is a deep one for many Jews. There is still an unofficial ban on his music in Israel; something Daniel Barenboim, who is as Jewish as they come, has long been trying to overcome. His music is so much greater than the man. If people don’t want to listen to it because of his views, that’s their choice.
Probably some sort of hypercorrection or mix-up. I looked up the Russian IPA chart and didn’t see anything for /w/ there, and looking up /w/, I don’t see any examples from Russian there. I hear the V pronounced as W a good bit from ESL speakers from certain countries, even if their language has both a sound like our W and V (like in German, English Ws will get pronounced like V with some speakers, but English Vs will get pronounced like Ws. A German friend of mine has pretty much perfect English, but she still gets Vs and Ws mixed-up in pronunciation.)
From the clips that appear on TV news, it sounds a bit more like what the French might say: “Vahg-nair”, where in both German and English, the second syllable would be just an “uh” sound.
[Moderating]
I think the factual question has been answered here, and most of what’s going on here isn’t FQ material any more, so this is closed.