It has no stripes, but no limits either. You can insult a general or bless an execution. Their dead men do not exist and their victories shine on social networks before the Ministry of Defense draws them on the maps. Evgeni Prigozhin, head of the Wagner mercenary company, has been Vladimir Putin’s Mr. Wolf in the Ukrainian war. Like John Travolta’s and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters in Pulp Fiction, the Kremlin is now up to its neck in blood and trouble. Evgeni Viktorovich Prigozhin (Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg, 1961) was a convict during the USSR. Today he is the former hot dog seller who has reached the highest in Russia. After his advance in Soledar, he seems to have the magic recipe to win. But after years of success in the dark, exposing him to the light of Putinism can burn him.
Wagner currently has around 50,000 men deployed in the Ukraine. Of those, 10,000 are contractors and 40,000 are convicts recruited from Russian prisons, according to US estimates. His role right now is key in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, an inalienable objective of the Kremlin.
When Putin praised his army for its advances in Soledar, he knew full well that it was Wagner’s wolves that were preying on Ukrainian soldiers amid those collapsed houses and abandoned salt mines.
Moscow last year proclaimed Lugansk and Donetsk “republics” of Russia, but has not succeeded in expelling the Ukrainians, especially in the latter. Wagner’s boss stated earlier this year in a rare interview that it could take Russia two years to subdue the entirety of these two eastern Ukrainian regions. And he is the spearhead.
After hanging the medals, Prigozhin has disappeared from the official Russian media. But he has continued to stick out his chest on social networks. “Today, Wagner’s assault units took the city of Krasna Hora,” was one of his statements through this channel from the Wagner leader, posting a photo of his warriors a few kilometers from the long-awaited Bakhmut.
Sources from United Russia, the party that supports the Russian government, assure that the Kremlin, if it has not prohibited the mention of Prigozhin and Wagner on television channels, has at least ordered to curb their presence in public conversation.
Known for years as Putin’s chef due to the catering services he provides among the Russian elite, he has aroused suspicion in the military ranks, especially after his alliance – described by some dissidents as a failed conspiracy – with Ramzam Kadirov (the leader of Chechnya ) and General Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed the butcher of Syria and who, until his dismissal last month, led the Russian army in Ukraine.
Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net, explains how Prigozhin has slipped on the most important political springboard of his life: “The plan was to make a quick offensive in Ukraine, spending tens of thousands of soldiers in battle, achieve a great result” and promote a reshuffle in the Russian high command, which would finally make room for the new lords of unconventional warfare. That plot was to bring Surovikin to the post of deputy minister or even defense minister. Kadirov would be left at the head of the National Guard, finally playing a role in Russian national politics.
Osechkin says that Prigozhin aspires to lead the FSB (heir to the Russian KGB) because he knows that these spies control his movements and his future: they have material to blackmail him, apparently a kompromat referring to his decade in prison.
Russia’s unexpected difficulties in its conquest of Ukraine last year upended the power scene in Russia. The military leadership remained in the crosshairs of propaganda criticism: some high command have been demoted or have spent long periods of time missing from the media spotlight. Unexpectedly, that space has been occupied by Putin’s thugs: people from outside the army, with poor military experience, but who stand out for their toughness, their lack of accountability, and their personal—not institutional—loyalty to Putin. They are rudimentary tools, but useful in a war in which, for the moment, nothing is going according to plan. Ramzam Kadirov, is one of those who has seized the moment showing the ferocious military campaigns of his men in the Ukraine. But the one who has played his cards in the most ambitious way has been Prigozhin, who last year sued anyone who pointed to him as Wagner’s boss and after the invasion presented himself as the creator of that private army.
Since coming out, Prigozhin has been continuously in the news: personally recruiting inmates in Russian jails, going through the stored corpses of his warriors after succumbing to Ukrainian fire, insulting generals, commenting on the difficulties of the advance and even calling for new approaches. .
Stepping outside of your comfort zone can either give you an office on the legal side of power or put you out of favor. So far, he has had more luck at the front than at home. With almost no support in Moscow and still struggling to gain respect from the political power of his native St. Petersburg, he has failed to get the Russian Parliament to legalize the Wagners. To this day, they are still a band.
The challenges launched at Russia have been continuous in recent months and, finally, they have materialized in a rebellion.
Denis Korotkov, a Russian journalist who has spent years investigating the Wagners and who now works at the Dossier Center, assures that “Prigozhin has no other support than his link with Putin.” Any defeat would put him off the board. Wagner is more ammunition than weapon, recruiting convicts and returning coffins no one bothers to count.
But Prigozhin learned in prison that the best gal is to be tough. After the dismissal of his favorite Surovikin and the appointment of Valery Gerasimov to command the Russian offensive, the magnate seeks his place. If necessary, with a more temperate profile. He claimed in February that Wagner had stopped recruiting prisoners. In the interview, he denied using them as cannon fodder and said that the losses among the prisoners were more or less the same in percentage terms as among the rest of his fighters. He also insisted that he had “zero” political ambitions. And above all he prevented new attacks against Russia’s military leadership. In a dramatic gesture, he looked directly into the camera to emphasize that he was not criticizing anyone.
Mr. Wolf is now trying to change his skin. Wagner has been accused of atrocities at the front. In January the United States designated it as a criminal organization. Prigozhin denied this and asked Washington to “clarify” what crime Wagner is accused of. But the video library haunts him. Last year he appeared to tacitly endorse a video showing the sledgehammer killing of a Wagner defector who had been returned by the Ukrainians in a prisoner exchange. “A dog’s death for a dog,” Prigozhin, who is also blamed for owning the St. Petersburg troll farm designed to interfere in Western debates, said at the time.
Putin has competing factions fighting each other in the Ukraine. And no one wants to bring bad news to the tsar’s table, but the opposite: a triumph drawn on the map of Ukraine. The great mission is to turn into reality what Putin hastily written into the constitution: that all of Donbas, and also Zaporizhia and Kherson, is Russia.
Subduing the entire Donbas could take, according to Prigozhin, up to a year and a half. This means not being on time for the next Russian presidential election, which should keep Putin in office in 2024. “And if we have to get to the Dnipro, that will take about three years,” Prigozhin added. In that case the Russian forces should spread out over an area up to that great river that runs roughly through the Ukraine from north to south. It is a difficult goal. But it would achieve Putin’s desire – since he cannot redirect Ukraine’s western course – to split it in half, turning it into little more than a stump of the country it is today. Breaking the will with a good beating: the usual etiquette that Prigozhin and his warriors learned in prison.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
