The increasingly public feud between Russian military leaders and the head of a Russian paramilitary group escalated dramatically on Friday, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the paramilitary Wagner Group, accused Russian armed forces of attacking his soldiers and vowed retaliation. It was a shocking accusation, one with unpredictable consequences for Prigozhin, Russia, and the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The evil that the military leadership of the country brings forward must be stopped. They have forgotten the word ‘justice,’ and we will return it,” Prigozhin said in a recording published Friday on Wagner’s social media, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Russian Ministry of Defense denied Prigozhin’s allegations that the military had launched a strike on Wagner fighters, calling it a “provocation.” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said late Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “aware” of Prigozhin’s claims, and that the Kremlin was taking “all necessary measures.”

Shortly after, Russian law enforcement said that in response to Prigozhin’s statements, Russia’s security services, the FSB, have launched a criminal case over calls for an armed uprising. “We demand to stop these unlawful actions at once.”

Russia’s deputy head of military intelligence went as far as to call it a “coup” attempt in a video urging Wagner fighters to stand down. Russia’s prosecutor general also announced that Prigozhin was now being investigated “on suspicion of organizing an armed rebellion,” reports the New York Times. Prigozhin himself, for what it’s worth, denied he was carrying out a coup, calling it a “march of justice.”

Videos and images posted to social media late Friday showed Russian security forces patrolling the streets of Moscow and another Russian city, reportedly close to where Wagner troops are deployed in Ukraine.

Prigozhin, whose Wagner forces helped take the city of Bakhmut, has been increasingly vocal in his attacks against the Russian military’s leaders, posting more and more scathing criticism of the top brass over the war effort and accusing generals of denying Wagner the ammunition and support needed to fight effectively.

Prigozhin has generally avoided direct criticism of Putin himself, but earlier on Friday he had posted a video on Telegram with a stunning assessment of Russia’s war effort. In it, he attacked the Russian military’s — and, by extension, Putin’s — rationale for the war, basically saying the threat of NATO aggression through Ukraine was made up by Russia’s top brass and corrupt elites. The war, Prigozhin said, was “needed for a bunch of scumbags to triumph and show how strong of an army they are.” He included a diatribe against Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who Prigozhin claimed pushed for war to secure a promotion, and whose decisions led to the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers.

Prigozhin has taken a very public — and very risky — part in the war in Ukraine, and he may have finally crossed a line that he has been butting up against for many weeks. Yet this story is very much still developing, and both the Russian government and Prigozhin have an interest in pushing their own propaganda at this moment.

Prigozhin is a Putin ally and a political survivor, but those often have limits in Putin’s Russia. Still, whatever is unfolding is yet another crack in Russia’s war machine, and a window into some of the dysfunction of the Russian state — dysfunction, in part, of Putin’s own making. Who is this Prigozhin character, and what does he want?

Prigozhin, the man at the center of this, is an unlikely, and imperfect, challenger of Russia’s war effort.

Known as “Putin’s chef,” he has been something of a fixer for Putin’s regime. He isn’t exactly in Putin’s inner circle but has the skills and connections to make himself useful and needed. This may be setting up a troll farm to sow political discord abroad, including in the 2016 US elections, or acting as the frontman for Wagner, a private mercenary-like force to do the Kremlin’s bidding. In both cases, Prigozhin fulfilled the interests of the Russian state, but with just enough distance to offer Putin a measure of plausible deniability.

Prigozhin has claimed to be the founder of the Wagner Group, but the reality is likely much more complicated. He is more likely the convenient figurehead of the group, which Russia has relied on for years to do its bidding around the world in places where it did not want to openly commit troops or resources, and where it could operate in a kind of gray zone. That again granted Moscow a degree of plausible deniability as it exerted its influence and interests in other corners of the globe, from Syria to Mali to Venezuela. It also gave Putin a kind of independent power center, a paramilitary outside of the formal military structures.

That all started changing in Ukraine, where Wagner, and Prigozhin himself, took on an increasingly public role in the war.

Wagner filled a specific operational and public relations need for Russia. The group’s fighters — a portion of them convicts recruited from Russian prisons — bogged down and attrited Ukrainian forces at a time Russia’s military was in disarray. The group achieved its most substantial victory in Bakhmut, one of Russia’s main territorial gains since last summer. But that victory took months, and came at an astounding casualty rate.

But as the battle for Bakhmut ground on, Prigozhin got more and more outspoken about what he saw as the failures of the Russian military and its leaders. In one video Prigozhin posted in May, he stands in a field, apparently surrounded by corpses of dead Wagner fighters. “Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where are the fucking shells!” Prigozhin says, referring to the minister of defense and the military’s chief of the general staff. “They came here as volunteers and died so you could gorge yourselves in your offices.”

These kinds of critiques are frankly shocking for a guy who is largely dependent on Putin’s largesse; in a country where open criticism of the government, and especially the war, is often brutally crushed; and within a military apparatus where insubordination of this magnitude is rarely tolerated.

Some have interpreted Prigozhin’s braggadocio as an oligarch feeling himself, and seizing on the incompetence of the Russian military to create his own power center — maybe even playing the long game to challenge Putin.

But even before Prigozhin escalated his rivalry with the Russian military this week, experts I’ve spoken to really doubted Prigozhin was actually a Putin rival and could build his own power center in the Russian state. Instead, then, it made sense to look as Prigozhin as a functionary who was seizing an opportunity in an otherwise dicey environment.

There is a place — even within Russia’s controlled media environment — for a convenient foil, a guy to get out front and complain about Russian military incompetence. It focuses and puts pressure on the war’s generals, but not on the war’s mission or its necessity. It is not necessarily a permanent or stable spot to be in, and becomes even more precarious when Prigozhin outruns his usefulness.

Experts told me this spring that the worst thing for Prigozhin is for the Ukraine war to end. “Prigozhin clearly understands that there will be no safe retirement for him,” Sergey Sukhankin, a senior research fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, told Vox earlier this year. “He knows that if the current regime, or if his Wagner Group, goes down, he goes down with them.”

There were signs then, as now, that Prigozhin might overstep his ambitions. How that will play out for him — and for Russia right now — is extremely unclear, although the view from where Prigozhin sits looks pretty bleak. If the Russian military is launching attacks against him and his fighters, and if the security services are really investigating him, then any serious challenge to the Russian state or military looks pretty doomed right about now. But the fact that Russia had to rely on Wagner, and Prigozhin, to wage its war helps explain why Russia has struggled militarily since invading Ukraine, and that is unlikely to change, no matter what’s next for Prigozhin.

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year Other

Yes, I’ll give $120/year

Yes, I’ll give $120/year

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

  • EnderWi99in@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    1 year ago

    We need a megathread to follow somehow. It’s really hard to follow this without going to Twitter and Reddit at the moment.

  • patchymoose@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    23
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I find it very strange how much Russia relies on this mercenary group. I know there are other groups like this in the West (I’m mainly thinking about Blackwater), but Wagner seems many orders of magnitude larger and more powerful, seemingly rivaling Russia’s own military itself.

    I’m surprised that someone as notoriously paranoid as Vladimir Putin has allowed this man to gather so much power, and indeed, his own personal army. Putin will probably still come out on top, but this is going to hurt him tremendously in the PR arena.

    • sealneaward@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wagner is almost a completely different entity compared to a traditional mercenary group. It’s evolved past that. It has its own political objectives, independent sources of income from mining, oil, etc.

      It’s just absolutely wild what we are witnessing.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      It was a convenient thing for Putin to have a layer of plausible deniability. It’s Wagner committing atrocities, not him. And how much money is the Russian military spending in a place like Syria? They aren’t, they’re making secret payments to Wagner. How many casualties in the conflict there? It’s not Russian casualties, it’s Wagner casualties.

      In Ukraine Putin got desperate and started to rely on Wagner more and more. And allowed Wagner to grow it’s ranks and become bigger and more powerful. Another big miscalculation for Putin.

      So TL;DR, Putin relied on Wagner too much because he was desperate.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I haven’t been following their in-fighting much recently. Is this a “My rabid attack dog is now attacking me” kind of situation?

    • Antik@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      From what I gather, some of Wagner forces’ bases were recently bombed, killing lots of orcs, and Prigozhin is blaming/accusing Putin.

      This isn’t the first thing though, I remember Prigozhin complaining about how Russia wasn’t sending them enough supplies or whatever not long ago.

  • Jurbl@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Interesting situation. Prigozhin has criticized the Russian military over the past few months and Putin has stayed silent. Now this and the military responds but Putin remains silent. Putin needs a weak military to avoid being overthrown, but the FSB opens an investigation, why? Prigozhin threatens to attack the russian military and comes up with a story/lie that he realizes the Ukrainian invasion was based on lies. What does Prigozhin want, money a coup?

    • _sigma@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      the Economist article on this had the following:

      Alina Polyakova, of the Centre for European Policy Analysis, a think-tank in Washington, DC, tweeted that Mr Putin’s silence was “another signal that this is a Shoigu-Prigozhin power struggle”.

      • pingveno@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        In a dictatorship, it’s common to keep underlings competing for power like this. That keeps any one underling from gaining too much power, making them a risk to the dictator. That’s because dictatorships are structured not to best benefit the people, but to keep the dictator in power.

        • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah Saddam Hussein would have one underling suggest to another about working together against Hussein. If the other underling didn’t report it, he’d have him killed.

          It’s imperative for a dictator to have the underlings distrust one another and be incapable of working together. If they can work together they can overthrow the dictator.

  • Bobo_Palermo@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    1 year ago

    Seems like an old dude who has just had enough, and is ready to right some wrongs, but that may just be me being hopeful.

    • Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      27
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      This is the guy in charge of the organization which punishes people for being captured by beating them to death with a sledgehammer. I have zero percent hope that he stands for anything right, rather I think he’s just using shifting popular opinion in Russia to challenge the military leaders for more power.

      We must not forget that these people are monsters who have no qualms about the systematic rape and murder of thousands of innocents, including children. Any actual infighting that weakens their military capabilities is good though, I hope they get too distracted by each other to focus on Ukraine but that’s still incredibly unlikely.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        At minimum this removes Wagner from the board, a major piece for Putin. The only territorial gains they’ve made in a while has been because of Wagner. And any losses in the Russian military is less Ukraine has to deal with.

        • Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          You’re entirely correct, my hopes are that Wagner and the MoD will exhaust their resources fighting against each other so that Ukraine has enough time to take back their country.

    • FanfictionConsort@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Doubt it. I think this guy wants control of Russia.

      I strongly advise you not to give Prighozin the benefit of the doubt- he’s a HUGE Nazi, and has the tattoos to prove it (plus he literally named Wagner after… well, Wagner. Hitler’s favourite musician).

      Best case here is mutual destruction of russian leadership.