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.

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  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I wonder what Prigozhin is seeing that we don’t see. If reports are to be believed, 25k Wagner troops participate in this armed “peaceful march”. That must be way short of the manpower the russian army has at its disposal. It also controls most weapons. As far as I know, Wagner doesn’t an air force, air defense or strategic deterrence.

    Yet, Prigizhin has been the one public figure head, that has analyzed the tactical situation the most realisticly. So,if we assume that he is level headed, what makes him think his numbers are enough to go against Shoigu? Does he expect the latter to fold? Or does he see the russian army as incapable of defending the country from yet another threat?

    • huffers@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
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      1 year ago

      I suspect Prigozhin knows that by going up against the Russian MoD he’ll almost certainly be dead within the year, but he’s doing it anyway because he thinks his chances are even worse if he doesn’t.

    • lightrush@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      How many Russian army personnel aren’t on the front line with Ukraine? Given they had to draft hundreds of thousands, chances are, not many. So for Russia to defend another conflict, it might mean taking resources out of the Ukraine front line. And then the Ukrainians go into Crimea.

      Add to this the void left by Wagner leaving positions in Ukraine which will let the Unranians take those.

      • damnYouSun@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        My understanding is that in Russia military service is compulsory, but at the same time no one’s actually expected to do any fighting as they’re not really trained, they basically just used in noncombative roles.

        Good old Pooters has changed the game when he sent conscripts of to die. So I wouldn’t expect a great deal of loyalty from that camp.

        Here’s how it’ll work out:

        Them: Surrender now or we will kill you. If you surrender we will go kill the person who put you in danger in the first place.

        Russian “military”: Yea, okay.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Exactly.

        If this were peacetime, the Russian Army would crush Wagner. But with most of the Russian Army pinned down in Ukraine (and exhausted) they may not have enough to stop Wagner. But that’s a massive maybe.

        We’ve seen some Russian Anti-Putin paramilitary groups cross make raids into Belgorod which indicated that Russia wasn’t really defending it’s border with Ukraine. If they aren’t defending their border with a country they’re at war with, how much depth do they have in their defences.

        The big question mark is how many forces does Putin have around Moscow?

        I think the odds are against Prigozhin though. But at the very least Wagner has been removed from the board with regards to the Ukraine conflict. What remains to be seen is how much they can damage Putin.

        The quote from Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence is the best. “We are watching.” It’s all anyone can do at this point.

        • Kurama@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          It seems Chechen forces are on their way to fight against Wagner. My big question is: What will happen when the columnns reach Moscow outskirts? How many Russian conventional soldiers will join this rebellion? It seems clear that he has some kind of “backup”

          • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            I don’t think the Chechen forces are loyal to Putin himself, only loyal to Putin’s money.

            It’s just more question marks at this point.

    • PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I read somewhere recently that 90-95% of the armed forces of russia are currently engaged in Ukraine.

      It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the russian partisan excursions into the belgorod region a month or so ago were mean to highlight to potential usurpers how little resistance they would meet if they were to move now