![]() Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, serves food to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during dinner at Prigozhin’s restaurant outside Moscow in 2011. Prigozhin later set up the Internet Research Agency, the infamous troll factory designed to promote Russian misinformation and interfere in elections, especially after Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan revolution. Prigozhin’s relationship with Putin dates back to the early 2000s, when his company Concord Catering became the Kremlin’s partner-of-choice for state banquets. For all his alleged enthusiasm for purging his underlings, Putin has actually only rarely discarded those close to him. That said, both Wagner and Prigozhin remain important to Putin. ![]() That would seemingly make it difficult for Prigozhin to dodge the ire of the Kremlin, much less – as some have speculated – directly challenge Putin himself. He lacks a broad power base in Moscow, with few friends among the main courtiers – the heads of Security Council ministries and agencies.Īnd with an estimated 50,000 fighters – a tenfold increase since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – Wagner is dwarfed by Russia’s regular armed forces, as well as the Rosgvardiya (Putin’s personal guard), which has over 300,000 personnel. But it is generally accepted that Prigozhin is an outsider. Whichever group succeeds in dodging “official” blame depends to a large extent on how influential they are in Russia’s complex vertical power structure, as well as how valuable their chief figureheads are to Putin.Īssessing the relative weight of different Kremlin clans and their leaders is difficult because they are so fluid and opaque. Wagner Group: what it would mean for the UK to designate Putin's private army a 'terrorist organisation' That’s evident in the fact that the difficult task of turning around Russia’s military fortunes is rapidly being overshadowed by an enthusiastic search for the guilty. Yet, just as success has its own momentum, so does failure. This is what we are witnessing now, with Russia’s armed forces and Wagner attempting to pin culpability on one another. When things go badly, it becomes imperative to punish scapegoats, deflecting blame from the leader. Putin’s Russia has been no exception, repeatedly stretching credibility to claim great successes over Russia’s woke Western foes. Most commonly, they use fear – of the state, and of external and internal “enemies” – against which only strong leadership can prevail.īut they also need narratives about success, trading on tales of triumph against foreign or domestic evils. ![]() A weakened Putin, who has deliberately placed himself at the heart of the Russian state with no obvious successor, would raise more serious questions about the future of his regime.Īuthoritarian governments control their populations in a variety of ways. However, the fact he now seems unable (or unwilling) to do so with Prigozhin indicates that his ability to control the Kremlin’s fiefdoms isn’t what it used to be. ![]() And while tempers often spill over among Russia’s competing elites, Putin has previously had little trouble reining them in. One official indicated Prigozhin had made the offer regarding Bakhmut more than once but Kyiv leaders, skeptical of his objectives, declined.But the deployment of compromising material and misinformation is a common tactic in Eurasia. Some versions of the leaked documents circulating online have been edited, Insider previously reported, but two anonymous Ukrainian officials confirmed to WaPo that Prigozhin has spoken to Ukrainian intelligence officers on multiple occasions. In exchange for Ukrainians pulling back from the front lines of battle in Bakhmut, where Wagner mercenaries have faced heavy losses that Prigozhin blames on Putin's lack of support and supplies, Prigozhin would reveal the locations of Russian troops and stand by as Ukraine attacked. The Washington Post reported that US military intelligence documents allegedly shared on a Discord server by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old airman at a National Guard unit in Massachusetts, included a briefing on a January meeting between Prigozhin and unnamed Ukrainian officials where the Wagner leader made his desperate offer. In an apparent escalation of Yevgeny Prigozhin's public feud with Vladimir Putin over his for-hire army, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group offered to sell out the locations of Russian troops to Ukrainian officials in exchange for their mercy on the battlefield, according to leaked intelligence documents. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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