Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company. Photo / AP
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the Wagner Group military company. Photo / AP
EDITORIAL
The strange mercenary mutiny in Russia at the weekend may be the start of a new period of power instability in Moscow.
About half of 10,000 fighters from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group reportedly travelled three-quarters of the way to Moscow in a day after claiming control of the cityof Rostov-on-Don, 1100km to the south. The others stayed there.
Despite a Belarusian deal where Prigozhin moves to the Russian ally and his fighters return to their camps, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority has been humiliatingly undermined by the Wagner advance to within 200km of Moscow.
Preparations in Moscow showed the Kremlin’s panic. Major routes were blocked off and sections of roads dug up. Three thousand Chechen troops were said to be on guard. The compromise solution came after Putin said on television that the mutiny was “treason” and a “stab in the back”.
Servicemen of the Wagner Group military company sit atop a tank, as local civilians pose for a photo prior to their leaving an area at the HQ of the Southern Military District in a street in Rostov-on-Don. Photo / AP
Prigozhin is a blood-soaked warlord who has been allowed by Putin a loose rein with his militia army on the frontlines for months. The company also operates in other conflict-hit countries.
The danger of this scenario, and the reliance on the similarly-thuggish Ramzan Kadyrov, who runs Chechnya for the Kremlin, has been realised.
Under “Putin’s chef”, Wagner has been dishing out violence to Ukrainians in the war, and last year a mercenary who switched sides was butchered with a sledgehammer.
Prigozhin has openly feuded with defence bosses in Moscow over the war’s direction, likening it to a meat-grinder, and objected to a plan to merge volunteer forces with the military.
Putin instigated Prigozhin’s rise to power from convict and caterer. But the warlord has his own voice via a Telegram messaging channel and constituency. Prigozhin has previously thrown shade on Putin over the fighting but at the weekend became more overtly critical of those in charge, taking aim at the president’s justifications for the invasion.
“The war was not needed to return our Russian citizens and not to demilitarise and de-nazify Ukraine. The war was needed by oligarchs. It was needed by the clan that is today practically ruling in Russia... We don’t want the country to continue to live in corruption, lies and bureaucracy.”
The blame for this chaos sits with Putin for unleashing the forces of war, including its dogs, on Ukraine.
The list of consequences is long from tens of thousands of Russians killed or injured, to economic sanctions, an act of environmental sabotage, and billions worth of damage to Ukraine.
Putin has got everything he didn’t want - countries joining Nato, Kyiv tethered to the West, a draining war, military strikes on Russia, potential loss of occupied territory in Ukraine, rival political figures emerging in Moscow, and threats heading home.
It’s hard to know what this means in the short-term for the war and for Putin’s longer-term future but, as Yale professor Timothy Snyder put it in a tweet on Saturday: “Wars end when the domestic political system is under pressure.”
The Russian president may seek revenge against Prigozhin but, as a Putin-made man, he knows more than most about his boss.
