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The World Of Wagner

The video (which merits a warning to viewers) is ghoulish, intense, and jaw-droppingly macabre. In it, Yevgeny Prigozhin—the Russian businessman who leads the infamous Wagner Group mercenary army now fighting in Ukraine—points to rows upon rows of dead Wagner mercenaries and growls invective at the Russian military brass, for allegedly failing to provide ammunition for Wagner’s assault on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In another video, Prigozhin threatens the same military leaders: Unless ammunition is delivered, his men will stop fighting and leave.

For casual observers of Russian politics and President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, this has all been stunning. In such a tightly controlled political system, where dissent can mean languishing in a prison colony, how is this man allowed to rail against the ruling order so menacingly?

As Putin’s war stalls—and as Wagner has devastated Bakhmut—analysts are dissecting what it all means. Their consensus: nothing good.

Prigozhin “has turned the war in Ukraine into his own show since early May,” Mikhail Fishman writes for The Atlantic. Having gained the right to recruit prisoners to serve as effective cannon fodder on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin has filled a battlefield need for Moscow. But Fishman sees Prigozhin as “playing with fire. Putin might well tolerate Prigozhin’s attacks on the military command, but as soon as he considers them an assault on the state itself, he will crush him.”

Appearing on Sunday’s GPS, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kori Schake suggested Prigozhin may be allowed to insult leaders in Moscow because Putin can no longer control the network of elites beneath him. That might be encouraging to Putin’s critics, but Schake reminds us: Whoever or whatever comes after Putin, at the top of Russia’s leadership hierarchy, “may actually be worse.”

Some of those conclusions are shared by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., who writes in a Wall Street Journal column that such bickering and extreme hawkishness reflect “a universal elite consensus (in Russia) that the war has been a disaster and a blame game is coming.” Prigozhin and others, Jenkins argues, are looking ahead to their own postwar futures. While some observers meditate on internecine Russian politics, Colin P. Clarke of the Foreign Policy Research Institute argues that Prigozhin likely has another goal: returning his focus to Wagner’s empire of mercenary operations—and contracts for gold and other lucrative extractions—in Africa.

At Der Spiegel, eight coauthors detail Wagner’s use of an estimated tens of thousands of mercenaries (many said to have been recruited from prisons, the Der Spiegel coauthors write) who allegedly would advance into Ukrainian fire—or be executed by their own commanders. But Prigozhin and Wagner play a much bigger role in Russia’s global ambitions, the Der Spiegel coauthors write: returning it to a place of power and influence in Africa (and Syria), where struggling dictators have needed deadly force.

Of Prigozhin and his current feud with military leaders, they write: “He takes care of the dirty work for Putin—but he has decided to highlight that filth instead of doing his work in the shadows. He has given a face to the brutalization of the Putin regime. Many, though, have been left to wonder: Is this man powerful? Is he a megalomaniac? Desperate? All of the above?”