At the crack of dawn on June 24, a soldier wakes up the intelligence chief of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine (GUR), Kyrylo Budanovto warn him that the owner of PMC Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhinrose up against Moscow and captured the city’s military bases Rostov, the most important in southwestern Russia. To which the head of the Ukrainian “false beards” replies: “Damn, is it six o’clock already?” It is one of the jokes circulating in Kiev these hours and, in fact, the current internal crisis in the Russian Federation – a real civil war – cannot be understood without evaluating the relationship between the two military leaders that history has placed against each other in the most devastating battle of the last eighty years, the one fought by the Ukrainian army and the mercenaries of the former “Kremlin cook” in Bakhmut. The vicissitudes of the war brought them together – probably also in person – in at least two prisoner exchanges between February and May, certainly without men from the Russian Defense Ministry among those present. It is undeniable that Prigozhin’s narrative of history has radically changed since then, but he would be wronged to think that he converted to the Ukrainian cause or that this could only have happened because of Kiev’s promises.
The truth is that the entrepreneur’s blatant detachment from the small elite at the top in Russia dates back to a few months earlier, when between October and November 2022 he had come into conflict with the governor of St. Petersburg Alexander Beglov, to whose election he had contributed in 2019 thanks to the media he controlled and which, in the end, had not given him any benefit. Indeed, on closer inspection the exponent of the president’s party Vladimir Putin he had gone to great lengths to thwart Prigozhin’s many investments in the Baltic city, including PMC Wagner’s monumental headquarters in a huge business district. Their feud had been tolerated by the Kremlin, usually opposed to destabilizing initiatives from within the Russian power system. Not that it was the first time that Prigozhin had his voice heard: he was one of the most vocal critics of the Russian commanders’ approach to the invasion, regardless of the fact that it was illegal under Russian law to criticize or “disparage” the armed forces . On the other hand, it was also illegal own or operate private mercenary companies. After all, then it seemed more useful to keep the man than to fear him – despite his head shots and talkativeness – given that he had created the ferocious mercenaries successfully employed in Donbass, Libya, Syria and Central Africa, but also the “Russian troll factory” creator of fake online accounts for Facebook and other social media, strategic in spreading disinformation and propaganda and even capable of interfering with the 2016 US presidential election.
It is precisely the relationship between Prigozhin and Budanov that helps us understand how we got to this point. At the end of 2022, PMC Wagner’s boss father allowed one of his men to complain about the lack of ammunition, a criticism that as a soldier of the regular forces would have brought him before a court martial and that instead the “cook” will make his own, railing several times – even ferociously – against the defense minister Sergei Shoigu and the Chief of Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Since May, the film of the battle of Bakhmut, in its epilogue, has in fact become a Wagner-GUR co-production: the mercenaries have managed to easily complete the capture of the entire inhabited center – where in winter they had had to fight room by room in each house – while in parallel the Ukrainians advanced on the flanks, effectively creating the conditions for a possible future encirclement of the city. Immediately afterwards the mercenaries – as confirmed by their founder – withdrew to a “regenerative” camp right in Donbass. Despite being within range of the HIMARS rocket launchers, Kiev took good care not to disturb them, while in the same days it mowed down all the concentrations of enemy troops it came to know of. Prigozhin had reached that point after Shoigu, Gazprom and even some Russian oligarchs had undertaken to set up and send companies of mercenary competitors of Wagner to the Ukraine and Africa, with the deliberate task of replacing or at least damaging it.
Obviously Prigozhin did not remain silent or passive: after having created the myth of the commander around him close to his men and the common people – going so far as to pay the due in cash to the wives and mothers of the men who died in combat to strengthen the bond between himself and the Russian people – he lashed out several times against the military elite, guilty in his opinion of having sent them to massacre – without organization and without means – tens of thousands of Russians, deceiving public opinion with blatant propaganda. In all of this, up until his arrival in Rostov he never lashed out against Putin, except for making him pass as an “imbecile unable to take the Russian armed forces out of the hands of a gang of scoundrels”. Master of communication, the cook now acts in the silence of Ukraine and the West, both holding their breath in front of this incredible adventure. Of course, seeing Budanov reappear in public – after days of false rumors about his injury – with his hair shaved off, making him appear bald like Prigozhin, some suspicion arose.
Yes, but how many fighters – many of whom, as mentioned, were “covered” by the Ukrainians in Donbass for almost a month – did recruited, trained and employed in combat in recent years Prigozhin in Ukraine and in the other conflicts in which Putin’s Russia has gotten itself into? If we limit ourselves to the forces deployed in Bakhmut, we are led to think that the “cook” has lost at least thirty or more probably forty thousand men in that tremendous battle, keeping one or two tens of thousands. However, if we add the “veterans” of Donbass, the Middle East and Africa to the bill, we realize that he has moved, like pawns on the chessboard, tens of thousands more men, often already returned to Russia and remained faithful to him. Who can forget the dismissals of ex-convicts, with him – himself an ex-con in the 1980s as a common criminal – admonishing them not to repeat crime once someone had trusted them and restored their dignity? Now he can count on them – veterans and ex-convicts – while the Kremlin has nine tenths of the strength deployed in Ukraine and in confusion: according to the Israeli military officer Yigal Levin, the militants of PMC Wagner are adopting the tactics of the Taliban in Afghanistan: probably, in Moscow and in the main centers of European Russia, the bulk of the forces loyal to Prigozhin are preparing to emerge from the state of “sleeping cells” and to strike the defenders from behind of the capital or more simply to convince the soldiers of the National Guard and the few of the armed forces that the regime’s hours are numbered. I wonder if that’s really the case.