In the end, Wagner’s rebellion lasted less than 24 hours. But the toxic cocktail of jealousy, rivalry and ambition that spawned it has taken months, if not years, to brew.
The main characters of the play were Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, and the heads of Russia’s huge army – Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov.
Prigozhin – an ex-convict who was involved with organized crime in the 1980s and for which he spent years in prison – is a creation of the Kremlin, which owes its vast wealth to President Vladimir Putin.
Since he formed the Wagner Group in 2014, he has become a key tool in Mr Putin’s desire to reassert Russian influence around the world. From the shadows, his forces – made up of hardened former Russian special forces – have supported Mr Putin’s ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria and helped shift French influence in Mali.
Until last year Prigosan denied mounting evidence that he controlled the group, launching a lawsuit in British courts against Belling Cat journalist Elliot Higgins who accused him of running a private militia.
The undeniable nature of his group’s operations has endeared him to Mr. Putin and allowed him to build his power base over the past year vis-à-vis the military and security elites who rule Russia.
A man at ease with violence, corruption and ambition – his rise symbolizes the modern state built by President Vladimir Putin over the past 24 years.
But despite his growing power, he remains an outsider in Mr. Putin’s small inner circle of advisers, unafraid to criticize officials in Moscow who he sees as corrupt, lazy or both.
And for years he has reserved a special distaste for Army Chief Valery Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Unlike most of Mr. Putin’s top advisers, who hail from the president’s hometown of St. Petersburg, Mr. Shoigu was born in a small village on the Russian-Mongolian border.
Despite leading the Russian military for more than a decade, Mr Shoigu has never served in uniform, rising through the ranks of the Communist Party before becoming head of Russia’s Emergencies Ministry in the 1990s.
Mr. Gerasimov, the third figure in this rivalry, is the ultimate military insider. He cut his teeth in the 1990s putting down a bloody insurgency in Chechnya, and is now the longest-serving post-Soviet military chief.
Prigozhin’s growing importance in projecting Russian power — and his group’s ability to poach top special forces operators from the military by offering higher wages — is believed to have fueled tensions between the men for years. Is.
But it’s really after the Russian invasion of Ukraine – and especially after the bloody Battle of Bakhmut Meat Mill, a battle where thousands of Wagner’s soldiers are believed to have been killed – that Prigozhin’s hatred of the military elite It has come out in the open. .
The attempt to capture Bakhmut – a small pre-war city of about 70,000 people – is problematic. Most observers believe that it had limited military significance and some say that the campaign was designed by Prigogne so that he could claim victory during a failed army campaign.
He regularly accused Mr. Shoigu and Mr. Gerasimov of “constantly trying to steal credit for Wagner’s victory” in cities like Soledar, where thousands of paramilitary troops – often recruited from prisons – faced their deaths. were
And unlike his more bureaucratic rivals, Progozin’s often foul language made him a figure who often captured the attention of the world’s media. Leaked documents show that the Russian Defense Ministry was unsure how to counter its messaging and growing popularity.
But Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin was willing to go ahead.
Letting rivalries boil over is President Putin’s style. It has long allowed competing power centers to vie among themselves for influence, believing that this will prevent one group from gaining enough prominence to challenge it directly.
Daniel Trestman, a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote last year that Mr. Putin’s system contained “trip wires” to prevent insurrection, noting that “the armed men There is a lack of mutual trust between the officers in command. organizing a conspiracy”.
In this regime, Mr. Shoigu is kept under his watch by Wagner, while mercenaries fear the army. At the top of the pyramid sits Mr. Putin, a chess master moving the pieces around the board and balancing the system.
Meanwhile, Prigozhin has always been careful to avoid directly criticizing the president, instead blaming Russia’s failures since the February 2022 invasion on Mr. Putin being misled by his commanders.
For Mr. Putin, it was useful to allow a mercenary boss to blame a failed military campaign on underlings. The Russian president is believed to have privately criticized Shoigu and Gerasimov for the slowness of the attack.
But in recent months, Mr. Putin’s long-held strategy has come to the fore.
Prigozhin—increasingly angry over his suspicions that the Army was withholding ammunition from his forces as they attempted to complete the capture of Bakhmut—began posting more and more unsolicited telegram rants.
In one video – in which the remains of dozens of dead Wagner fighters apparently surround him in the background – he raged: “You [scumbags] who aren’t giving us ammunition, you bastards, you put their guts to hell. will eat!”
“Shoygo! Gerasimov! Where’s the ammunition?… They came here as volunteers and die for you to fatten themselves up in your mahogany offices,” he shouted in another video. , apparently trying to blackmail Moscow into threatening to withdraw from the front lines and abandon the battle for Bakhmut.
According to US intelligence documents leaked by US Airman Jack Teixeira, Prigozhin was called to a meeting with Mr Putin and Mr Shoigu on February 22 – the same day he posted the video of Wagner among the bodies.
“The meeting is almost certainly concerned, at least in part, with Prigozhin’s public accusations and the resulting tension with Shoigu,” read a document using a different spelling of the defense chief’s name.
But it seems that the summit did not have the desired effect.
