Putin has replaced his commanding general three times in less than a year. The mutual dependency, however, is outweighed by a problem that has bedeviled Russia’s war effort since it started: the lack of coordination and disunity of command. Frustrating as Prigozhin’s mouthing off has been, his men have helped fill the void along a 600-mile front line. Prigozhin, in turn, needs the Russian military establishment for the supplies and material required to get the job done. The first draft call-up of 300,000 men in September 2022 was a disruptive event in Russian society, pushing hundreds of thousands of eligible Russian men to leave the country and rupturing the notion that the Kremlin could insulate the Russian population from the war. It’s not hard to understand why Putin would want to delay another mobilization. Prigozhin’s antics aside, Wagner serves as a crucial source of manpower for the Russian army at a time when Putin seeks to defer a second troop mobilization for as long as possible (in April, Putin signed a law that makes it easier for the authorities to reach draftees with a summons, which suggests another mobilization is likely only a matter of time).
But beggars can’t be choosers, and the fact is each side needs the other. There is no love lost between Wagner and the Russian high-command.
Several days after the promised ammunition was supposedly approved, he stated that the Russian state was “unable to defend the country” and that Putin was being deceived by his military advisers. Prigozhin remains unapologetic in his diatribes.
While that withdrawal never took place (the way Prigozhin tells it, the Russian army agreed to send more ammunition), the episode produced yet another deluge of bad press for the Russian war effort. Prigozhin is clearly feeling the heat. This month he recorded a video with piles of dead fighters behind him, gesturing to the camera while claiming that Wagner was being starved of ammunition by his enemies in the Russian military and threatened to withdraw his men entirely from Bakhmut unless the problem was rectified. Kyiv, however, chose to stay and fight rather than retreat to safer ground in the west, and Ukrainian troops have made progress recapturing some ground in the city. That offensive has been a bleeding ulcer for Wagner, which has sent wave upon wave of poorly trained recruits - many plucked from the Russian prison system - toward Ukrainian positions in the hope that sheer mass and constant artillery barrages would dislodge Ukraine’s defenders. Last year, after Russian forces had to pull back from the town of Lyman, Prigozhin excoriated Russia’s senior officers and hinted they should be deployed “with machine guns barefoot to the front.”Īccording to a White House assessment on May 1, there have been approximately 100,000 Russian casualties since December, at least half from the Wagner Group's spearheading the offensive in Bakhmut. His frequent rhetorical commentaries on Telegram and other media outlets against the Russian military leadership no doubt grates on Shoigu and Gerasimov, who are depicted by the Wagner boss as a fat, lazy pair of idiots sitting back in their red-wooded offices as young Russian men are sent to their deaths without adequate supplies. The swift rout of Russian troops in Kharkiv last September was apparently so distasteful to Prigozhin that he approached Putin personally and complained about how the war was being run. Yevgeny Prigozhin addresses the Russian army's senior command in a message posted to Telegram on May 5. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Army General Staff who Vladimir Putin appointed last fall as the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine. The man commonly referred to as “Putin’s Chef” because of his lucrative catering contracts with the Kremlin isn’t afraid to register his opinions on the competence of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Gen. It’s no secret that Prigozhin has been strongly critical of the Russian military’s performance since the war erupted in February 2022. But whether or not all the details are substantiated, the report itself highlights a tug-of-war between Prigozhin’s private army and the Russian military establishment, each of which have been taking rhetorical shots at each other even as they fight against staunch Ukrainian resistance in the field. Prigozhin forcefully denied the allegations, alleging that the entire thing was concocted by his enemies in the Kremlin.
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