Wagner founder receives Putin’s support, but the Kremlin’s side- eye
He challenged Ukraine’s president to a duel from the cockpit of a bomber. He threatened to urinate on the face of a critic. He declared his private army was fighting for “every street, every house, every stairwell” in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
And that was just the past couple of weeks in the still- nascent public life of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the St. Petersburg tycoon who is confounding Moscow’s Kremlinallied elite by starting to dabble in politics alongside waging war in Ukraine.
Prigozhin operated for years in secrecy, profiting from his personal ties to President Vladimir Putin to win lucrative catering and construction contracts with the Russian government while building up a mercenary force known as Wagner. After throwing his forces into Ukraine, their ranks swelled by prisoner recruits, Prigozhin has emerged as a public power player, using social media to turn tough talk and brutality into his personal brand.
Now Moscow, along with analysts trying to understand the changing dynamics of Putin’s Russia, is puzzling over Prigozhin’s next move. Some analysts believe he is poised to turn his new prominence into broader political influence, perhaps even to threaten Putin. Others see limits to Prigozhin’s power base and public appeal.
“We don’t understand what his political ambitions are,” Oleg Matveychev, a member of Parliament for Putin’s United Russia party and a longtime pro- Kremlin political operator, said in a phone interview. “No one understands whether he has them or not.”
The emergence of Prigozhin after many years in the shadows has, in many ways, defined Russia’s political transformation since its invasion of Ukraine began last February. Spewing vulgarities, disregarding the law
and displaying loyalty to no one but Putin, Prigozhin is becoming a symbol of wartime Russia: ruthless, shameless and lawless, while his mercenary force takes thousands of casualties in one of the bloodiest battles of the war.
But there are obstacles to Prigozhin’s rise. He is facing public blowback in St. Petersburg, his home base, as he tries to exert control over the politics of the city, Russia’s second- largest. Wagner has suffered heavy casualties in the battle for Bakhmut. And Prigozhin is dogged by open questions and criticism in Moscow, where analysts doubt that his recruitment of prisoners and endorsement of extrajudicial executions have broad appeal. On Thursday, Prigozhin said that he was no longer recruiting from Russian prisons.
Even the Kremlin appears to be trying to keep Prigozhin’s political rise in check. Sergei Markov, a pro- Putin political analyst and former Kremlin adviser who appears frequently on Russian state television, said officials had been transmitting an unusual directive to Moscow’s talking heads in recent weeks: “Don’t excessively promote Prigozhin and Wagner.”
“It was a request from the leadership, and not just to me,” Markov said in a phone interview, declining to specify who,
exactly, had made the request. “They apparently don’t want to bring him into the political sphere because he’s so unpredictable — they fear him a little.”
Prigozhin jumped into the fray by expanding Wagner’s presence in Ukraine after the Kremlin’s initial attempt to seize Kyiv, the capital, failed early last year.
Amid Russia’s urgent need for frontline manpower, Prigozhin toured the country’s prisons last summer looking for recruits — an effort so blatantly encroaching on Russia’s powerful security establishment that analysts believed it could have been approved only by Putin.
In the battle for Bakhmut in recent weeks, Western officials say, Prigozhin has thrown thousands of convicts into the maw of Ukraine’s defenses, taking extraordinary casualties in a stubborn effort to wear down the other side.
When Prigozhin has tried to flex his muscle beyond Ukraine’s battlefields, he often has been rebuffed. He has demanded that his nemesis Alexander Beglov, governor of St. Petersburg, be tried for treason, describing him as the leader of the city’s “parasites and spongers who only think about stuffing their pockets.”
Beglov, an ally of Putin, has brushed off the months of public attacks and remains in power.
“He has a mandate,” Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst, said of Prigozhin, “but not carte blanche.”
Prigozhin’s ambiguous role in Russia’s domestic politics reflects Putin’s high- stakes balancing act as the Kremlin tries to fire up pro- war hard- liners without setting the stage for mass discontent over any future Russian military failures.
Prigozhin did not respond to a request for comment for this article and claimed in an interview with a Russian blogger on Friday that he had “zero political ambitions.” But on his social media account — in which his press office publishes inquiries from journalists along with his responses — Prigozhin casts himself as a populist wartime leader taking on corrupt officials and oligarchs who would prefer to cozy up to the West.
Two of his Wagner fighters recorded a video in December profanely excoriating Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian military’s general staff, for not providing them with enough ammunition. Prigozhin followed up by warning that “it’s hard to hear the problems on the front when you’re sitting in a warm office.”
Last month, in a screed on the Telegram messaging service, Prigozhin attacked officials for refusing to block access to Youtube — “the informational plague of our time.” He blamed Putin’s presidential administration, where, he claimed, many officials “only think about one thing: if only Russia would lose the war as fast as possible, so that the Americans come and work things out.”
But only two weeks after Prigozhin’s broadside against Gerasimov, the Kremlin named the general the chief commander of the war in Ukraine. The same day that Prigozhin went after Youtube, a senior lawmaker declared that “we are not discussing or, as far as I know, planning to discuss blocking Youtube.”