Key to understanding Wagner’s boss’s rebellion against Moscow
The head of private security company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a traditional ally of President Vladimir Putin and a Kremlin bulwark on the Ukrainian front, carried out his confrontation this Saturday against regular Russian forces and in particular against the country’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu an offensive by his mercenaries, brought to a critical juncture from Rostov-on-Don — 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian border and the headquarters of the Southern District’s military command center — with the goal of reaching Moscow. A few hours after crossing the Lipetsk region, around 360 kilometers south of the Russian capital, the Wagner boss announced the end of the mission after mediation by the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. These are some keys that allow us to understand one of the greatest security challenges for Russian territory since the fall of the Soviet Union:
Who is Yevgeny Prigozhin?
Prigozhin is considered one of the protagonists of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. But he was not unknown to the international community. The 61-year-old businessman, who was born in Saint Petersburg, from where he built his business, was already in the crosshairs of the US Treasury Department, which was responsible for administering the US sanctions program, even before this large-scale war. As early as 2020, Wagner was primarily associated with the abusive exploitation of mining resources in the Central African Republic. The use of his troll farm to destabilize and manipulate public opinion in unstable contexts and the presence of his gunmen in Ukraine (embroiled in a conflict in the Donbass region since 2014), Syria, Sudan, Libya and Mozambique.
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The hospitality tycoon, now concentrated under his leadership in the Concord Group, has enjoyed an unprecedented rise in three decades from St. Petersburg, where he began his business adventure with a dog stand – after he was jailed for theft – to the St. Petersburg’s eastern trenches Ukraine, critical of the Kremlin’s strategy, has rebelled and sent its mercenaries into battles as bloody as Bakhmut’s. In between, Prigozhin grew up in the restaurant world connected to the Russian elite and had a very prominent client named Vladimir Putin. His corporate conglomerate has grown in the shadow of the Kremlin over the past 10 years with two main pillars: Wagner and the Internet Investigation Agency, his troll militia on the Internet.
What is the Wagner group?
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Together with Lieutenant Colonel Dmitri Utkin, another of Wagner’s founding military chiefs, Prigozhin has managed over the past five years to expand his mercenary group’s Hydra from the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa. He secretly directed paramilitary operations until February 2022, when Moscow gave the green light to the land, sea and air offensive against Ukraine and Wagner made public their existence and maneuvers on Ukraine’s eastern front. The group of Russian mercenaries morphed from Moscow’s unofficial armed wing into the official vanguard on the muddier battlefields between Lungask and Donetsk, the two provinces that make up the Donbass region that Putin craves. Until last year, Prigozhin’s men, mostly former military personnel with special operations experience, had taken part in the revolt that began in 2014 to seize a third of this Donbass, albeit without a loudspeaker.
But the industrial region on the Ukrainian-Russian border was not Wagner’s only place of work over the past decade. Among other things, the mercenary group has participated in the conflicts in Syria in support of the El Asad regime and has grown; Libya, linked to rebel general Khalifa Hafter; Mali, in support of the current military leadership; Sudan, with even ties to the various armed groups that made up the military junta, although they are more closely related to Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s and Central African Republic’s militias, such as President Faustin Archange Touaderá’s Praetorian Guard. It is this latest country that has turned the private security group into a kind of African laboratory of its leverage – and that of Moscow – with tentacles in the main sectors of the mining industry.
Through the exploitation of natural resources – in the Central African Republic alone, according to estimates by Politico, the company could have fattened its coffers by around 1 billion dollars – it financed its armed forces. However, Wagner has also been instrumental in failures on the African continent, such as his 2020 offensive to stop the Al Shabab jihadists in Mozambique. They didn’t succeed.
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How did the rebellion come about?
In the past six months, Prigozhin has become particularly fierce as the main internal critic of Moscow’s denounced war in Ukraine. In addition, he was in the service of a great paradox: he was one of the executors of the military offensive and was in the forefront on many fronts around the Donbass region. And with notable fluctuations: from complaints about the lack of support in some battles, to the clear rejection, as he did this Friday, to the necessity and urgency of the operation, which started 16 months ago,” he accused Russian Defense Minister Sergei shoigu to be its main architect.
In contrast to Putin’s low public profile, Wagner’s boss has launched an information offensive in recent months via Concord’s profile on the Russian social network Vkontakte, in which he uses messages and videos with Prigozhin himself to inform about the needs and grievances of his men, especially those around him the Battle of Bakhmut. In general, the businessman-turned-military leader has channeled his goals in three directions: criticism of the wealthy Russian elite around the Kremlin, with particular animosity towards Shoigu and the chief of the general staff, veteran Valery Gerasimov, in clear contrast to his own paper in the trench, near enemy fire; Rejection of the military strategy of the Russian commanders on the ground and, above all, allegations of complicity against them due to the lack of weapons and ammunition for their men.
The latter, the scarcity of resources for the fight against the Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut, was one of the greatest points of friction between Wagner and Moscow in recent weeks. Prigozhin repeatedly threatened to leave this front if he did not get ammunition. After the warnings from Putin’s so-called boss, negotiations and reinforcements kept coming up. At the end of May, the mercenaries began withdrawing from Bakhmut to cede the positions to the regular Russian forces. But the tension didn’t let up. Prigozhin had denounced in recent weeks that his ranks had been the target of attacks by the Russian army during the retreat and withdrawal. The escalation peaked this Friday after Prigozhin blamed the Shoigu detachment for the bombing of his camps. This was the prelude to Wagner’s offensive from the south-western Russian region of Rostov.
Can Wagner’s troops challenge Putin’s power?
There are no reliable figures on the Wagner Group’s size or its deployment in Ukraine since February 2022. Consensus estimates, mostly from Western sources, suggest that Prigozhin has around 50,000 troops stationed in the neighboring country. As the entrepreneur from St. Petersburg conceded, around 20,000 mercenaries would have died at the front, many of them only recently drafted. That’s the same number of casualties that Moscow’s regular forces have suffered, according to Washington’s calculations. Having said this, and having to add Prigozhin’s own constant accusations about the lack of military resources – arms and ammunition – it is safe to assume that the size of the Russian army, one of the largest in the world (1.3 million soldiers and more than two million reservists) should not be endangered by Wagner’s putsch.
Although Russian regular troops were criticized for their lack of flexibility and adaptation to the Ukrainian front, especially of new recruits, the group of mercenaries was also fed by inexperienced personnel, using prison recruiting campaigns to fatten the detachments. The effectiveness of Prigozhin’s offensive will depend on the resistance his column of vehicles and men might encounter en route to Moscow, but above all on the messages of strength that might come from the Kremlin and the generals.
Putin initially condemned the operation and promised a tough response, while there was no sign of weakness among the top military figures. The Russian general Sergei Surovikin, who commanded the Russian troops for a short time and maintains good relations with Wagner’s men, urged Prigozhin to stop his offensive in the last few hours.
What does the West think of Wagner?
Key Allied actors at the forefront of international sanctions programs, including the United States and the European Union, have exerted intense pressure on the mercenary group in recent years, which they accuse of ongoing human rights abuses. The sanctions against its main leaders, including Prigozhin, but also against his lieutenants in Africa and the Middle East, have drained the coffers of the paramilitary organization, which has found new sources of funding in the illegal trade in timber, gold and diamonds. Human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the arrests, torture and executions of the mercenaries. As a final example of Wagner’s actions, the UN released a report last May in which it blamed “foreign military personnel” — referring to the Russian soldiers without identifying them — for involvement in the deaths of 500 civilians in Mali with the Malian army .
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