There’s a famous quote attributed to Winston Churchill that he may or may not have said.
Here’s one version (I have read others):
Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.
It’s the sort of observation that Churchill might have made, and it’s accurate enough, so let’s go with it for now, as this story from the Financial Times brings it to mind:
The Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin often brags about his supposedly fearless exploits on Ukraine’s battlefields, but his most reckless manoeuvre may have been at home: flying too high in the Kremlin.
For months, the founder of the Wagner Group has been sparring with Russia’s military over a series of calamitous defeats in Ukraine, in what has become an epic Moscow power struggle over the war.
But in recent days Prigozhin has resorted to increasingly angry rants, a sign of what Kremlin watchers see as his waning clout in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle as the defence establishment closes ranks and reasserts its dominance.
Prigozhin this week was left to cry “treason” over the military allegedly starving his men of ammunition, ending his prison recruitment campaign and stifling praise of Wagner in state media. “There’s a risk he could end up like Icarus,” a person close to Prigozhin said.
Prigozhin is someone who appears to have risen in Putin’s favor originally on the back of owning various restaurants that Russia’s leader liked. His companies also provide catering services to the Kremlin (he is sometimes known as “Putin’s chef”). If this did indeed play a major role in his rise, it not only shows the extent to which Putin now rules like a czar, picking favorites on a whim, but also a degree of historical continuity. If Putin is to be believed, his grandfather, Spiridon, worked as a cook for both Lenin and Stalin.
These days, Prigozhin is best known as the founder of the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization connected to the state, but up until recently held (officially) at enough of a distance for a Kremlin connection to be unconvincingly, but helpfully, denied if necessary (the same was true of the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm Prigozhin also admits to have founded). The Wagner Group first emerged in the fighting in the Donbas in 2014, and has since seen service in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. It is known for recruiting in prisons (Prigozhin himself spent time in prison for robbery in the 1980s) and for its savagery. Execution by sledgehammer has become one of its trademarks. Some comparisons might be made with Nazi Germany’s notorious Dirlewanger Brigade.
The Wagner Group has taken a prominent role in the current war in Ukraine, and, as the FT reports, Prigozhin has become an increasingly vocal critic of the way that the Russian Army has handled the conflict. That he has risen as far as he has says quite a lot not only about the culture of the Putin regime, but also about the way that power is distributed within it.
We’ll have to see if Prigozhin has now gone too far. But there was another passage in the FT‘s story that caught my eye:
Prigozhin’s willingness to take on Russia’s top brass won him allies among leaders of other irregular forces who shared his hatred of Shoigu and Gerasimov, the architect of the army’s failed blitzkrieg on Kyiv last February, according to two people who know him and two western officials.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya, was upset at the losses elite Chechen paratrooper units sustained during an assault on Hostomel airfield outside the capital. Meanwhile, ultranationalists with ties to Russia’s separatist proxies in the Donbas thought the army’s grinding tactics had led to needlessly high casualty rates in eastern Ukraine.
Members of the Russian elite have also set up militias in a fashion after Wagner’s, according to current and former western officials. “This is a patchwork military effort,” a former senior US official said. “It’s sort of like the Spanish civil war.”
To say that arrangements such as these would have been inconceivable in the highly centralized Soviet state is an understatement. To say that this only emphasizes the personal nature of Putin’s rule is a statement of the obvious, but the hint of warlordism is unexpected.