Wagner’s founder has Putin’s support, but the Kremlin is wary

He challenged the President of Ukraine to a duel from the cockpit of a bomber. He threatened to pee in the face of a reviewer. He said his private army was fighting for “every street, every house, every stairway” in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

And this is only in the last two weeks in the still fledgling public life of Yevgeni Prigozhin, the St. Petersburg tycoon who is baffling the allied Moscow Kremlin elite with his first forays into politics as he wages war in the Ukraine.

Prigozhin has been operating in secret for years. Benefitted from his personal ties to President Vladimir Putin to win lucrative food service and construction contracts with the Russian government built a mercenary force known as the Wagner. By sending his forces into Ukraine, with his ranks filled with conscripts pulled out of jail, Prigozhin emerged as a powerful public figure. Through social media, he has turned brutality and aggressive language into his personal brand of him.

Now Moscow, along with analysts trying to understand the changing dynamics of Putin’s Russia, is trying to figure out Prigozhin’s next move. Some analysts believe he is ready to turn his newfound prominence into broader political influence, perhaps to the point of threatening Putin. Others see clear boundaries in Prigozhin’s catchment area 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 telephone interview. “Nobody knows if they have them or not.”

Prigozhin’s emergence after many years in the shadows has, in many ways, defined Russia’s political transformation since the invasion of Ukraine began in February last year. Spitting profanity, ignoring the law and showing loyalty only to Putin, Prigozhin is becoming a symbol of what Russia is like in wartime: ruthless, shameless and unpunished, as his mercenary force suffers thousands of casualties in one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

However, there are some obstacles in Prigozhin’s ascent. He faces public rejection in St. Petersburg, his base of operations, as he tries to exert control over the politics of the city, Russia’s second largest. Wagner suffered heavy losses in the battle for Bakhmut. Moreover, Prigozhin is haunted by open questions and criticism of Moscow, where analysts doubt his prisoner recruitment and support for extrajudicial killings will find widespread acceptance. On Thursday, Feb. 9, Prigozhin said he was no longer recruiting in Russian prisons.

Even the Kremlin seems to want to keep Prigozhin’s political rise under control. Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin political analyst and former Kremlin adviser who appears frequently on Russian state television, said officials in recent weeks had issued an unusual directive to Moscow spokesmen and commentators: “Do not overpromote Prigozhin nor Wagner”.

“It was a request from the leadership, and not just from me,” Markov said in a telephone interview, though he declined to specify who made the request. “Apparently they don’t want to bring him into the political sphere because he’s so unpredictable. They’re a little afraid of him.”

Prigozhin entered the conflict when he expanded Wagner’s presence in Ukraine after the Kremlin’s initial attempt to take control of the capital Kiev failed early last year. The “private military company” was at the time mainly active in Syria and Africa, where it operated both on behalf of the Russian government and in the service of Prigozhin’s business interests.

Faced with Russia’s urgent need for soldiers at the forefront of battle, Prigozhin visited the country’s prisons last summer in search of recruits.. This initiative was such a blatant invasion of Russia’s powerful security elite that analysts believe only Putin could have approved it.

In the battle for Bakhmut in recent weeks, Prigozhin has thrown thousands of detainees into the jaws of Ukrainian defenses, according to Western officials. He has suffered extraordinary losses in a dogged attempt to wear down the opposing side.

When Prigozhin tried to show his strength beyond the battlefields of Ukraine, he was often repulsed. He has called for his nemesis, Alexander Beglov, the governor of St. Petersburg, to be tried for treason, describing him as the leader of “the city’s parasites and freeloaders who only think about lining their pockets.”

Beglov, a Putin ally, has shrugged off months of public attacks and remains in power.

“He has a mission,” said Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow-based political analyst, of Prigozhin. “but you don’t have carte blanche”.

Prigozhin’s ambiguous role in Russia’s domestic politics reflects Putin’s high-stakes balancing act at a time when the Kremlin is trying to foment pro-war extremists without providing an arena for the mass discontent opposite to a potential Russian military failure.

Prigozhin did not respond to a request for comment for this article, saying in an interview with a Russian blogger on Friday, Feb. 10, that he had “no political ambitions.” But on his social media account — where his publicist posts journalists’ questions along with their answers — Prigozhin portrays himself as a populist wartime leader facing off against corrupt officials and oligarchs who would rather curry favor with the West.

Two of its Wagner fighters recorded a video in December of them profanely lashing out at General Valeri Gerasimov, the Russian Armed Forces Chief of Staff, for not supplying them with enough ammunition. This was followed by a statement from Prigozhin in which he warned that “it’s hard to feel the problems ahead when you’re sitting in a cozy office.”

Last month, during a discussion on the Telegram messaging service, Prigozhin slammed government officials for refusing to block access to YouTube, “the information scourge of our times.” He blamed Putin’s presidential administration, in which, he said, many officials “think only of one thing: Hopefully Russia will lose the war as quickly as possible so that the Americans come to settle their differences.”

But just two weeks after Prigozhin’s outburst against Gerasimov, the Kremlin appointed the general commander-in-chief of the war in Ukraine. On the same day that Prigozhin hounded YouTube, a high-ranking lawmaker stated that “we are not discussing or, as far as I know, are not planning to discuss a YouTube block.”

Prigozhin’s attention-seeking is particularly notorious because it was only last fall that he acknowledged having founded Wagner. For Moscow’s policy pundits, there are key questions that remain unanswered. What does Prigozhin really want? How will he fit into Putin’s tightly controlled political system?

“Prigozhin behaves like a public politician,” said Alexander Kynev, a political scientist in Moscow. “But today there are practically no vacant public order posts in Russia.”

Markov, the pro-Kremlin political analyst, said he believes Prigozhin’s main goal is to create a “business empire” where political influence is useful.

For Putin, Prigozhin is also useful to some extent. While Wagner’s fighters are often portrayed as brave and effective in the Kremlin-controlled media, Prigozhin’s antics, such as the one in the recent video of the bomber’s cockpit that went viral among war supporters, have almost no media presence. of state television.

Markov said that while the Kremlin tries to keep Prigozhin’s popularity in check, it has Putin’s personal backing.

“It is clear that Putin defends Prigozhin”, he assured. “Because the number of people who have sharp claws against him in the bureaucracy is enormous.”

*Alina Lobzina contributed to this report.

c.2023 The New York Times Society