Why Putin won’t clamp down against the Wagner boss Prigozhin

For many Western military analysts, Russia is losing the Ukraine conflict. To back up this claim, they often cite the ongoing tussle between the Russian military and Kremlin’s hired guns - the Wagner group. But there’s much more to the story.

For months, the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has publicly lambasted the regular Russian military, blaming its commanders for cowardice and bad battlefield strategies.

Last week he upped the ante by telling his thousands of followers on the Telegram app that Moscow will ‘execute’ top generals for losing Ukrainian territory.

“I think that we are two or three months away from the firing squad,” he said.

“Shoigu, Gerasimov, I call on you to visit the front line, raise your guns so the army marches forward. Come on, you can do it! And if you can’t, you’ll die as heroes,” said Prigozhin, in another video, referring to Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu and the army’s top general Valery Gerasimov.

Prigozhin used various expletives to attack both leaders' military conduct, which the Wagner chief said necessarily cost the lives of many Russian soldiers.

Interestingly, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not intervened to stop the Wagner boss from making his inflammatory opinions public, leaving many analysts to wonder why.

Alessandro Arduino, an affiliate lecturer at the Lau China Institute of King's College London, and the author of Money for Mayhem: Mercenaries, Private Military Companies, Drones, and the Future of War sees two main motives for why the Kremlin stays aloof from Prigozhin’s bickering with the regular army.

‘A controlled infighting’

One of the real motives “lies in the Kremlin's strategic utilization of Wagner as a means to keep the army on its toes,” says Arduino. “Therefore, the presence of Prigozhin's media persona not only receives acceptance but is even encouraged,” Arduino tells TRT World, in reference to the Kremlin’s conspicuous silence on Prigozhin’s attacks on the defence ministry.

While the Kremlin lets Prigozhin keep the military on the defensive, the president’s inner circle relies on the regular Russian army leadership as “a fail-safe to keep 'Putin's Chef’ in line in case he will cross the proverbial red line and turn against his master,” says Arduino.

Another motive for the Kremlin's silence on Prigozhin’s tirades against the army is related to Wagner's growing presence across the African continent from Mali to the Central African Republic and Sudan.

“In this respect, the Wagner Group advances the Kremlin's geopolitical objectives," says Arduino and adds that providing support to local militias also provides Kremlin with valuable resources like gold and diamonds.

"This circumstance explains the tolerance granted to Prigozhin's social media outbursts,” adds Arduino.

Maybe, Putin also sees the problem as just a war of words.

Eugene Chausovsky, a defence expert and a senior analyst at New Lines Institute, believes that Putin’s tolerance of the issue is related to the fact that it has not escalated to a level where it compromises the Russian army and Kremlin’s strategic stakes in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world.

And things might not have reached a point where Putin feels he must interfere. Take the example of Bakhmut, the Ukrainian city over which Russia and Ukraine fought a bloody battle. At one point in May, Prigozhin even threatened to withdraw from Bakhmut because he alleged Moscow was not supplying necessary ammunition. Despite Prigozhin’s provocative statements, his Wagner fighters helped take control of the city from Ukrainian forces, handing the city over to regular Russian army forces, says Chausovsky.

But the Wagner group lost tens of thousands of its fighters in the battle for Bakhmut and Prigozhin has let everyone know that he partly blames the Russian military for that.

In a recent post, he accused the Russian army of allowing Ukrainian forces to take over areas near Bakhmut. Reportedly Wagner mercenaries even interrogated and tortured a Russian colonel, Roman Venevitin, the commander of the 72nd Brigade, for allegedly opening fire at a Wagner vehicle.

“This is a complete demoralisation of the Russian Armed Forces who should not be any close to tolerating such behaviour of a PMC (Wagner),” wrote a war observer, who translated Wagner’s interview with the Russian commander.

But Chausovsky thinks otherwise. “Until the dispute has tangible negative impacts on the battlefield, this is something Putin can tolerate,” he tells TRT World, adding that the infighting within the Russian war apparatus has not yet reached “a strategic level of threat” in the eyes of the Kremlin.

“For now, Putin has been able to keep the Russian security apparatus largely consolidated and under his control, which is the most important element for the Kremlin,” he says.

Why is Prigozhin angry?

Putin’s ‘Chef’ has lost many of his fighters, which he partly blames on the wrong war strategies of the Russian military. At the same time, he’s vying for recognition as somebody who’s the chief architect behind the battleground setbacks faced by Ukraine, experts say.

“If there is anger, then there are two possible aspects of discontent: commercial and operational. Wagner is a for-profit military contractor and this can create tensions with the regular army and its rather different organisational philosophy,” says Gregory Simons, an associate professor at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University.

“In some respects, the army is a market competitor to Wagner and this is one possible reason, to argue for a bigger share (and profit) in the war. Operationally speaking, Wagner may feel the army is holding back and saving the lives of its troops at the expense of Wagner. So the irritation comes from disagreements on operational choices and priorities of the two may be different,” Simons tells TRT World.

“First and foremost Prigozhin is a businessman and not a military man,” Simons added.

Ulas Pehlivan, a Turkish political analyst, believes that Prigozhin’s public outbursts might also be related to his background, lacking military discipline and tradition as well as the army’s organisational culture.

But there is also a possibility that Prigozhin might pretend to be angry for tactical reasons, which is called maskirovka in Russian political language, aiming to confuse the military strategy of Ukraine and their Western backers, according to Simons.

Prigozhin’s expletive-laden tirades against top Russian generals may be “a show to try and give the impression of a split” in the Russian military conduct, says Simons, encouraging Ukraine to take rash and unwise battlefield decisions. “It’s a public spectacle to shape the perception of those external actors watching.”