Get ready for the flood of kompromat
As Vladimir Putin sits thinking in his bomb-proof office, he may come to regret the fact that the entire world is sure that he ordered the death of the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Kremlin is a Camorra, a mafia style parliament, running a gangster operation to fill Putin’s pockets and those of his oligarchs and elites. But as the Japanese found in Burma in 1944, if you prosecute a war with terror you will likely come unstuck against a well led, motivated and moral organisation like General ‘Bill’ Slim’s ‘Forgotten Army’.
Putin may in fact have signed his own death warrant. His fingerprints may not have been on the firing button when Prigozhin’s jet was brought down, and may not have been on the Polonium or Novichok which killed some of his other opponents, but his DNA is all over the orders. He now has two very powerful groups to worry about – quite apart from the International Criminal Court, which no doubt has so much evidence that if he ever gets to the Hague he will never leave.
Firstly, Putin must worry about his oligarchs who have now been holed up in their dachas in Moscow for over 18 months, unable to use their superyachts or villas in the Mediterranean. As their leader is further vilified around the globe over this latest murder, the oligarchs may come to see that their only chance to break out of Russia, now so diminished economically and socially, is to dispose of Putin.
Secondly, the Wagner Group might have lost their ‘cowboy’ leader and his deputy, but they remain a large force of thugs and murderers. Prigozhin was no military commander, but the Wagner Group is the most successful military outfit that Russia has managed to put into the field, no matter that they are paid mercenaries, many of them recruited out of Russian jails. To control such a rabble, you need some very hard ‘lieutenants’ running the show and these men will now be considering the future in Belarus and Africa. How ironic it would be if somebody showered them with riches to go and create mayhem within Russia. My experience of mercenaries is that they are not too picky about whose money they take.
archive link: https://archive.is/mMry3
Part One
Sorry this is so long. I separated it into two parts for posting.
I would agree with all of this. What you asked, specifically, was, “But if Prigozhin was paying their fees and keeping them in check with his control structure how could they have been available to change their masters?”
There are multiple assumptions in that question, and the simple answer is that no military organization is one single unified group, especially Wagner. And that is the biggest mistake that author was making, IMO. But feel free to disagree.
My belief is that to pull off a successful coup – which is what killing Putin would be – you have to have more than a single shooter, even if a single shooter is the one doing the deed. Leaving aside the bigger issue of who will fill the vacuum of power when Putin is dead, for the assassin of a world leader there has to be some level of ideological motive as well as high pay, plus the level of skill that act would necessarily demand. In other words, it has to be someone who wants to do it, as well as being an insider who can bypass all the layers of security.
Putin famously defends against all of these, making it a high barrier for anyone, and something that would be highly unlikely for anyone under Prigozhin. Remember that Prigozhin counted Putin as a friend for thirty years, he supported the war not just with words but with rubles, and he did not want Putin dead or even deposed. And that, to me, is the biggest factor in preventing this: the lack of ideological motivation not just in those directly loyal to Prigozhin, but in all of Wagner.
Prigozhin was paying their costs, as Putin’s oligarch who was expected to do so, but that doesn’t mean that Wagner under Prigozhin was anything like an ideologically unified force. Wagner was (and is, as far as I know) a ragtag collection of ex-prisoners, then soldiers for hire (mercenaries), and at the top highly paid security specialists like Utkin and the other Wagner personnel on the downed plane. That’s roughly three disparate groups within Wagner, definitely some overlap but not one unified force, and they each have their own motivators and reasons for whatever they do.
Of those three groups, only the lowest ranks are stuck “in check with his control structure,” to use your phrase. They would hate Prigozhin as much as Putin, but still worked for Prigozhin either to stay out of prison or because it’s at least better than being a Russian conscript. But these would never have the skill level or individual desire to make a move. An ex-prisoner or basic soldier with no special training being sent on a mission to kill Putin? Not believable, even if he hates Putin. He’s there for the pay, or to stay out of jail, and if Prigozhin or Putin (or both) were on fire in a ditch he wouldn’t waste piss on either. That’s why it’s just not believable to assert that the lowest ranks are going to be ideologically driven, and thus self-motivated to “change masters” on that basis alone, even if they had the freedom. Of all Wagner’s troops, these are the most trapped.
And there’s something else to consider. Morally, Prigozhin was as much of a gutter rat as Putin, another fat oligarch feeding at the trough of Russia’s stolen wealth, but as it turns out, he was actually a pretty good battlefield commander and leader of men. And good commanders tend to earn the respect of their men, even the lowest. But that does NOT equate to any of them loving him enough as a group that they would avenge his death en masse, which is pretty much what this article alleges, even the headline.
That leaves the soldiers for hire, plus the more highly-paid, highly skilled security specialists at the top, two more groups that are in Wagner but out of choice, to pull off an assassination of Putin. But they never did, even though there are countless people in the world who would have paid to have Putin killed, and will even now. And these higher-level Wagner operatives are in demand and could have left at any time, but never did. So it seems pretty clear that it was never a situation of higher-level operatives in Wagner not killing Putin because they were being “held in check,” or unable to leave or without other options; they are simply choosing not to do so.
The author of the article takes none of this into account. He thinks of Wagner forces as a conglomerate, one entity with unified thinking and will, now suddenly filled with a desire for revenge. Read again what he says. It’s wishful thinking, with absolutely no recognition of the stratification of motive and ability found in any military organization, including Wagner:
Part Two follows . . .