Wagner Chief’s Feud With Russian Military Cracks Putin’s Image of Control
Prigozhin’s public criticism of Moscow’s generals and defense minister reveals strains in the mighty leadership structure the Russian president built
The owner of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary organization, Yevgeny Prigozhin, stood amid the ruins of the conquered Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 20 and unleashed a tirade against his foes.
Their names: Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defense, and Valeriy Gerasimov, Russia’s top general.
“Shoigu and Gerasimov have turned the war into personal entertainment,” Prigozhin thundered as he announced Wagner’s costly victory in Bakhmut. “Because of their whims, five times more guys than had been supposed to die have died. They will be held responsible for their actions, which in Russian are called crimes.”
The escalating conflict between the owner of Wagner and Russia’s top military leadership, a tale of perceived betrayal with roots in the Syrian war, represents the first significant crack in the country’s establishment since the invasion of Ukraine began more than a year ago.
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The extent to which it has become public in recent weeks, affecting military operations, shows that Moscow’s setbacks on the front line are putting under strain the formidable system of power that has been created by President Vladimir Putin over the past two decades.
Fearful of potential challengers, Putin, 70, has long promoted rivalries among subordinates. These intrigues, however, used to be hidden from the public eye. The vitriol of the confrontation between Prigozhin’s private army, which numbers tens of thousands of veterans, many of them recruited in prisons, and the country’s military leadership has shattered that mold.
“Looking at this conflict, the main conclusion drawn by Russian elites is that Putin is not capable of regulating these relations. It means that Putin has become so weak that the power vertical is coming undone,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter and a political analyst who has become a vocal critic of the regime. “In times of war, keeping a united front is the basic task of a state. And Putin is unable to achieve that.”
Just how much this quarrel can destabilize Russia is difficult to gauge, Western officials say. “The system is hard but brittle. You never know when it will break,” one senior U.S. official said.
Wagner’s seizure of Bakhmut, with a prewar population of just 70,000, was the first material Russian advance in 10 months. In the same period, the regular Russian military has lost much greater territory throughout southern and eastern Ukraine, a fact Prigozhin constantly repeats.
Putin himself has kept switching between the two sides as Russia’s military fortunes ebbed and flowed, bringing in and out of favor generals who appeared to be aligned with Prigozhin, his confidant and former caterer.
Wagner’s recent successes have elevated Prigozhin’s stock once again, prompting some U.S. officials to wonder whether he could become Putin’s successor. In a snub to his nemesis, Prigozhin has already recruited to Wagner a deputy defense minister who had just been fired by Defense Minister Shoigu.
In recording after recording, some with the bodies of Wagner’s dead soldiers as a backdrop, Prigozhin has unleashed choice curses on Shoigu and Gerasimov, accusing them of throttling the supply of weapons and ammunition to settle political scores. The ministry of defense, in a bland statement, has responded that it is providing Wagner with everything it requires.
“They are killing our soldiers, and the happy grandpa thinks that he’s doing well,” Prigozhin, 61, said in one such recent attack on Gerasimov, 67. “What will our country do, what will happen to our children, our grandchildren, to the future of Russia, and how will we win the war if it turns out that grandpa is a complete moron?”
While Shoigu and Gerasimov, aware of Prigozhin’s personal relationship with Putin, have abstained from retorting in public, some retired generals in the Russian parliament have shot back.
Wagner is “an illegal military formation. It’s not clear where it is registered and what it does,” retired Lt. Gen. Viktor Sobolev said. Many of Wagner’s practices are indeed contrary to Russian laws, including its much-publicized custom of executing deserters, often with a skull-engraved sledgehammer.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, questioned by reporters about the conflict between Wagner and the ministry of defense, said earlier this month that he had listened to Prigozhin’s statements but “cannot comment because it concerns the course of the special military operation.”
This public fight is especially remarkable because of the near-total suppression of political debate in wartime Russia. Russian security services have been extremely efficient in rooting out the liberal opposition, driving tens of thousands of opponents of the war to exile and silencing most others with draconian punishments. Under laws promulgated early last year, “discrediting” Russian armed forces, even with a Facebook like, routinely leads to lengthy prison sentences.
Prigozhin hasn’t been constrained by these rules. In daily statements and videos, he delivers philippics about the weaknesses of the Russian military strategy, the real strength of the Ukrainian army and the mismanagement and alleged cowardice of the regular Russian troops.
These outbursts aren’t usually shown on state TV, but they are amplified by a fleet of hypernationalist commentators on Wagner’s payroll, many with social-media audiences in the hundreds of thousands. In recent weeks, Prigozhin expanded his target list from the military brass to what he has described as “clowns on Old Square”—the address of Putin’s presidential administration.
Such no-holds-barred campaigning, creating a narrative of Prigozhin standing up to the powerful traitors who steal Russia’s victory, would be impossible without Putin’s assent, Russia-watchers and Western officials say.
“Prigozhin is hated by the generals,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Russia’s prime minister during Putin’s first term and now lives in exile. “His fate, and his very physical existence, entirely depend on Putin. Once Putin goes, Prigozhin goes too.”
The consequences of the hostility between Prigozhin and the regular military shouldn’t be overestimated, cautioned Andrei Kozyrev, a former Russian foreign minister, who pointed out that similar splits existed in the Nazi regime during World War II. “Wehrmacht’s officers also hated the SS, but all of them took part in the war despite that hatred,” he said. “Their tension was real. Yet Hitler’s Germany kept resisting until the last day, all together.”
Ukrainian commanders, meanwhile, have praised opposite sides, fanning the enmity. Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Ukraine’s military commander-in-chief, has repeatedly lauded Gerasimov’s military talents.
Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence, used a recent TV interview to shower Prigozhin with compliments. “What Prigozhin says is mostly truth,” he said, adding that Wagner “has shown its utmost effectiveness, unlike the Russian army, which has shown its utmost lack of effectiveness.” Shoigu and Gerasimov, Budanov said, are driven by jealousy in their attempt to deprive Wagner of resources.
A former convict who spent 10 years in Soviet prisons for robbery and theft, Prigozhin, like Putin, hails from St. Petersburg’s rough neighborhoods. He supported democratic reforms as the Soviet Union collapsed, and initially found his calling in opening some of the city’s most fashionable restaurants, personally pouring wine to celebrity guests such as then-President George W. Bush in 2006.
Created as a deniable instrument of Russian influence, Wagner saw some of its first action in the Russian-occupied parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, but grew into a significant military force only after the Russian intervention in Syria the following year.
Prigozhin was better known at the time as the owner of an online propaganda operation, the Internet Research Agency, that according to the FBI interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A U.S. arrest warrant was issued for him in 2018.
Until last August, Prigozhin denied he had anything to do with Wagner, and in 2021 even sued a British journalist in London for naming him as the owner of the mercenary force. In reality, as he later admitted, he was intimately involved with Wagner’s operations in Syria, spending considerable time in the country.
A recent book of memoirs by Kirill Romanovsky, a war correspondent for Prigozhin’s RIA-FAN news agency, who followed Wagner around the world and died of cancer in January, described Prigozhin sitting next to an inebriated Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov, then commander of Russian forces of Syria. They were on a hilltop as they observed Wagner’s battle to retake the city of Palmyra from Islamic State in 2016.
Wagner’s men sustained heavy losses and its artillery was running out of ammunition. “Bastard, give us at least 100 shells,” Prigozhin yelled at Dvornikov, according to the book. The general was on the phone with Moscow, busy taking credit, it added.
Even though it was Wagner that seized the city, the Russian ministry of defense later issued medals for taking Palmyra even to secretaries in its Moscow headquarters, but not to the actual fighters, Prigozhin complained this month.
The Russian military brass had plenty of reasons to dislike Wagner and its owner, with his direct line to Putin. Thanks to high salaries and a flexible if fiercely brutal culture, Prigozhin’s private army had begun to recruit away the regular military’s best officers and soldiers.
The real rupture occurred two years later. On the evening of Feb. 7, 2018, Wagner forces began an attack on an area known as Hasham, with its oil fields once operated by Conoco, in Syria’s Deir-ez-Zor province. The U.S. maintained a small special-operations outpost there. As soon as it came under Wagner’s shelling, the Pentagon tried to get Shoigu on the line, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis testified to Congress.
The reply from Moscow, according to Mattis, was that “it was not their people.” Mattis ordered the attacking force annihilated. Within hours, hundreds of Russian mercenaries were killed or maimed in American strikes that involved assault helicopters, drones, an AC-130 gunship and Himars missiles. Moscow remained silent.
According to Romanovsky’s book, which describes the carnage in gruesome detail, Wagner’s men had been assured they would be protected by Russian aircraft and air defenses. “We were simply betrayed,” he wrote. “When we began the assault, we didn’t know that the only aircraft above us was American, and that the air-defense guys were all hiding under girls’ skirts.”
Prigozhin said he wasn’t asked to help out in Ukraine until three weeks after the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, when Russian forces failed to seize Kyiv and “the special military operation went off the plan.” Soon, his units flown in from Africa entered the battle in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, achieving a series of breakthroughs.
Even as Wagner dramatically expanded recruitment, lowering standards, the grinding combat quickly exhausted the supply of volunteers. Prigozhin’s solution was to tap the vast resources of Russia’s penitentiary system, enlisting violent criminals with the promise of pardons—something only Putin could deliver—should they survive six months in Ukraine.
As Russia retreated in southern and eastern Ukraine last fall, Prigozhin’s area of operations near Bakhmut was the only one where Russian forces advanced, albeit very slowly.
Prigozhin and Chechen leader Col. Gen. Ramzan Kadyrov, who also oversees a large private militia, joined forces in criticizing Russia’s top military leadership. Kadyrov demanded that Col. Gen. Aleksandr Lapin, the commander of Russia’s Central military district, be busted to private and “sent to the front with a rifle to wash off his dishonor with blood.”
“Ramzan, good lad, keep up the fire,” Prigozhin responded. “All these dimwits—to the front, shoeless and with a rifle.” For a while, Lapin was removed from command.
Wagner Chief’s Feud With Russian Military Cracks Putin’s Image of Control
Prigozhin’s public criticism of Moscow’s generals and defense minister reveals strains in the mighty leadership structure the Russian president built
The owner of Russia’s Wagner paramilitary organization, Yevgeny Prigozhin, stood amid the ruins of the conquered Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 20 and unleashed a tirade against his foes.
Their names: Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s minister of defense, and Valeriy Gerasimov, Russia’s top general.
“Shoigu and Gerasimov have turned the war into personal entertainment,” Prigozhin thundered as he announced Wagner’s costly victory in Bakhmut. “Because of their whims, five times more guys than had been supposed to die have died. They will be held responsible for their actions, which in Russian are called crimes.”
The escalating conflict between the owner of Wagner and Russia’s top military leadership, a tale of perceived betrayal with roots in the Syrian war, represents the first significant crack in the country’s establishment since the invasion of Ukraine began more than a year ago.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
What’s News
Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions, free in your inbox every day.
The extent to which it has become public in recent weeks, affecting military operations, shows that Moscow’s setbacks on the front line are putting under strain the formidable system of power that has been created by President Vladimir Putin over the past two decades.
Fearful of potential challengers, Putin, 70, has long promoted rivalries among subordinates. These intrigues, however, used to be hidden from the public eye. The vitriol of the confrontation between Prigozhin’s private army, which numbers tens of thousands of veterans, many of them recruited in prisons, and the country’s military leadership has shattered that mold.
“Looking at this conflict, the main conclusion drawn by Russian elites is that Putin is not capable of regulating these relations. It means that Putin has become so weak that the power vertical is coming undone,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter and a political analyst who has become a vocal critic of the regime. “In times of war, keeping a united front is the basic task of a state. And Putin is unable to achieve that.”
Just how much this quarrel can destabilize Russia is difficult to gauge, Western officials say. “The system is hard but brittle. You never know when it will break,” one senior U.S. official said.
Wagner’s seizure of Bakhmut, with a prewar population of just 70,000, was the first material Russian advance in 10 months. In the same period, the regular Russian military has lost much greater territory throughout southern and eastern Ukraine, a fact Prigozhin constantly repeats.
Putin himself has kept switching between the two sides as Russia’s military fortunes ebbed and flowed, bringing in and out of favor generals who appeared to be aligned with Prigozhin, his confidant and former caterer.
Wagner’s recent successes have elevated Prigozhin’s stock once again, prompting some U.S. officials to wonder whether he could become Putin’s successor. In a snub to his nemesis, Prigozhin has already recruited to Wagner a deputy defense minister who had just been fired by Defense Minister Shoigu.
In recording after recording, some with the bodies of Wagner’s dead soldiers as a backdrop, Prigozhin has unleashed choice curses on Shoigu and Gerasimov, accusing them of throttling the supply of weapons and ammunition to settle political scores. The ministry of defense, in a bland statement, has responded that it is providing Wagner with everything it requires.
“They are killing our soldiers, and the happy grandpa thinks that he’s doing well,” Prigozhin, 61, said in one such recent attack on Gerasimov, 67. “What will our country do, what will happen to our children, our grandchildren, to the future of Russia, and how will we win the war if it turns out that grandpa is a complete moron?”
While Shoigu and Gerasimov, aware of Prigozhin’s personal relationship with Putin, have abstained from retorting in public, some retired generals in the Russian parliament have shot back.
Wagner is “an illegal military formation. It’s not clear where it is registered and what it does,” retired Lt. Gen. Viktor Sobolev said. Many of Wagner’s practices are indeed contrary to Russian laws, including its much-publicized custom of executing deserters, often with a skull-engraved sledgehammer.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, questioned by reporters about the conflict between Wagner and the ministry of defense, said earlier this month that he had listened to Prigozhin’s statements but “cannot comment because it concerns the course of the special military operation.”
This public fight is especially remarkable because of the near-total suppression of political debate in wartime Russia. Russian security services have been extremely efficient in rooting out the liberal opposition, driving tens of thousands of opponents of the war to exile and silencing most others with draconian punishments. Under laws promulgated early last year, “discrediting” Russian armed forces, even with a Facebook like, routinely leads to lengthy prison sentences.
Prigozhin hasn’t been constrained by these rules. In daily statements and videos, he delivers philippics about the weaknesses of the Russian military strategy, the real strength of the Ukrainian army and the mismanagement and alleged cowardice of the regular Russian troops.
These outbursts aren’t usually shown on state TV, but they are amplified by a fleet of hypernationalist commentators on Wagner’s payroll, many with social-media audiences in the hundreds of thousands. In recent weeks, Prigozhin expanded his target list from the military brass to what he has described as “clowns on Old Square”—the address of Putin’s presidential administration.
Such no-holds-barred campaigning, creating a narrative of Prigozhin standing up to the powerful traitors who steal Russia’s victory, would be impossible without Putin’s assent, Russia-watchers and Western officials say.
“Prigozhin is hated by the generals,” said Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Russia’s prime minister during Putin’s first term and now lives in exile. “His fate, and his very physical existence, entirely depend on Putin. Once Putin goes, Prigozhin goes too.”
The consequences of the hostility between Prigozhin and the regular military shouldn’t be overestimated, cautioned Andrei Kozyrev, a former Russian foreign minister, who pointed out that similar splits existed in the Nazi regime during World War II. “Wehrmacht’s officers also hated the SS, but all of them took part in the war despite that hatred,” he said. “Their tension was real. Yet Hitler’s Germany kept resisting until the last day, all together.”
Ukrainian commanders, meanwhile, have praised opposite sides, fanning the enmity. Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, Ukraine’s military commander-in-chief, has repeatedly lauded Gerasimov’s military talents.
Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence, used a recent TV interview to shower Prigozhin with compliments. “What Prigozhin says is mostly truth,” he said, adding that Wagner “has shown its utmost effectiveness, unlike the Russian army, which has shown its utmost lack of effectiveness.” Shoigu and Gerasimov, Budanov said, are driven by jealousy in their attempt to deprive Wagner of resources.
A former convict who spent 10 years in Soviet prisons for robbery and theft, Prigozhin, like Putin, hails from St. Petersburg’s rough neighborhoods. He supported democratic reforms as the Soviet Union collapsed, and initially found his calling in opening some of the city’s most fashionable restaurants, personally pouring wine to celebrity guests such as then-President George W. Bush in 2006.
Created as a deniable instrument of Russian influence, Wagner saw some of its first action in the Russian-occupied parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, but grew into a significant military force only after the Russian intervention in Syria the following year.
Prigozhin was better known at the time as the owner of an online propaganda operation, the Internet Research Agency, that according to the FBI interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. A U.S. arrest warrant was issued for him in 2018.
Until last August, Prigozhin denied he had anything to do with Wagner, and in 2021 even sued a British journalist in London for naming him as the owner of the mercenary force. In reality, as he later admitted, he was intimately involved with Wagner’s operations in Syria, spending considerable time in the country.
A recent book of memoirs by Kirill Romanovsky, a war correspondent for Prigozhin’s RIA-FAN news agency, who followed Wagner around the world and died of cancer in January, described Prigozhin sitting next to an inebriated Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov, then commander of Russian forces of Syria. They were on a hilltop as they observed Wagner’s battle to retake the city of Palmyra from Islamic State in 2016.
Wagner’s men sustained heavy losses and its artillery was running out of ammunition. “Bastard, give us at least 100 shells,” Prigozhin yelled at Dvornikov, according to the book. The general was on the phone with Moscow, busy taking credit, it added.
Even though it was Wagner that seized the city, the Russian ministry of defense later issued medals for taking Palmyra even to secretaries in its Moscow headquarters, but not to the actual fighters, Prigozhin complained this month.
The Russian military brass had plenty of reasons to dislike Wagner and its owner, with his direct line to Putin. Thanks to high salaries and a flexible if fiercely brutal culture, Prigozhin’s private army had begun to recruit away the regular military’s best officers and soldiers.
The real rupture occurred two years later. On the evening of Feb. 7, 2018, Wagner forces began an attack on an area known as Hasham, with its oil fields once operated by Conoco, in Syria’s Deir-ez-Zor province. The U.S. maintained a small special-operations outpost there. As soon as it came under Wagner’s shelling, the Pentagon tried to get Shoigu on the line, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis testified to Congress.
The reply from Moscow, according to Mattis, was that “it was not their people.” Mattis ordered the attacking force annihilated. Within hours, hundreds of Russian mercenaries were killed or maimed in American strikes that involved assault helicopters, drones, an AC-130 gunship and Himars missiles. Moscow remained silent.
According to Romanovsky’s book, which describes the carnage in gruesome detail, Wagner’s men had been assured they would be protected by Russian aircraft and air defenses. “We were simply betrayed,” he wrote. “When we began the assault, we didn’t know that the only aircraft above us was American, and that the air-defense guys were all hiding under girls’ skirts.”
Prigozhin said he wasn’t asked to help out in Ukraine until three weeks after the Feb. 24, 2022, invasion, when Russian forces failed to seize Kyiv and “the special military operation went off the plan.” Soon, his units flown in from Africa entered the battle in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk province, achieving a series of breakthroughs.
Even as Wagner dramatically expanded recruitment, lowering standards, the grinding combat quickly exhausted the supply of volunteers. Prigozhin’s solution was to tap the vast resources of Russia’s penitentiary system, enlisting violent criminals with the promise of pardons—something only Putin could deliver—should they survive six months in Ukraine.
As Russia retreated in southern and eastern Ukraine last fall, Prigozhin’s area of operations near Bakhmut was the only one where Russian forces advanced, albeit very slowly.
Prigozhin and Chechen leader Col. Gen. Ramzan Kadyrov, who also oversees a large private militia, joined forces in criticizing Russia’s top military leadership. Kadyrov demanded that Col. Gen. Aleksandr Lapin, the commander of Russia’s Central military district, be busted to private and “sent to the front with a rifle to wash off his dishonor with blood.”
“Ramzan, good lad, keep up the fire,” Prigozhin responded. “All these dimwits—to the front, shoeless and with a rifle.” For a while, Lapin was removed from command.
Prigozhin and Kadyrov applauded when Gen. Sergei Surovikin took charge of the war last October. Prigozhin hailed his hard-line credentials as the only Russian commander who used force against pro-democracy demonstrators during a failed putsch that sought to prevent the Soviet Union’s collapse in August 1991. Back then, Prigozhin—and Putin—opposed the putsch.
Surovikin failed to achieve any breakthroughs, presiding over a Russian withdrawal from the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson and a wasteful and unsuccessful missile campaign that aimed to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
By January, the pendulum had swung again, with Gerasimov taking direct command of the war and making Surovikin one of his deputies. Surovikin no longer spoke in public while Lapin, brought back from disfavor, was promoted to chief of staff of Russia’s Land Forces. He recently welcomed Putin on a trip to the war zone.
As the winter came to an end, Wagner was still stuck in Bakhmut, sustaining heavy losses as its prisoner recruits launched wave after wave of near-suicidal attacks on Ukrainian positions. All in all, Wagner sustained 20,000 fatalities in that campaign, half of them former convicts, according to Prigozhin. Russia’s entire military was suffering from a shortage of munitions by then, and Wagner, if anything, was better supplied than other Russian units, according to Ukrainian and Russian commanders.
But Prigozhin turned his public demands for more ammunition into a dramatic art form, threatening to withdraw from the city. His media empire bolstered the narrative of betrayal, with #GiveWagnerShells becoming a trending hashtag and songs commissioned by Wagner blasting out his demands for ammunition. “Are you secretly waiting for champagne in a warm prison in the Netherlands?” one of these songs asked Shoigu, referring to the international criminal court in The Hague.
Once Bakhmut finally fell, Putin on May 21 congratulated Wagner’s storm units for taking the city, alongside regular Russian forces “that offered them the necessary support and the coverage of flanks.”
The day happened to be Shoigu’s 68th birthday. Kadyrov dispatched an obsequious letter of congratulations, praising the defense minister’s martial prowess.
Prigozhin adopted a different tone. “You have spent a huge amount of time on developing your multitude of talents,” he wrote mockingly. “Few people combine the abilities of a refined aesthete, a graphic artist, a wood carver, a hunter, a hockey aficionado, a caring father and father-in-law. I hope you will continue to grace those around you with your happy smile.” As a gift, Prigozhin dispatched Romanovsky’s book describing the massacre of Wagner that, according to the Pentagon, Shoigu hadn’t tried to avert.
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