Yevgeny Prigozhin He is a very powerful man, if only because he has a private army of about 50,000 troops. Vladimir Putin owes him a lot of favorsnot only in Ukraine – where the wagner group it already had a clear leading role in 2014 and now in the seizure of Bakhmut-, but also by interfering in the 2016 US electoral campaign and gaining positions in Syria, Libya, Mali and other African countries. In his shadow, Prigozhin has grown to become not just a oligarch and a mercenary boss, but also in a political actor with increasingly clear ambitions. In any case, until today, it can be assumed that he has done everything in tune with his pattern, or at least convinced that it was so.
From this point of view, it can be understood that, at its start, the cracking that he has just launched was not directed against Putin, with the intention of giving a coup and expel him from the Kremlin, but against the tandem Sergei Shoigu (Minister of Defense)-Valery Gerasimov (Head of the Defense Staff and Commander-in-Chief of the forces deployed in Ukraine). In fact, one can also imagine that –fed up with the scorns of said duo when he has asked for ammunition and military support, and contrary to complying with the order that from next July 1 all the “volunteers& rdquor; Russians must sign an explicit compliance with the orders of the defense ministry – has chosen to give a force blow believing that deep down he would even receive Putin’s blessings for freeing the country (according to his own words) from “corruption, lies and bureaucracy& rdquor ;. That would mean he hasn’t understood that, like so many dictators before him, Putin has simply let them all get weak in their infighting as a classic method of ensuring that no one grows strong enough to be tempted to knock him off his chair. presidential.
Definitely, Putin has been wrong to fuel this processwithout calculating that the direct confrontations that they have consented to between the forces that each one controls imply a loss of operational capacity vis-à-vis the Ukrainian troops and a real risk of civil war. But Prigozhin has also erred, putting Putin in a position where he will not be able to show much weakness after the challenge he has met. All this while military commanders such as Sergei Surovikinhead of the Russian forces in Ukraine until last January and usually identified as close to the mercenary boss, has come out in defense of the president and without any oligarchs or members of the Russian business or political elite daring to align themselves with who is now facing a criminal case for military rebellion and to Russian armed forces vastly superior in number and in weaponry.
From here on, the prevailing confusion still makes it impossible to know what is happening and, even less, what the immediate consequences may be. On the one hand, there are clear indications that Wagner’s fighters have not only managed to re-enter Russian territory without any opposition, to even seize the Rostov control Don (where the Russian headquarters from which operations in the Donetsk sector are directed) is located, but has been able to go to Moscow with several columns of troops and material without being stopped by forces loyal to the Kremlin until they They have decided to suspend their advance. On the other, there are alignments with Putin, including that of the Chechen leaderRamzan Kadyrov, inclined to send his fighters to Rostov, or that of the Turkish presidentin correspondence with the support received during the coup that Erdogan suffered in 2016. Simultaneously, the absence of an armed response to Wagner’s forces on their way to Moscow (1,100 kilometers from Rostov-on-Don) could indicate that there may be more fractures in the ranks of the army.
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As the Russian capital prepared for defense, activating Operation Fortress, Alexander LukashenkoBelarusian president, claimed to have achieved the Prigozhin’s commitment to stop the advance of his forces. But if the situation is not corrected and finally there is a direct clash, Russia can enter an irreversible path that, in one fell swoop, will facilitate Ukraine’s calculations when it encounters the gaps left by Wagner’s units and those that Moscow must use to combat them, leave Putin without an instrument that is serving him so much to gain influence in Africa and beyond, and ruin the dreams “patriotic & rdquor; from Prigozhin.
*Jesús A. Núñez Villaverde – Co-director of the Institute for Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Action (IECAH)