A great article from the FT offers a good explanation on what happened between Pregozhin and the Kremlin in the last few days.
In essence “Wagner became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that eventually turned on its creator”.
“Covert warfare, corruption and poor governance stoked the greatest threat to Russian president’s rule”.
Excerpts:
“Although Putin appeared shocked by his former caterer Prigozhin’s “treason” during a stern five-minute address to the nation, the chaos indicated how years of covert warfare, poor governance and corruption had created the greatest threat to his rule in 24 years.
“They never should have fought with a [private militia] during a war. It was a mistake to use anything except the army,” a former senior Kremlin official said. “It’s nice to have during peacetime, but now you just can’t do it. That’s what led to this story with Prigozhin — [Putin] brought it upon himself.”
The roots of Prigozhin’s revolt date back to 2014 when Prigozhin set up Wagner as a way for Russia to disguise its involvement in a slow-burning war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The group helped keep eastern Ukraine under Russian proxy control and, as its mission expanded, gave Russia plausible deniability for sorties as far away as Syria and Mozambique.
But for all its ostensible independence — the Kremlin claimed to know nothing about it, while Prigozhin denied for years that the group even existed — Wagner was a big part of Russia’s official war machine.
Initially run by GRU, Russian military intelligence, Wagner was lavishly funded from the national defence budget and often competed with the armed forces for lucrative contracts…
That nourished a rivalry that began years before Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, heated up during the bloody siege of the town of Bakhmut this winter and spilled out of control this week, the people said.
… it was obvious from the start that creating a parallel army has huge risks,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a Moscow-based defence think-tank.
As it took an increasingly prominent role on the front lines and its feud with the army deepened, Wagner became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that eventually turned on its creator, according to analysts and people close to the Kremlin.
… Wagner’s forces were largely drawn from convicts after Putin personally signed tens of thousands of pardons.
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His [Prigozhin´s] rise horrified many of Moscow’s elites, who feared he would be used to beat them into backing the war effort or simply seize their assets with Putin’s support.
That dependence appears to have lulled Putin into a false sense of security. It convinced him that he could allow Wagner to undermine the defence ministry while keeping it under control, according to Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
“He thought Prigozhin was isolated. He doesn’t have a party, he doesn’t hold rallies, so he doesn’t exist. Putin doesn’t understand what the internet is, so he didn’t know that Prigozhin was more dominant online than him or the war or anything else,” Stanovaya said.
“He thought Prigozhin was totally dependent and [ . . .] could be routed in one second if needed.”
The exact circumstances leading to the uprising remain unclear. One person close to the FSB said Russia’s security forces had spent the past several days preparing for some kind of assault, suggesting Prigozhin had learnt of a plan to assassinate him and had decided to go out all guns blazing. “This isn’t out of nowhere and it didn’t come as a surprise,” the person said.
Another former senior Kremlin official said the conflict with the army had driven Prigozhin – a former criminal who is said to revel in publicly executing deserters – to even further extremes. “He went nuts, flew into a rage and went too far. He added too much salt and pepper”…
An important trigger appears to have been Putin’s decision to back the defence ministry’s attempts to bring Wagner to heel.
After Russia captured Bakhmut last month, Wagner’s forces left the front lines, prompting Prigozhin to muse about whether they would return at all. Then, Putin supported defence minister Sergei Shoigu’s attempt to bring the jumble of militias fighting in Ukraine under the army’s control.
“He was pushed to this when he realised he was being driven into a corner, losing power and control over Wagner,” Pukhov said. “He didn’t just want to sink into obscurity.”
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Stanovaya said the war had brutalised Prigozhin, who had recorded several tirades where he posed in front of battlefield corpses and blamed Shoigu for their deaths, to the point where he lost sight of his place in Russia’s hierarchy.
“This is a man who spent several months looking at torn-off arms and legs and severed heads while at war. He doesn’t think about red lines, how the [Kremlin] thinks of him and so on,” she said. “He thinks he deserves privileges and that even Putin can’t do anything about it.”
In his speech on Saturday, Putin appeared to have belatedly realised the threat Wagner posed to the state. He likened it to the collapse of the Russian empire in the 1917 revolution, which he said ended in “an enormous collapse, the destruction of the army and the fall of the state, the loss of huge territories, and in the end, the tragedy of civil war”.
Russia’s belief that it could outlast Ukraine and the west in a long war has proved a “dangerous illusion,” Pukhov said.
“Dragging the war out has huge domestic risks for Russia. The first destabilising blow came even earlier than they thought. Now the risks are only going to grow.”