RIGA, Latvia — Criticizing the military is illegal in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and openly displaying political ambition that could challenge the strongman president is highly ill-advised. Yet Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin somehow flaunts doing both these days and, for now at least, seems to be getting away with it.
Prigozhin, the caterer-turned-warlord who deployed his private army — reinforced by thousands of convicts whom he recruited from prison — to Ukraine, has been locked for weeks in a vicious feud with Russia’s military leadership, in which he has repeatedly accused Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other commanders of incompetence.
That fight took a harrowing turn this month when Wagner fighters and regular Russian soldiers ended up in a shootout near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, which ended with the mercenaries detaining a lieutenant colonel.
Prigozhin professes full loyalty to Putin. But he has also been giving speeches and holding news conferences across Russia in what looks a lot like a campaign tour — a potential red line in a country where any political challenge is viewed as betrayal. This has prompted many Russia watchers to wonder: Why is Putin tolerating it?
With the war in Ukraine going badly, some analysts say the Russian leader may not have a choice. Prigozhin, at least, is a fervent supporter of the war — he merely insists it should be more brutal and effective. By fully supporting the war and a total mobilization of Russian society, Prigozhin may have ensured himself security.
“The regime simply cannot afford to repress representatives of the ‘patriotic’ camp, which is already not very pleased with the president: He unleashed the war, but still cannot win it,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a political analyst and former Kremlin speechwriter.
“If they put pressure on this part of the public,” Gallyamov said, “they will [turn] into opposition and say, ‘It turns out Putin’s critics were right and he really turned into a dictator.’”
Other analysts say Putin is supremely confident in his role and does not perceive any threat from Prigozhin — which may be a miscalculation.
“Prigozhin is in a gray zone where he has a mandate from Putin to act, but its boundaries are not clearly defined,” said political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya. “So Prigozhin is testing his limits and, seeing no serious resistance, continues to push them.”
“From the outside, we may consider how Prigozhin poses a danger to the regime, and long-term it can be a problem for Putin, but if we look at this through Putin’s eyes, I think he doesn’t consider him a threat,” Stanovaya said. “Prigozhin is loyal, he is absolutely dependent on the government and can be [stripped] of all resources at once, if needed.”
There is a possibility, Stanovaya noted, that Putin “doesn’t fully sense the scale” of Prigozhin’s growing visibility. The state television networks, which Putin reveres as controlling public opinion, have essentially banned Prigozhin from their airwaves, limiting him to online media and Telegram blogs.
“In Putin’s world, the internet, all these sites, blogs and social media, are the periphery,” Stanovaya said.
While Putin has not publicly reprimanded Prigozhin, there are signs that the Russian president stepped in earlier in the year to draw lines for Prigozhin and Wagner.
The appointment of Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, whom Prigozhin had publicly berated, as overall commander of the war in Ukraine was viewed as a blow to Wagner. Prigozhin also lost his main source of manpower when the Defense Ministry barred him from recruiting in prisons.
According to classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked on the Discord messaging platform, Putin set up a meeting between Priogzhin and Shoigu in February to address a conflict over allegedly insufficient ammunition supplies in Bakhmut.
In the latest round of the fight, Shoigu decreed last week that all “volunteer formations” must sign a contract with the Defense Ministry by July 1. Prigozhin said Wagner would not do so.
After withdrawing his mercenaries from Bakhmut, which Russia effectively seized in late May, Prigozhin sought to capitalize on that battlefield success and get some real-world exposure with regional outlets.
He spent a couple of weeks giving interviews to pro-war reporters, even using one to warn of a potential revolution in Russia. He also held lengthy Q&A sessions in four major cities to promote an ill-defined project called “Wagner: The Second Front Line.”
“Not to be frantic, but [we need] to give people the truthful information that will force society to mobilize,” Prigozhin said cryptically, vowing to continue his “political briefings.” He added: “Until we mobilize, we won’t win the war.”
Gallyamov, the former speechwriter, said any crackdown on Prigozhin risked aligning his supporters with other anti-Putin movements, including that of jailed political opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“Figuratively speaking, soon after Prigozhin finds himself in a cell next to Navalny, his fans will find themselves on the same side of the barricades as the supporters of the latter,” Gallyamov said.
There is little polling on Prigozhin’s nationwide appeal but a recent report from Russian Field, an independent research agency, stated that 2 percent of Russians surveyed would vote for Prigozhin in a presidential race, the same as Navalny. That is higher than many politicians, including Shoigu, but less than Putin’s 30 percent.
The poll also suggested that Prigozhin’s visibility to average Russians was growing rapidly. “The speed with which Prigozhin has gained … is a high, because a year ago he had nothing,” Stanovaya said.
In a curious twist of Russia’s chaotic political life, some Kremlin watchers noted that several of Prigozhin’s talking points now match those of the liberal part of Russian society, including Navalny’s supporters — namely, that the war is deadly, will last a long time and will be costly for Russia.
In his speeches, Prigozhin relies on trusted populist tropes, presenting himself as “a man of the people” who speaks directly to ordinary Russians and opposes the detached elites of Rublyovka, a wealthy neighborhood west of Moscow that also serves a collective moniker for the country’s rich and powerful. Navalny built much of his political capital on exposing corruption and illicit wealth among the elite.
But there are also big differences. Navalny has opposed Putin for decades, and has called for ending the war, while Prigozhin represents an even more extreme version of Putin’s policies, in full support of authoritarian leadership.
Navalny has also urged that Russia be free, democratic and “happy.” Prigozhin has taken a somewhat darker tack, at one point declaring that Russians should live “like North Korea for a few years” to achieve something resembling a victory in Ukraine. Such a campaign slogan is unlikely to have much popular appeal.
“For people who live in big cities and are accustomed to the capitalist type of consumption, Prigozhin’s [call for a] North Korea lifestyle and to general mobilization cannot be attractive, so can only work with a very small … poor, frustrated population and with aggressive conformists,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who, like many Russians, has been designated a “foreign agent” by the authorities.
“There is a fundamental problem. … As Prigozhin himself comes from the depths of Putin’s elite, from Putin’s ‘kitchen,’ he is flesh from the flesh of the oligarchic system, and its product,” Kolesnikov added.
Prigozhin’s endgame is still unclear. For years, he thrived as the leader of a paramilitary organization that operated in the shadows to advance the Kremlin’s goals around the world using every means. That approach may not necessarily translate well into any official post, which comes with more responsibility and political risks, as well as nominal obligations to the law.
Analysts generally believe Prigozhin stands a minimal chance of having a successful political career because his message, like that of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, is often too extreme to resonate with mainstream Russians, let alone the country’s elite.
One possibility is that Prigozhin is positioning himself against other oligarchs for advantage in a post-Putin Russia.
“He is acting intuitively and he needs to gain political capital, but I don’t think he knows yet himself what he can convert it to,” Stanovaya said. “Putin — he has less and less control of the situation less and the elites. So the more political resources you have, the stronger your positions will be in the future, and that’s what Prigozhin is working toward.”
