Things have reached a fever pitch inside Russia’s war on Ukraine. The ongoing rivalry between the Wagner Group, a mercenary army that has been invaluable to Russia’s affront on Ukraine, and the Russian military leadership is at the heart of the tension. Yet intense as the infighting between the two factions has become, the two have been forced to rely on each other out of sheer necessity. The Wagner Group needs the Russian military as a source of supplies, and the Russian military needs Wagner to fill in breaches and engage in near-suicidal missions the Russian high command would rather avoid.
As it stands, the opposing camps are either oblivious to this most basic fact or are more interested in settling scores than salvaging a war effort that, to date, has been riddled with a lack of coordination and has weakened Russia militarily, politically, economically and strategically.
Whether or not all the details are substantiated, the report itself highlights a tug-of-war between Prigozhin’s private army and the Russian military establishment.
On May 15, The Washington Post reported that Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose fighters have backstopped the Russian army in places like the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, offered to provide Ukraine with intelligence on Russian troop positions in exchange for Kyiv pulling its forces from the mid-size city. The information, part of a dossier of U.S. intelligence reports leaked to the messaging chat-group Discord, reinforces the notion of the Russian military machine at war with itself.
Prigozhin forcefully denied the allegations, alleging that the entire thing was concocted by his enemies in the Kremlin. But whether or not all the details are substantiated, the report itself highlights a tug-of-war between Prigozhin’s private army and the Russian military establishment, each of which have been taking rhetorical shots at each other even as they fight against staunch Ukrainian resistance in the field.
It’s no secret that Prigozhin has been strongly critical of the Russian military’s performance since the war erupted in February 2022. The man commonly referred to as “Putin’s Chef” because of his lucrative catering contracts with the Kremlin isn’t afraid to register his opinions on the competence of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Army General Staff who Vladimir Putin appointed last fall as the overall commander of Russian forces in Ukraine.
The swift rout of Russian troops in Kharkiv last September was apparently so distasteful to Prigozhin that he approached Putin personally and complained about how the war was being run. His frequent rhetorical commentaries on Telegram and other media outlets against the Russian military leadership no doubt grates on Shoigu and Gerasimov, who are depicted by the Wagner boss as a fat, lazy pair of idiots sitting back in their red-wooded offices as young Russian men are sent to their deaths without adequate supplies. Last year, after Russian forces had to pull back from the town of Lyman, Prigozhin excoriated Russia’s senior officers and hinted they should be deployed “with machine guns barefoot to the front.”
The relationship between the Russian military leadership and Wagner hasn’t gotten any better with time. If anything, the tirades have gotten worse. Much of the friction these days concerns Bakhmut, an unassuming Ukrainian city in Donetsk that Wagner Group fighters have been trying to capture for about 10 months. The battle has been the bloodiest of the war. According to a White House assessment on May 1, there have been approximately 100,000 Russian casualties since December, at least half from the Wagner Group’s spearheading the offensive in Bakhmut.
According to a White House assessment on May 1, there have been approximately 100,000 Russian casualties since December, at least half from the Wagner Group’s spearheading the offensive in Bakhmut.
That offensive has been a bleeding ulcer for Wagner, which has sent wave upon wave of poorly trained recruits — many plucked from the Russian prison system — toward Ukrainian positions in the hope that sheer mass and constant artillery barrages would dislodge Ukraine’s defenders. Kyiv, however, chose to stay and fight rather than retreat to safer ground in the west, and Ukrainian troops have made progress recapturing some ground in the city.
Prigozhin is clearly feeling the heat. This month he recorded a video with piles of dead fighters behind him, gesturing to the camera while claiming that Wagner was being starved of ammunition by his enemies in the Russian military and threatened to withdraw his men entirely from Bakhmut unless the problem was rectified. While that withdrawal never took place (the way Prigozhin tells it, the Russian army agreed to send more ammunition), the episode produced yet another deluge of bad press for the Russian war effort. Prigozhin remains unapologetic in his diatribes. Several days after the promised ammunition was supposedly approved, he stated that the Russian state was “unable to defend the country” and that Putin was being deceived by his military advisers.
The Russian army hasn’t taken this lying down. While it may seem that Prigozhin can do pretty much anything he’d like — it’s difficult to imagine the Wagner chief throwing firebombs at Russia’s military establishment unless Putin was at least sympathetic — his influence is entirely dependent on Putin himself. As Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two authorities on the Russian security services, explained, Wagner is a useful counterbalance to Russia’s regular armed forces. And despite speculation that Prigozhin is turning on Putin or preparing to establish a political party of his own, the Wagner boss isn’t a political threat to the Russian strongman thanks to the number of enemies he has acquired over the past 15 months. There is no love lost between Wagner and the Russian high-command. But beggars can’t be choosers, and the fact is each side needs the other. Prigozhin’s antics aside, Wagner serves as a crucial source of manpower for the Russian army at a time when Putin seeks to defer a second troop mobilization for as long as possible (in April, Putin signed a law that makes it easier for the authorities to reach draftees with a summons, which suggests another mobilization is likely only a matter of time). It’s not hard to understand why Putin would want to delay another mobilization. The first draft call-up of 300,000 men in September 2022 was a disruptive event in Russian society, pushing hundreds of thousands of eligible Russian men to leave the country and rupturing the notion that the Kremlin could insulate the Russian population from the war. Frustrating as Prigozhin’s mouthing off has been, his men have helped fill the void along a 600-mile front line. Prigozhin, in turn, needs the Russian military establishment for the supplies and material required to get the job done. The mutual dependency, however, is outweighed by a problem that has bedeviled Russia’s war effort since it started: the lack of coordination and disunity of command. Putin has replaced his commanding general three times in less than a year. Russia’s defense industry is struggling to keep up with demand (Ukraine and its supporters in the West are experiencing similar issues). Putin grossly underestimated the strength of the Ukrainian military and overestimated the strength of his own forces. Russia’s command structure seems anemic to those leading troops at the front and waiting for instructions. There are also competing priorities at play; Prigozhin is focused primarily on capturing Bakhmut and is seeking any and all resources to achieve this task. But Shoigu and Gerasimov are focused on prosecuting a war that could last for years while protecting a large front line from an anticipated Western-backed Ukrainian counteroffensive. If anything, the latest Discord report exposes what we already know: the Russian military is hardly the well-oiled machine that so many analysts thought before the war began.
Daniel R. DePetris
Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist at the Chicago Tribune. 
