The big storyline late last year was the rise of Prigozhin.
Putin’s ex-chef joins forces with Kadyrov, treats the propaganda machine as his personal b…ch, signs up 50,000 convicts,
and cusses at army generals, whilst the government bureaucrats are scared senseless of losing their monopoly on violence.
One of the main storylines early this year is the obvious downfall of Prigozhin.
His bravado has been replaced by whining, demands by polite requests, groveling has taken place of cussing.
Though it’s all very apparent, it’s worth digging into deeper. Let’s try to do just that.
There are scenarios in the corporate world when the architecture and internal processes of a company,
regardless of personal values and interactions, breeds conflict.
Imagine a supermarket chain: there is a development department that is incentivized to open as many outlets as possible,
regardless of their performance
There’s also a sales department that is being paid depending on the profits of those new points of sale.
Those departments cannot be partners.
Sure, that spot on a highway perched right between a cemetery and a chemical factory you’ve found is amazing,
but in a year when sales results come in, it will be me to lose the bonus.
That’s the scenario Russia’s Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group find themselves in: a state of pre-meditated confrontation.
There is a constant battle for resources between the Wagner Group and the Russian army.
The latter is supposed to supply Prigozhin’s soldiers with ammunition, vehicles, artillery support, logistics, and air support.
That strains the army’s bureaucracy since you can’t legally transfer such an amount of army equipment into private hands.
It adds to the already over-the-top calamity.
But the worst part of it is money, which is now being siphoned to some sleazy civilian types,
rather than lining the pockets of generals and army bureaucrats, which was the whole idea of them taking up the positions.
Moreover, the Wagner Group never shied away from directly competing with or mocking the army every step of the way.
One of the cherries on that cake was the PMC’s advertisement talking about MoD with its useless generals, supply issues,
and low wages; it urged to join their band instead.
Prigozhin’s media empire is not only flogging the army but is doing so using state propaganda.
Prigozhin can destroy any general by making the army’s dirty laundry public, exposing things MoD would prefer to keep hidden.
Prigozhin is like a leech on an army structure: there is nothing but harm coming from him. He doesn’t share his victories.
He’s better than the army in every sense, he’s Putin’s favorite and propaganda’s darling.
When he fails the army is to blame: didn’t supply with enough ammunition, didn’t provide support when needed,
and screwed up in general. It’s the army’s fault and never Prigozhin’s.
PRIGOZHIN’S INVINCIBILITY!
You cannot discount the class differences either.
Who is Prigozhin after all? He’s some restaurateur from St.Petersburg, whose culinary talents got him close to Putin.
From the standpoint of Russia’s top brass, regardless of their shoulder straps, Prigozhin is a waiter, kitchen staff, a hustler.
He is someone they used to extort, not get orders from.
People he is picking a fight with are used to selling banks and oil fields, they operate with billions on offshore accounts.
And here comes that prick with a couple of restaurants and a contract to feed Moscow schoolkids,
thinking he’s a king of f—g everything.
To those people, Prigozhin is toe jam that somehow managed to get to Putin.
And that sock snot is swearing at very important people now, people who got very serious money behind them.
Those very important people in very roomy offices and with very heavy stars on their shoulders,
people who were close to the “leader” for the last 20 years, don’t take it well.
They are not happy with that plook on their collective face.
What was Prigozhin’s saving grace until very recently?
He has won a talent show of sorts.
He has managed to give Putin something nobody else could, not even his army which had a trillion dollars sunk
into it over the last 15 years.
Prigozhin has bought Putin some time by preventing the collapse of the frontline forces.
General Surovikin was showering Ukraine with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in missiles
and shells but hasn’t gained a yard of territory.
A political decision to run half-baked referendums, with new state borders running through the trenches hasn’t impressed anyone.
Prigozhin, on the other hand, with his army of convicts managed to tie up the Ukrainian army so much
on a single spot of the frontline, they couldn’t even dream of a counteroffensive on, say, Melitopol.
Prigozhin was invincible whilst he was useful. The army was left to quietly wipe the convict’s spit off its face.
To the commander of the General Staff: You (expletive), we've got no shells,
the guys are dying out there for us, and we're sitting here of no help.
They had to come to terms with some shiv being higher in their invisible hierarchy than any general.
We don’t know for certain what happened next.
Maybe Prigozhin promised to capture Bakhmut before the New Year, to bring a victory
that would make Putin’s New Year’s address to the nation carry more weight.
Those are all theories — the facts are that Wagner PMC entered 2023 on very different terms.
The tone of public relations between the Wagner Group and the Ministry of Defense has drastically changed.
Both state propaganda and Ramzan Kadyrov no longer praise Prigozhin every step of the way.
Something else has happened, too, a devastating blow to Prigozhin: he can no longer recruit convicts.
It’s MoD’s job now. And they don’t waste their time persuading. They just come and pick whoever they want.
That was an ingenious move on their part, one that would destroy Prigozhin.
Big boys in large offices realized what was his special sauce, what allowed him access to the “leader.”
It wasn’t his invulnerable warriors or his political talents.
The secret was in readily available manpower whose source he had stumbled upon.
It is a story of an overnight millionaire that uncovered a not-so-rare resource nobody knew about.
Someone who got insanely rich, got a name and clout, and lost it all when local oligarchs found out about that resource
and drove the newcomer out of business. That’s the same story here.
A GOLD MINE
What do mobilized recruits, all those machinists and bartenders, do when a fishing trip or a summer camp they expected
to end up in turns into a frontline trench?
Some places where they haven’t got the essentials: warm clothes, working weapons, decent grub, flack jackets, helmets, and stoves.
Where the stuff they do have is ice-cold wind, dirt, and the enemy wanting them dead.
What do those people do when their commanders are sending them tide after tide on enemy fortifications with no regard
for their lives?
When they face the corruption, incompetence, and lawlessness, already prevalent in the Russian army,
and only getting stronger with the war going on.
Those mobilized recruits are outraged by that, they are videotaping appeals to the government,
and their wives and mothers are going public.
Governors have to come up with some bleat that they will get to the bottom of it or open up sweatshops to produce underpants.
Even the propagandist state-run media have to admit through clenched teeth
that the army they claimed was ready to take on NATO is incompetent and sold to bits.
The mobilization drive is drawing a lot of public attention.
Everything that happens to the mobilized recruits has a political lining.
And the backlash doesn’t only affect the army — it also impacts Putin himself.
Millions of people are dragged into digging in the army’s dirty laundry.
That is something Shoigu, being the Minister of Defense, has been consistently suppressing for the past 10 years.
Money is best made in silence. Theft depends on it even more.
The more difficult it is to measure, quantify, weigh, and compare something, the easier it is to steal,
and the less control there will be.
When you grab several hundred thousand people off the street and shove them into a closed-up system,
all the dirt accumulating over decades and covered by trendy merch and military parades spills to the outside.
It is difficult to steal off the mobilized, simply put. It becomes evident very soon. It is difficult to kill the mobilized with impunity.
When the lot of them gets killed, like in Makiivka, it turns into a scandal.
You can’t just ignore the death of hundreds of people; you need to talk about retaliation strikes afterwards.
We treat mobilization as a horrible example of lawlessness.
The military sees it as an influx of civilians that don’t play by the rules, talk about their rights, and cause a ruckus.
Convicts on the other hand are a gold mine for the Ministry of Defense. They are just walking ATMs. Let’s have a look at how so.
Nobody is counting convicts. We know now how it functions. Putin is signing clemencies in advance.
They are getting backdated, with the names written in depending on the number recruited.
How many actually went to die near Bakhmut and how many got their clemency and bought a one-way ticket to Abu-Dhabi,
we’ll find out from historians after the whole thing.
It is even more pronounced now when MoD got involved. Prigozhin was only recruiting those who went willingly.
We are unaware of any cases when people were forced. The Ministry of Defense does not ask.
They have modified the approach.
They not only accept bribes from those buying their freedom, but also from those not willing
to die and wanting to finish their prison sentence.
Convicts are voiceless. Nobody would hear their complaints about corruption.
We can only hear them speak after they have been captured as prisoners of war.
Only then do we find out how they fight, what they are wearing and eating and how they are keeping themselves warm.
There is no way to find out what percentage of the tunics, pants, stoves, MREs, and medkits have made it to them,
and what has turned into diamonds on the Instagram page of the next mistress of a next vice minister.
No internal investigation or a public one would be able to uncover it. One can hide any money that way.
If it so happens that the problems meant to remain hidden spill out, if some platoon had everything stolen from them,
that platoon could be ordered a frontal assault on fortified Ukrainian positions with no survivors.
When there are no battle orders to be carried out, they could be taken care of by their own forces.
The fog of war will cover everything.
The key is that all the traces can be buried so deep, no bloodhound will ever be able to sniff the scent.
Convicts are all alone.
Let’s come back to the words of Olga Romanova, head of an NGO, Russia Behind Bars:
80% of Russian convicts are not even getting letters from the outside.
There won’t be another Makiivka disaster when it comes to convicts. There won’t be a disaster the army couldn’t hide.
There is no need to talk to relatives or pay compensation.
There is not even a need to retrieve the bodies — they could just be bulldozed into the mass graves.
That’s how Prigozhin ran it.
The only thing we know about the Wagner Group, compared to the army, is how many yards it has advanced for near Bakhmut.
What we don’t know is how many people have paid for that with their lives.
Army generals need to put up a show as a bare minimum when they are wasting platoon after platoon.
Every dead soldier has parents, kids, a wife, and friends. And they will be asking questions.
Using convicts as cannon fodder, on the other hand, allows the army to disclose only the information they want.
That’s why convicts dying don’t attract the attention even of their own relatives, people they might have not seen for decades.
The death of convicts doesn’t catch the public’s eye.
Who cares if there’s a new Makiivka incident involving cons?
So what if there are 70 fewer murderers and several dozen fewer rapists? That’s not prime-time talk show material.
If we set morality and decency aside and approach it from the standpoint of a corrupt bureaucracy,
Prigozhin has found the cave of Ali Baba.
He has added an item to the budget that can be used to write anything off.
One that can’t be measured, calculated, inspected, or checked.
That item leaves no traces.
A war to a bureaucracy is like a mobile game where you need to collect as many coins as you can whilst the timer runs.
In that game, convicts being sent to the front lines is a bonus level where the coins are an endless stream.
One can’t just leave that treasure in the hands of a businessman. It needs to be expropriated ASAP.
Who would want to share such a pie with some ex-con instead of digging in with a large spoon?
ARMY AS A PRISON
There is a side-effect to stuffing the army with convicts, though. Infiltrating the army with cons corrupts and destroys it.
Prigozhin had scum being watched by even bigger scum.
The core of the Wagner Group is made up of seasoned mercenaries that have been notorious
for their public executions and senseless violence since the Syria campaign.
They’ve got no qualms about killing people.
Prigozhin managed his forces with fear.
A convict that killed his own brother with a crowbar for a bottle of hooch had a clear understanding that he’d end up
on a stake for any signs of disobedience. That he’d be killed first and asked questions later.
However, even with the discipline being maintained by the cruelty on par with Ivan the Terrible’s,
and the only punishment being an elaborate death, convicts were deserting in droves.
The cons make excellent and free cannon fodder, but they also make useless soldiers.
Why isn’t the Night’s Watch from The Game of Thrones a good idea?
Because arming criminals and putting them all together is creating a gang of criminals that would rape, rob,
and murder, rather than defend the Wall.
To guard those criminals would be more expensive than to have a proper regular army in their stead.
Who will be guarding and watching over seasoned criminals armed to the teeth and with years of experience behind bars?
Who will be sending them to suicidal charges?
Will those be yesterday’s salespeople, barely trained and assigned as commanders?
Or will those be green lieutenants that have graduated just a couple of months before?
We do realize that it won’t be the army that will absorb the prison, but vice versa.
Any division that will see an influx of criminals will lose all the remnants of discipline,
subordination, and control they might have left.
The last time we were discussing recruiting convicts, we noted that Prigozhin’s approach is non-scalable.
Convicts cannot become a mobilization source for the army. You cannot make army types into wardens.
That has proven to be true. However, we also realize that the top brass couldn’t care less.
Criminals for them is another company they want to expropriate, with Prigozhin being the new Khodorkovsky,
an oligarch they want to rob.
Prigozhin has access to an important resource that brings a lot of money, they just need to take it away from him.
The survivability of the army is none of their concern, in their large offices. The main thing is, they can sell people.
They can now sell time to Putin and get insanely rich off it.
It is a matter of bureaucratic influence, money, and control. Those shoes are way too big for someone like Prigozhin to fill.
He was the one who stumbled upon that resource, but now it’s time for big boys to do their big deals.
It is, however, a personal catastrophe for Prigozhin. He is now expendable, losing access to free people he is useless.
When you lose your exclusivity, when you outlive your necessity but have stepped on too many important toes in the past,
your chance to survive, even if incarcerated, is getting slimmer by the day.
There is a cemetery full of once important people in this war.
My team and I cannot get rid of the Déjà vu that we’re back in 1995 working for the NTV channel, writing scenarios for Criminal Russia,
the country’s most popular true crime show.
The truth, however, is that Vladimir Putin has brought Russia to the point where other narratives just cannot exist,
where there is no other language than that.
The good news is that our colleagues from NTV of the past managed to cover the dawn and dusk
of those bands in 30 minutes including a commercial break.
The frameworks built on criminal logic, one that values battles for resources, are very short-lived.
They consume themselves. That is what we’re witnessing now.
See you tomorrow!