By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Stalin’s Secret Force

In early May, tensions between the Russian Defense Ministry and Wagner, the private military company close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, burst into the open. For months, at an enormous human cost, Wagner soldiers had been playing a lead part in Russia’s siege of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. Now, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s combative leader, had had enough. In a lurid video he released, he stood surrounded by the dead bodies of Wagner soldiers in Bakhmut, hurling expletives at Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defense minister, and the head of the general staff and the head of Russian forces in Ukraine. Prigozhin threatened to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut if they were not immediately given more ammunition.

To many observers, a significant crack emerged between Wagner and the Kremlin. Others speculated that Prigozhin’s days might be numbered now that he had seemingly made enemies with the entire Russian military leadership. But two days later, Prigozhin returned his threat to pull Wagner out of Bakhmut and tried to present the situation as successfully resolved in his favor. And then, in a new video, he berated some unnamed “happy grandfather” who “thinks he is good,” raising many eyebrows in Moscow about whom he was aiming at. In the end, the melodrama looked like a desperate attempt by Prigozhin to save Wagner’s reputation as the only Russian unit capable of offensive operations, despite its catastrophic losses in Bakhmut.

Missing from this view, however, is why Putin has tolerated Prigozhin’santics and where Wagner fits within Russia’s military and intelligence hierarchy. Wagner’s rise to prominence is only the most recent development in a long history of Russian and Soviet reliance on informal forces, which goes back to the Stalin era. Moreover, the group has a substantial legacy in Ukraine, first emerging during Russia’s previous war in the Donbas eight years ago. For Putin, Wagner has also become a crucial means to rein in the military, which he has long viewed as a potential threat to his rule. Contrary to Western assumptions, Wagner’s high-profile role in the war has as much to do with the dynamics of power in Moscow as with what is happening on the battlefield in Ukraine.

 

To Understand Wagner

To understand the relative strength of Prigozhin and Wagner in Russia, it is necessary to consider how the company is seen by at least four different parts of the Russian state: the military intelligence agency, known as GRU; the military at large; the state security agency, known as the FSB; and Putin himself.

The GRU played a leading role in Wagner’s origins, and the reasons lie largely in the tumultuous reforms the military intelligence underwent in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Under Shoigu’s predecessor Anatoly Serdyukov, who served as defense minister from 2007 to 2012, the ministry tried to decrease the role of the GRU within the military. Soon after taking over, however, Shoigu changed course and put new resources into the GRU. As a result, the agency was beefed up with new personnel, many of whom were recruited from the Spetsnaz—military special forces traditionally supervised by the GRU. To the generals running the agency, bringing in more Spetsnaz made sense: the Russian army was by then heavily involved in the conflict in Syria, as well as in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and the GRU was shifting its focus to what it called “active intelligence”—conducting armed operations rather than simply cultivating sources as in traditional espionage. In the years that followed, this Spetsnaz mentality grew inside the agency. General Vladimir Alexeev, who was in charge of the Spetsnaz, was promoted to first deputy chief of the GRU.

It was amid this shift in the GRU’s priorities that the existence of Wagner was first reported in the Russian media. In 2015, the independent news site Fontanka.ru, based in St. Petersburg, reported that the private military company members were active in eastern Ukraine. Fontanka was also the first to report that Prigozhin was a leading backer of Wagner and that Dmitry Utkin, who had served as a Spetsnatz commander, was in charge of Wagner’s military operations. Although it was unknown at the time, a new department had been formed inside the GRU to supervise the activities of private military companies, including Wagner. A few months after Wagner’s existence was first reported, an official within the GRU confirmed that Spetsnaz veterans staffed this new department's existence. For the GRU, Wagner provided convenient deniability to its operations when Russia publicly disavowed its direct involvement in eastern Ukraine.

On the surface, the use of private military companies fit a new pattern of twenty-first-century warfare. Military contractors had been used by the United States in Iraq, for example, and Wagner bore some similarities to Blackwater, the U.S. military contractor. But for the GRU, Wagner was also a continuation of a much older tradition going back to Soviet times, when the Kremlin used proxy forces to intervene in conflicts worldwide.

“It’s just like when we had our military in disguise in Spain during the Spanish Civil War,” a GRU official told us in 2017 when we asked him why the agency needed a private military company like Wagner.

Although the Soviet government never officially confirmed its intervention, it is well established that Stalin sent military advisers to support Republican forces in Spain in the 1930s. All Soviet soldiers who went were given false Spanish-sounding names. (One of these advisers was the legendary Soviet officer Haji Mamsurov, who was known in Spain as Colonel Xanti and may have been one of the possible prototypes for the character of Robert Jordan in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.) In 2015, a Spanish town near Madrid unveiled a monument to Colonel Xanti in a ceremony attended by Mamsurov’s descendants and Russian government officials.

Soviet and Russian military officials had long viewed the Spanish Civil War as a “good war”: Soviet soldiers had been on the right side, and the fighting was undeniably antifascist since the Republicans were fighting the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco, who was allied with both Mussolini and Hitler. In official Russian historiography, the Soviet intervention in Spain is seen as the direct precursor to the Great Patriotic War—Russia’s monumental fight against Nazi Germany in World War II.

For the GRU, the Russian experience in the Spanish Civil War became a convenient justification for its embrace of Wagner forces in Ukraine, where the Kremlin insisted it was once again fighting fascists. And Wagner even had its own Colonel Xanti: like the famous Soviet officer, Dimitry Utkin used a nom de guerre—Wagner—and his exploits included directing Russian mercenaries, in his case, in Syria.

 

Gaming The Generals

However, a far more complicated question is the extent of Wagner’s support within the military and the FSB. Since its emergence in 2015, significantly since the start of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, the character of Wagner’s military operations has evolved considerably. It started as a mysterious, deniable proxy mercenary force. It gradually evolved into a large military unit with operations in several countries, its own artillery and air force, and finally, huge recruiting billboards on the streets of Russian cities, its film production glorifying its deeds, and a big shiny tower in St. Petersburg for its corporate headquarters. It also became known as the most brutal force in the Russian military, openly boasting of killing “traitors” in the most horrific way.

As Prigozhin becomes increasingly bold in his criticism of the military leadership, many observers have questioned how long he can get away with it. According to officials we have spoken to within the agency’s Spetsnaz forces, the GRU has maintained its support for Wagner. The GRU seems to believe that Wagner remains useful.

But the agency’s backing doesn’t give much assurance to Prigozhin. During Putin’s tenure, there have been notable occasions when GRU support didn’t count for much. In the early years of this century, for example, the GRU and its Spetsnaz forces supervised a proxy military battalion in Chechnya called Vostok, which Ruslan Yamadayev, a powerful Chechen warlord, ran. Vostok was an efficient force, and Yamadaev was loyal to the GRU. But this was not enough to protect him when his clan went into open conflict with Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya. In September 2008, Yamadayev was assassinated in a drive-by shooting while sitting in his Mercedes at a traffic light just a few hundred meters from the White House in Moscow (the seat of the Russian government). Many believe that Kadyrov ordered the killing.

For the moment, Prigozhin also retains some support within the military, despite his caustic criticism of the Ministry of Defense. Since September 2022, when Russia lost much territory to Ukraine’s offensive in the northeast, Prigozhin has been openly attacking Russia’s military chain of command. Nonetheless, Russia’s heavily controlled media, including the so-called vendors—Russian war reporters embedded with the army—have been ordered to help promote Wagner and its activities in Ukraine. As a result, pro-Kremlin papers have continued to publish interviews with Wagner’s officers that glorify the group’s fighting spirit.

Even now, the Russian media’s pro-Wagner coverage has not subsided. Moreover, the army itself appears to be continuing to support Wagner.

According to Prigozhin, following the release of his Bakhmut video, the military leadership assigned General Sergey Surovikin, the former head of Russian forces in Ukraine and still one of Russia’s most respected generals, to oversee the provision of ammunition and resources to Wagner.

For Prigozhin, one advantage is that, apart from him, Wagner has remained faceless, and Russia’s military leadership doesn’t see it as competition. Although Prigozhin has been incessantly promoting his fighters as the most capable fighting force on the Russian side, he has also made a special effort to keep his officers and field commanders anonymous. None of their names, even Utkin’s, are familiar to ordinary Russians, and when Wagner’s soldiers and officers are interviewed by voenkors, they remain anonymous. The military leadership’s tolerance of Wagner is essential, but it could be withdrawn when the army or the Kremlin finds it fit to do so. Russian generals are not known for their loyalty to their comrades-in-arms.

Just as important for Wagner is the stance of the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence agency. After the FSB’s initial missteps at the start of the war, the agency has recently regained its footing and influence within the Russian establishment. In Russia, the FSB has been getting increasingly aggressive in suppressing any signs of dissent. But it is also very active in Ukraine, especially its military counterintelligence department, which provides oversight of the army and has been assigned to suppress all forms of resistance in Russian-occupied territories. As a military unit, Wagner falls under the responsibility of this FSB branch, which offers little comfort to Prigozhin.

 

The Utility Of Badness

However, the most critical factor in Prigozhin’s continued role in Ukraine is Putin himself. Indeed, Prigozhin’s repeated attacks on the military’s two top leaders seem so out of line that only Putin’s support seems able to account for the Wagner leader’s continued role in the war. But why is Prigozhin valuable to Putin?

The explanation lies in Putin’s complicated relationship with the Russian military. During his early years in power, one of Putin’s greatest challenges was controlling the military. As one of the world’s largest armies in a vast country where everything is done in-house, the military has a tradition of ensuring that the outside world knows as little as possible about its activities. That means the usual forms of government and public oversight—whether through Parliament, law enforcement, or the media—don’t occur in Russia. During his first decade in office, Putin sought to tighten his grip on the army by appointing the former KGB general and his trusted friend Sergei Ivanov as minister of defense. But Putin was forced to replace him in 2007 when it became clear that Ivanov’s efforts to launch a larger military reform had failed. Later, with Shoigu, another outsider to the military, Putin again attempted to gain more leverage.

But now, after over a year of war in Ukraine, there is little evidence that Putin has succeeded with Shoigu any more than he did with Ivanov. Moreover, Putin understands that in wartime, the military tends to gain more power within the state. He knows that the longer the war continues, the more this power will grow and the harder it may be for him to exercise control. And since he tends to view the world in terms of threats, the relative power of the military concerns him—in some ways even more than the army’s performance on the battlefield.

As a result, Putin has resorted to increasingly unorthodox methods to rein in the generals. Starting in the fall of 2022, for example, he encouraged the voenkors to publicize problems in the army. But even more important has been the role of Wagner as a counterbalancing force to the military. For Prigozhin, despite the extraordinary casualties suffered by his soldiers, this is a win-win situation. He recognizes that he will never pose a political threat to Putin because he has no other backing within the Russian ruling elite apart from Putin’s patronage. And Putin has been careful to keep it that way.

With his special status—loosely managed by the GRU, tolerated by the military, and protected by Putin—Prigozhin hopes to keep his unique position in the Kremlin’s increasingly medieval court. And in this situation, even Prigozhin’s outrageous attacks may be part of the design: the more he acts like a wicked court jester, the better. This is a familiar type in Russian history. In the eighteenth century, Tsar Peter the Great made Alexander Menshikov, his version of a court jester, the most powerful prince in the country for much the same reason: Menshikov, with his modest background, had no standing within Russian aristocracy, and was brutal, ruthless, and utterly loyal to the tsar, who had a habit of beating him with a stick.

What Prigozhin doesn’t understand, however, is that Putin’s Russia is not Peter the Great’s, as much as he and Putin have tried to make it so. Many sectors of Russian society, particularly the country’s bureaucracy, watch the Wagner boss’s escapades with horror and disgust. Right now, Wagner is burning through more ammunition than any other Russian unit, which can be justified only as long as Wagner is doing what Prigozhin promised—making advances in Bakhmut. If things go south on the battlefield, this massive monthslong campaign—in which Wagner has sacrificed thousands of human lives and destroyed huge quantities of war materiel—could look like a colossal waste of scarce resources. But whether Putin would see a serious Wagner setback as a capital offense. The Russian president has a long record of effectively using failed bureaucrats, politicians, and other henchmen—former president and prime minister Dmitry Medvedev comes to mind. Prigozhin could be next.

 

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