Wagner Group–Russian Ministry of Defence conflict

Growing influence of Wagner Group According to Meduza, on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin developed tense relations with the Russian leadership. According to its sources, Prigozhin was in conflict with both the MoD and the Presidential Administration. Prigozhin criticized Shoigu for the actions of the Russian army in Syria, saying that the Russian military was operating with "outdated methods". In turn, Shoigu did not like the provision of food for the Russian army by Prigozhin's companies. Between 2022 and 2023 during the invasion, Prigozhin and Wagner experienced a sharp rise their influence. During 2017 and 2018, Wagner's membership numbers were estimated at several thousand. By January 2023, the number had reached 50,000 according to Western intelligence estimates. According to Prigozhin, the Russian leadership approached him on 16 March 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine "did not go according to plan". On 19 March, his mercenaries arrived from Africa and immediately engaged in the battle of Popasna. During 2022, Wagner received significant resources including its own aviation, heavy artillery and the right to recruit Russian prisoners. Wagner functioned as a Prigozhin's private army, acting outside of Russian law and the military hierarchy of the Russian Federation. The MoD and the Russian General Staff were unhappy with this situation and began to try to limit Prigozhin's growing influence. Prigozhin's rise to fame Prigozhin became well known after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Prior to that, he long denied his ties with the Wagner Group and would sue journalists who claimed otherwise; only in the fall of 2022 did he admit that he was the founder of Wagner. Wagner existed outside of the legal framework of Russia, and back in 2018, the Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said, "De jure we do not have such legal entities as private military companies". Regardless, in the course of the war with Ukraine, Wagner started to become a recognized entity. Prior to that, there was not a single legal entity with Wagner in its name in Russia. Prigozhin created an image of a military leader who is ready to deal with traitors and refuseniks in the most brutal way. Some of the military supported him and even some wrote reports on their transfer to Wagner. Prigozhin is a popular theory among the siloviks: He is the sword of Damocles hanging over the elite, and is needed to curb it and maintain an atmosphere of fear. In his opinion, Prigozhin's activity was coordinated with Putin, who, knowing the doubts of the Russian elites about the necessity of war with Ukraine, threatened them with Prigozhin, whose activity is not limited by the law. It has been suggested that Prigozhin's activity was necessary for Putin to "keep defence minister Sergei Shoigu and his subordinates in line". Another iStories source close to the MoD said that Wagner was fully dependent on the ammunition supply, logistics, medical and other military infrastructure that without which Prigozhin's army would have quickly become ineffective. Although Prigozhin was an irritant to many in the FSB and the MoD, Wagner continued to operate at the instigation of the president. At the same time, a businessman close to Putin's entourage said that Prigozhin was "more about money than politics", and that according to him, Prigozhin was a member of Putin's inner circle, being personally loyal to the Russian president and "tied to him by blood". == Conflict ==

Tensions enter the public sphere First public accusations In December 2022, Wagner first sounded out loud accusations against the MoD. Videos circulating on Telegram alleged that Wagner fighters had appealed to the Gerasimov because of the problems in providing their units with shells, with fighters calling Gerasimov a "faggot" and a "devil". On 20 February 2023, in his address to the MoD, Prigozhin said, "I am not poking you in the nose with the fact that you sit down to breakfast, lunch and dinner from gold dishes, and send your daughters, granddaughters and dogs on vacation in Dubai. Not embarrassed by anything. At a time when a Russian soldier is dying at the front. I'm just asking – give me ammunition!" In February 2023, Shoigu's son-in-law Alexei Stolyarov liked Yuri Dud's anti-war post on Instagram. After it gained media attention, Stolyarov even got into a skirmish with one of his critics, calling him a "Z-scum", but Stolyarov claimed that he was "not liking anything". Prigozhin stated, "we have to catch Stolyarov and bring him to me. I will train him for six weeks, and since I am a Z-scum myself, I will help him to reform by sending him to combat". In February 2023, Prigozhin began to complain about the "shell hunger" of Wagner during the heavy fighting for Bakhmut. On 16 February, Wagner fighters published a video, where, in an emphatically polite manner, they addressed the MoD with a request to give them ammunition. Then Prigozhin confirmed that it was his soldiers and reported that the appeal had some effect. Soon a video surfaced on the Internet where soldiers with a Wagner insignia fired machine guns at the portraits of General Gerasimov and the Chief of Staff of the Ground Forces General Alexander Lapin with the words "Fucking awesome machine gun, fucking generals". Prigozhin called this video a "Ukrainian fake". On 20 February, Prigozhin published a new appeal in which he stated that although there is ammunition in military depots, the MoD deliberately does not issue it to Wagner. On 21 February, the ministry said that despite the "exaggerated statements appearing on certain information resources" about a shortage of ammunition, all requests for ammunition are fulfilled for the assault troops in the shortest possible time". On 22 February, Prigozhin published another audio message where he accused Shoigu and Gerasimov personally of not providing ammunition to Wagner detachments. He said, "the Wagner PMC kind of does not exist. We used to be given ammunition formally for some military units, which like to take Bakhmut instead of us". According to Prigozhin, "the Wagner PMC is walking around like a beggar, from the world by a thread, asking unit commanders to help in some way". Prigozhin then published a photo with the bodies of dead Wagner fighters, saying that because of the lack of ammunition, his squads are suffering heavy losses. Military expert Yuri Fedorov noted that Prigozhin "simply uses" the problem of ammunition shortage for his confrontation with the MoD since other units of the Russian forces also had a shortage of shells, as former commander of the Vostok battalion Alexander Khodakovsky said in particular. Prigozhin said to the Russian military commanders: "you sit in expensive clubs, your children enjoy life, you make videos on YouTube. You think that you are the masters of this life, and that you have the right to dispose of their lives". According to Meduza, the Kremlin negatively reacted to Prigozhin's words about "grandpa": "of course, he can then say that this is about Shoigu or about an abstract layman, but people draw understandable conclusions. Observers have noted the ambiguity of Wagner Group's reputation. Although Prigozhin tried to position Wagner as an effective military structure, this image has been criticized including by Russian pro-war bloggers. On 5 June, the Prigozhin press service published a video in which Wagner members interrogated the commander of the Russian 72nd Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin. Venevitin, with traces of beatings on his face, said on the video that he "in a state of alcoholic intoxication" due to personal animosity fired at a Wagner car. However, according to the documents published on the Prigozhin channel, the incident with the capture of Venevitin occurred as early as 17 May. According to a lawyer interviewed by BBC journalists: "the capture of a lieutenant colonel of the Russian Armed Forces by Wagnerites is an armed kidnapping of a public servant in the line of duty, committed by an organized group". In addition, Wagner's actions fell under a number of related articles, including Article 318, Part 2 of the Criminal Code "threatening to use violence dangerous to life or health", which could result in up to 10 years in prison.. Journalists also noted that back in late May 2023 a video surfaced where Storm-Z fighters accused Venevitin of giving "criminal orders" and complained about death threats from Venevitin. Prigozhin as a populist critic Within a few months, Prigozhin underwent a metamorphosis, beginning to position himself as a "truth teller", ready to speak the unpleasant truth and to criticize the Russian leadership in the harshest terms. He also criticized members of the Russian parliament and oligarchy, accusing them of attempting to "steal everything that belongs to the people" during the war. The Institute for the Study of War noted that Prigozhin's statements increased his influence within the ultranationalist Russian milblogger community. In addition to his rhetoric against the MoD, Prigozhin also had a conflict with the leadership of the Chechen Republic and personally with its Head, Ramzan Kadyrov. By June 2023, Prigozhin was aiming for the image of the "people's hero of the Special Military Operation". In May 2023, according to Russian opinion polls, Prigozhin's approval rating reached 4%, equaling that of Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin and Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) leader Gennady Zyuganov. Prigozhin refuted these allegations, asserting that the Wagner Group did not possess a sufficiently large army to execute a coup. By June 2023, Prigozhin had begun making regular statements that were not allowed to any other public figure in Russia. Journalists noted that many of his statements would have resulted in criminal charges against other people. Wagner Group rebellion On the afternoon of 23 June, Yevgeny Prigozhin released a large interview with harsh accusations against the MoD leadership, in which he stated that the MoD deliberately deceived the Russian public and Putin about the upcoming NATO-backed offensives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) in 2022 and about the increase of "Ukrainian military aggression" before Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Prigozhin said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was ready for negotiations with the Kremlin, but the Russian leadership refused due to its "maximalist positions". Prigozhin also accused the oligarchs and the Russian military leadership of launching a full-scale invasion to obtain assets of the occupied Ukrainian territories, higher military ranks, military awards and for "self-promotion". On 23 June 2023, Prigozhin said that there were missile strikes by the Russian military against Wagner rear camps. In response to Shoigu, Prigozhin said: "This creature will be stopped". The Russian Defence Ministry said that all the messages and videos spread in social networks on behalf of Prigozhin about the Russian military strikes on the positions of Wagner do not correspond to reality and are an "informational provocation". After that, the FSB opened a criminal case against Yevgeny Prigozhin under Article 279 of the Criminal Code, suspecting him of committing an armed insurgency. After the rebellion led by Prigozhin failed, the Wagner Group began withdrawing its forces from Russia and began moving them to Belarus as part of a deal signed with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that ended the rebellion. 2023 Wagner Group plane crash On 23 August, Prigozhin and nine others including fellow founder Dmitry Utkin were killed in a plane crash as his private were en route from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. Russian state-owned media agency TASS reported that Prigozhin had been on the passenger list of the flight. A Wagner-associated Telegram channel claimed the jet that Prigozhin was in was shot down by Russian air defences over Tver Oblast. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that the crash, which they described as a targeted assassination, would ultimately eliminate the Wagner Group as a substantial threat to Putin. == See also ==