Why Putin Keeps Yevgeny Prigozhin and His Mercenaries Around

Yevgeny Prigozhin should not have called Putin “grandfather”. But he got away. That was last month, during one of his vulgar and sinister rants against the Russian top leadership. The leader of “Wagner” poses in military gear like a Slavic Rambo, stepping on the corpses of his fallen comrades and spewing profanities into the camera.

He wanted ammunition from the Russian army for his mercenaries so that he could complete the bloody siege of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. He criticized Russia’s overall military strategy. And then, apparently driven by anger, he contemptuously compared Putin as a “happy grandfather” who “thinks he’s got it.”

Up to this point, his Russian audience assumed that Prigozhin, as part of his megalomaniacal stunt, was only insulting Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and senior generals. But “grandpa” sounded an awful lot like Vladimir Putin, president of Russia and de facto czar. Challenge or threaten Putin and you’re done.

Yet somehow Prigogine is still around. After winning victory over the ruins of Bahmut, he appears to regroup his Wagner mercenaries. And Putin seems to tolerate its existence. Why?

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington believe Putin wants to keep Prigozhin out as a counterbalance to something he, Putin, fears even more than a brash mercenary: the Russian military.

In his early years in power, Putin struggled to assert control over his superiors. And as a former KGB officer who thinks only of potential threats, he now worries that as his war against Ukraine drags on, a military coup becomes more likely. It’s a good thing he keeps Prigogine around to embarrass the army and keep them in line, writes Andreas Kluth in an analysis.

András Ratz, a Hungarian scholar at the German Council on International Relations in Berlin who has long studied the Wagner group and private military contractors in general (including American Academi, formerly known as Blackwater), read the situation differently.

First, Putin is not as worried about the loyalty of his own army as Soldatov and Borogan imply, Ratz believes. So Putin does not need to maintain a counterbalance, and in any case does not see Prigogine as such. Nor is Putin afraid of Prigozhin, who has no support from the Russian elite. Instead, the president grows or trims the Wagner boss’ position as needed. And lately he’s been cutting hair. One way he did this was with a new inmate hiring policy.

Since last fall, Prigogine, himself a prisoner in his youth, has been going into prisons and recruiting prisoners for the front line, about 50,000 in all. He cynically uses these people as cannon fodder in Bakhmut and elsewhere. This was a big help for Putin because it outsourced death. Given the choice between sacrificing regular conscripts and prisoners-turned-mercenaries, Putin chose the latter.

In February, however, Putin, trying to avoid another unpopular mass mobilization, banned Prigozhin from recruiting more prisoners. Now the Russian army directly hires them. So Putin has effectively restricted the supply of “Wagner” troops just as he may or may not have withheld ammunition. Prigogine remains completely dependent on Putin, and they both know it.

The other reason Putin is not afraid of Prigozhin is the motivation of the mercenary. Prigozhin actually wants to get his people out of Ukraine, which for him is nothing but a loss. Instead, he needs them in lucrative places like the Middle East and Africa, where “Wagner” provides his violent services to any warlord who asks. In return, “Wagner” receives the rights to exploit local resources – such as oil in Syria, diamonds or rare earth elements in Africa.

Putin likes these Wagner operations because of their side effects. Spreading chaos and unbearable human misery in regions like the Sahel, “Wagner” is also causing mass migration to the European Union, which Prigogine and Putin want to destabilize.

The real question, Ratz believes, is therefore not whether Prigogine will ever challenge Putin for power – he won’t – or whether Putin is thinking of eliminating Prigogine – he isn’t. What matters is whether “Wagner” as a unit is already damaged goods and should be replaced by another group.

One reason states outsource some military operations to the private sector is plausible deniability. Soldiers of Destiny do the bidding of the state, but the government can claim no responsibility. For “Wagner”, however, this element of separation from the state is no longer there. The whole world knows that “Wagner” is a continuation of Putin’s regime.

The greater tragedy in these developments is the growing role of mercenaries in modern warfare in general.

For most of history, mercenary warfare, which has been called the second oldest profession, was the norm. Soldiers of fortune fought for Carthage in ancient times and Florence in the Renaissance, and raped and plundered central Europe during the Thirty Years’ War. But then, with the rise of nationalism, states monopolized warfare for about a century.

After World War II, and especially after the Cold War, this trend reversed again. And Russia is far from the only culprit. The US uses subcontractors almost as enthusiastically in Iraq and Afghanistan as it does drug cartels, warlords, extremists and insurgents elsewhere.

War is always hell, but wars waged by mercenaries – which the protocols to the 1977 Geneva Convention sought to ban – are often even more horrific. In The Prince, Machiavelli describes mercenaries as “disjointed, ambitious, undisciplined, unfaithful; gallant among friends, mean among foes; without fear of God, without faith in men.” He may have been thinking of Prigogine—or of one of the evil people who would be happy to replace him.

Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering European politics. He is a former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a correspondent for the Economist.

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