Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Russia’s Wagner Group paramilitary corps, is standing in front of a field of dead bodies and screaming. He rants and curses while being filmed, pointing at the corpses of his men.
As the video goes on, he gets angrier and angrier, specifically blaming the deaths of his men on Russia’s two highest ranking military officials — Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. According to Prigozhin, those two leaders denied Wagner fighters the artillery ammunition they needed to defend themselves.
“Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where are the fucking shells!” Prigozhin says. “They came here as volunteers and died so you could gorge yourselves in your offices.” (You can watch the video here, but be warned — it’s graphic.)
So here you have a Russian paramilitary leader publicly advertising his high casualties in gruesome form and, even worse, publicly cursing out the top of the command chain for their deaths. And this isn’t even the first time he’s done something like this. It’s a kind of insubordination and dissent that, in a properly functioning military, simply shouldn’t happen.
But at this point in the Ukraine war, we know that the Russian military is very much not functioning properly. And Prigozhin’s video, for all its horrific spectacle, actually helps us understand an important reason why — Russia’s military is divided against itself by design.
It’s a set-up created to help Putin stay in power. But it’s also one that is likely damaging the country’s ability to perform on the battlefield.
How Putin’s authoritarianism hurt his military
In theory, the Wagner Group is a kind of mercenary outfit. In practice, as my colleague Jen Kirby explains, it’s more like a privatized arm of the Russian state — often deployed to help pro-Russian dictators in places like Syria where it’s more useful to have them than regular Russian army troops.
During the Ukraine war, Wagner…
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