When the European Parliament voted to condemn Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism last month, Yevgeny Prigozhin decided to send a message. The head of Russian military contractor Wagner Group and confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he would deliver a sledgehammer—shown in a video engraved with Wagner’s logo and stained with fake blood—to the parliamentarians in Brussels. The macabre public relations stunt came just two weeks after Prigozhin praised another video showing the execution of an alleged Wagner deserter with just such a sledgehammer. Prigozhin had also just boasted that Wagner’s army of online trolls would keep interfering in Western elections. “We have interfered, we are interfering, and we will continue to interfere” in U.S. elections, Prigozhin said.
Prigozhin’s public outbursts ostensibly took aim at the West, but his real target sits in Moscow: Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu. Prigozhin has long been Putin’s pit bull, running covert operations from Africa to the Middle East. Now he sees an opening for greater political power. With Putin’s invasion of Ukraine failing all along the 800-mile front, the Russian leader is searching for culprits, and a battle among different factions is underway. Should Prigozhin come out on top and emerge as the next minister of defense—or even with an expanded role in Russia’s war—it would presage an even more menacing turn in Moscow. That’s because Prigozhin leads a new generation of hard-liners that surpasses even Putin’s old guard in their aggression. Each will have a say in a post-Putin struggle for power or if the Russian Federation fractures.
Putin’s dominance of the Russian Armed Forces has never been absolute, and Putin cannot call on extensive loyalties within the military. Moreover, while during the Soviet era military generals doubled as Communist Party members, today’s Russian military is relatively apolitical. Putin reintroduced the Soviet-era Main Military-Political Directorate in 2018 to indoctrinate the military into Putinism, but there are no political commissars embedded in the Russian Armed Forces such as in Soviet times.
