Kremlin crack-up: who’s out to get Putin?

The soldier with the Kalashnikov wasn’t happy. Neither were the hundreds of comrades who had chosen him as the spokesman for their angry complaints as they milled about on a train platform somewhere in Russia. ‘There are 500 of us, we are armed, but we haven’t been assigned to any unit,’ the newly mobilised soldier complained on a video that went viral earlier this month. ‘We’ve been living worse than farm animals for a week… Nobody needs us, we’ve had absolutely no training.’ Other soldiers, most of them masked, chipped in with more grievances. ‘The officers treat us like animals,’ shouted one. ‘We’ve spent a fortune on buying food for ourselves.’

The video – and others like it – was rightly cited in the western press as evidence of the chaos that followed the ‘partial’ mobilisation announced by Vladimir Putin on 21 September. But the video also revealed something much more significant about how defeat in the field is sending cracks running through the ‘power vertical’ over which Putin presides.

Watch carefully and you can see among the ordinary forest-green camouflage army-issue uniforms several of the soldiers wearing more sophisticated kit, marked with the distinctive death’s-head badge of the Wagner private military company. The video was distributed by social media channels associated with Wagner’s founder and public face Yevgeny Prigozhin – a billionaire St Petersburg caterer and businessman better known as Putin’s chef. In other words, this video shows not only discontented soldiers but also a private army engaged in political manoeuvres.

It’s not hard to guess Prigozhin’s agenda in distributing – and possibly orchestrating – the video. The head of Russia’s largest private army is trying to undermine Russia’s beleaguered Minister of Defence, Sergei Shoigu. And Prigozhin is far from alone. Since Ukrainian advances near Kharkiv last month, Shoigu and his generals have come under heavy and public attack from patriotic pro-war bloggers, Wagner-affiliated media and the hawkish Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and even state-controlled TV.