Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

Prigozhin’s ‘treachery’ poses a dangerous challenge to Putin

Yevgeny Prigozhin (Credit: Getty images)

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind the Wagner mercenary army, likes accusing his political enemies of ‘treason’ for not backing him as much as he’d like. Now, though, he appears to have committed that very crime himself – with the revelation that US intelligence reports suggested he tried to cut a deal with HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence.

These reports were part of the trove of classified materials leaked onto the Discord gaming server earlier this year. Taken on their own, they could be regarded as sneaky fakes intended to undermine Prigozhin, yet many other documents within the collection have quietly been acknowledged as real. While it still cannot be taken as wholly proven, in Russia even some of Prigozhin’s erstwhile supporters are accepting their veracity. 

Indeed, when Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was asked about the claims during an interview with the Washington Post, he responded with a prickly defensiveness. This did little to dispel belief in either the Prigozhin claims, or separate US reports that suggested Zelensky himself had raised the prospect of cross-border incursions into Russia – something he has denied in public.

This is an example of the way that Putin’s style of managing the elite has proven dangerously dysfunctional

According to the reports, Kyrylo Budanov, head of HUR, warned Prigozhin that a Russian plot to destabilise Moldova involving former Wagner fighters was intended to incriminate him, precisely because he already had dealings with HUR. These were apparently arranged in Africa, where Wagner has extensive interests, and led to Prigozhin making an extraordinary offer in January: in return for the contested city of Bakhmut, he would supply Kyiv insider intelligence on the location and disposition of regular Russian military units and ammunition stocks. He even encouraged Kyiv to launch an attack on Crimea.

That Prigozhin is a thuggish opportunist willing to throw anyone under a bus when it suits him is hardly news.

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