Extract from ABC News
Analysis
From hotdog salesman to one of the most powerful Russians in the world.
The story of Yevgeny Prigozhin is an extraordinary one.
Prigozhin is perhaps the most intriguing character in this dreadful war between Russia and Ukraine.
Today, as Russia's President Vladimir Putin flails around dispatching one failed military chief after another, Prigozhin – for the moment at least – is probably the safest Russian in the world.
He's not in danger of being poisoned, imprisoned or thrown from a 20th floor window. As long as he keeps performing.
The moment he ceases to be of use, he may face a bleak future — or no future at all.
Right now, Putin needs Prigozhin more than he needs anyone else.
Without him, Russia's bloody stalemate in the battle of Bakhmut would become a decisive Ukrainian victory.
Prigozhin is head of the Wagner group, a private mercenary group that roams the world looking for opportunities to provide "security services" to shadowy regimes.
Essentially, this means keeping certain regimes in power.
One of the more obvious examples of this is Wagner's relationship with the government of Mali. In this African country, Wagner is paid to ensure that the militia groups in the north of the country who want to overthrow the government are never in a position to do so.
Money for plausible deniability
Wagner is the sort of company that, if you are a client, it's probably smarter not to ask what methods they use to ensure your security.
Plausible deniability means you don't know if anybody is bashed or killed so that you can continue to govern from your plush air-conditioned office.
In essence, Wagner's business model involves the majority of its funding coming from "security services" in Africa, as well as gold and diamonds from several African countries.
Soon after Putin launched Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February last year it was clear that the Russian army was not as formidable as the myth around it had suggested.
Putin quickly called upon Prigozhin to join the war. It's almost certain that Putin would, like the African dictators, have paid a significant amount of money to Prigozhin for Wagner's services.
But given that Russia does not have an equivalent of Australia's Senate Estimates, nor a free press, the details of any payment is unlikely to be known.
But what is known is that Prigozhin's military model has been keeping Russia in the fight.
New Wagners and Old Wagners
This week, I sat down with a senior member of Ukraine's special forces who has been both studying Wagner from a distance, and confronting them on the battlefield. He even interrogated a captured fighter recently in Bakhmut.
He explained to me that, within the Wagner group, there are two groups of fighters — the "old Wagners" and "new Wagners".
The old Wagners are well trained and professional fighters. Many have been with the group since it became a force in Syria in 2015.
The new Wagners are commonly referred to as "the prisoners". Many of them literally have come from prisons and psychiatric institutions in Russia.
As the war developed last year, and Prigozhin realised that he was going through fighters faster than he could recruit them, he went on a recruitment spree through Russia's prisons, psychiatric institutions, and, once he'd exhausted those willing recruits, tried sporting clubs (with very limited success.)
The new Wagners are the ones often referred to as the "cannon fodder" of the frontline. It's believed as many as 100 of these a day are dying around Bakhmut.
Prigozhin has made no secret of the dreadful toll that his fighters have taken. He recently recorded one of his famous videos in front of a pile of dead fighters, yelling to the powers that be in Moscow that these men were dying because of lack of ammunition.
While lack of ammunition may have been a factor, what Prigozhin did not yell was that the way he uses these fighters inevitably leads to thousands of deaths.
How Wagner operates
The Ukrainian special forces officer explained to me that the way the Wagner fighters have been operating has been in groups of eight.
A team of eight will run, crawl and zigzag towards the Ukrainian line, he said. The team consists of a team leader, a drone operator and six "mules". The mules carry as much ammunition as possible, including rocket propelled grenade launchers and machine guns.
Once the team of eight advances 20 or 30 metres — if indeed they survive — they then try to dig a trench which will form the beginning of the new Russian frontline. They then try to hide themselves and their weapons in this trench.
Then a second wave of Wagner fighters will join them and try to make this trench deeper and longer.
If they survive and establish this new frontline, then professional Wagner fighters – the "old Wagners" will join them, or, sometimes, professional Russian fighters may take over these new positions.
But the reality is that the chances of a "new Wagner" fighter doing this many times and surviving is very low.
The Wagner fighter who the Ukrainian special forces soldier interrogated explained that Wagner fighters earn $US400 a day when they are fighting. — this is much more than a regular Russian soldier would earn.
There is, of course, a major element of "danger money" in this and the Wagner fighters do not receive this when they are back at base.
When they are not in active combat they can receive as little as $US100 per day — which is still more money than they would be earning in a prison in Siberia or living in Sudan, Sierra Leone or Mali.
Prigozhin's future
Academic and former Australian diplomat Ian Parmeter has made a study of the Wagner group. A research fellow at the Australian National University and former counsellor at the Australian embassy in Moscow he told me last December that Wagner was used in the Donbas in 2014 and Syria in 2015.
"Wagner mercenaries include some former Spetsnaz personnel, but have characteristics that differentiate them from Spetsnaz. They are more deniable from Russia's perspective. They were first deployed in Donbas in 2014 at a time when Russia wanted to fight a covert war, blunting international criticism of the violation of Ukrainian sovereignty, and hide Russian casualties from the Russian public," Parmeter said.
"One Ukrainian estimate is that perhaps a third of the mercenaries did not speak Russian, which would mean fewer body bags going back to Russia. Similarly in Syria, though the main Russian intervention in 2015 was through air power, Wagner mercenaries were inserted on the ground as force multipliers for Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah ground offensives and to act as spotters and targetters for Russian air strikes and artillery fire from naval forces off the Syrian coast."
Parmeter said the other major factor differentiating Wagner and Spetsnaz is that Prigozhin wants Wagner to be a money-making enterprise, doing "dirty work for unsavoury regimes such those in Syria, Libya and various sub-Saharan African countries".
In The Oxford Middle East Review in June, Parmeter wrote: "Prigozhin appears now to be a de facto member of Putin's inner circle. However, he is not a member of the siloviki, the elite current and former senior intelligence and military officers who control the instruments of the state's hard power or the oligarchs … Prigozhin is a level below them. He has no separate power base and strives for influence and financial rewards by pleasing Putin.
"Putin argued in a 2018 interview that Russia has no responsibility for Prigozhin because Prigozhin has no official position. However, it can be assumed that Wagner cannot exist without Putin's blessing, and Prigozhin needs Putin's approval for strategic-level decisions, such as where and when Wagner is deployed. If he falls out of favour with Putin, he will be back to running restaurants."
Prigozhin is not back running restaurants or selling hotdogs. Far from it. But if Russia is defeated in Ukraine and Russian soldiers and Wagner fighters scurry to retreat, Prigozhin would still have an option to return to his cash cow, Africa, to provide security and buy and sell gold and diamonds.
Vladimir Putin has no such options. Victory or defeat sees him essentially trapped in Russia as warrants for his arrest on war crimes now make travel dangerous.
And in defeat he would need to watch everyone around him.
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