Extract from ABC News
Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be drifting closer and closer towards a potentially explosive feud with his former confidant, friend and mercenary warlord.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner paramilitary group, was once so close to the Kremlin strongman that he had the nickname "Putin's chef".
But these days, the pair spend most of their time throwing shade at each other.
In September last year, the Russian military was in disarray after a stunning counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces left Putin humiliated.
Prigozhin came to the rescue by flooding Ukraine with thousands of Wagner mercenaries — many of them recruited out of prisons.
This shadow army stands accused of some of the most deplorable war crimes committed during the 16-month long conflict.
Experts say Wagner soldiers are often used as cannon fodder, forced in relentless waves towards Ukrainian bullets as they capture territory one bloodstained inch at a time.
But the so-called "meatgrinder" strategy has been enough to keep Russia from full-blown defeat, and made Prigozhin a war hero in his own country.
"They should have just called me 'Putin's butcher' instead," he said earlier this year.
But as Wagner was increasingly celebrated for its successes, Prigozhin started to lash out, slamming the Russian military and demanding more recognition for his contribution to the war effort.
Putin, however, is not a man who likes to share the spotlight.
While he and Prigozhin have so far refrained from direct attacks against each other, the president has backed a move to bring the Wagner group under the control of the Russian military.
Prigozhin is refusing to obey the order, while waging a war of words against the country's top brass, and even ordering his men to kidnap a Russian officer.
The only question now is why the once loyal Putin ally is behaving this way.
To some experts, he's trying to build a competing power base to the Kremlin elite, perhaps with the ambition of one day toppling his old friend.
But others insist that nothing inside the Kremlin is as it seems. Putin and Prigozhin might seem at odds, but there might be a grander scheme in play.
Putin and Prigozhin share a long history
Long before Prigozhin emerged as a key player in the Ukraine war, the elusive St Petersburg businessman was frequently spotted rubbing shoulders with the most powerful members of the Kremlin.
"Putin's chef" regularly served elaborate meals to the Russian leader and visiting foreign dignitaries — a role that implies a level of deep trust in an arena where political poisonings are surprisingly common.
The origins of Prigozhin's friendship with Putin are shrouded in mystery, but there are many similarities in their rags-to-riches backstories.
From their first meeting, Prigozhin has said, "Putin saw how I built up my business from nothing", and the business relationship soon developed, with him granted lucrative state contracts and welcomed into the inner circle.
Prigozhin's role in the Kremlin has always been murky at best, and he has long denied any political role, but his influence has reached far beyond the dinner table.
Despite keeping a relatively low public profile, Prigozhin has been seen as a man doing Putin's bidding abroad — whether that be through his shadowy troll farm sowing distrust in the US election, or the ruthless band of mercenaries fighting wars across Africa and the Middle East.
After years of staunch denials and even legal suits over his rumoured association, Prigozhin publicly came forward last year as the head of Wagner.
The mercenary group's fighters, often referred to as Putin's shadow army, have been instrumental in stoking Russia's influence in Africa.
Meanwhile, the company has pursued commercial and political interests across the continent, buying up mines and parcels of land in resource-rich nations and providing advice and election-monitoring missions in struggling democracies.
According to a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime last year, Wagner is now the most influential Russian actor in Africa.
"The Wagner Group is unique as an organisation in the breadth, scale and boldness of its activities. However … Wagner did not emerge in a vacuum," the report summarised.
"The group's activities and characteristics reflect broader trends in the evolution of Russia's oligarchs and organised crime groups, their respective relationships with the Russian state and their activities in Africa."
How tensions boiled over during the battle of Bakhmut
In the early days of the "special military operation" in Ukraine, Wagner troops were conspicuously absent, according to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
But within a couple of months, they had been deployed to shore up Russia's defences as Kyiv's forces wrestled for control.
Despite offering the Kremlin plausible deniability, the private military company's crucial battlefield victories have presented a PR problem for Putin, whose forces has been painted as an inexperienced, disorganised mess by comparison.
The battle of Bakhmut was when cracks first started to emerge between the former chef and Russia's infamous leader.
The city held little strategic value but was subjected to intense shelling for several months as Russia's military campaign slowed to a crawl in January.
Prigozhin's Wagner spearheaded efforts to capture the area, with the backing of conventional airborne military troops, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
But it was clear traditional tactics would not be enough to claim the symbolic prize, and a ghoulish strategy dubbed the "meatgrinder" was born.
In tactics seemingly borrowed from ancient times, Prigozhin's recruits were treated as cannon fodder, deployed for the express purpose of taking bullets from the enemy and dying on a battlefield.
Soldiers were lined up in small groups and sent out in successive "human wave attacks" to advance towards Ukrainian positions.
If deployed correctly, the brutal tactics would be in line with other historical assaults such as those used by the Chinese People's Volunteer Army in the Korean War, wrote Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds in a special report for RUSI.
But they said Ukrainian forces reported the men often appeared to be under the influence of amphetamines or other substances.
The recruits conducted their attacks in a way that was "not conducive to successful assaults nor to the maintenance of momentum" but allowed the Russian side to find weaknesses in Ukrainian defences.
On May 20, Prigozhin declared the months-long struggle for victory over Bakhmut had been won, in what was considered the first sign of a Russian advance in 10 months.
Prigozhin, who had begun taking on a more public role in the campaign and didn't shy away from taking credit for Russia's successes, became the face of the war in Ukraine.
While Putin was quick to promise "state rewards" to those who helped secure the symbolic prize, Prigozhin used the moment to launch another tirade against the defence ministry and Russia's military command.
He argued the war's longest and bloodiest battle came at a significant cost, and he pointed the finger of blame at Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu and the Russian Chief of the General Staff for the Russian Armed Forces, Valery Gerasimov, who he said had "turned the war into personal entertainment".
It was not the first time that Prigozhin had targeted Russia's defence minister or its military generals.
The attack was just the latest in a series of public tirades lobbied at Russia's top brass over a range of issues from incompetent leadership to a lack of weapons and sniping about Russian troops.
Often Prigozhin sought to portray Wagner as more disciplined than regular Russian forces, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
At other times, it appeared as if there was a broader strategy at play.
To some observers, Prigozhin's rising public profile hinted at an underlying ambition to become a key player in the country's future.
Prigozhin's fiery remarks
Since the war began in Ukraine, Prigozhin has publicly embraced his status as Russia's gun for hire.
He has built a huge following on social media, given multiple interviews on Russian television, and held fiery press conferences around the country.
While he has largely focused his ire on the Russia's defence ministry, in recent weeks his comments have become so incendiary, they left many wondering how far he was willing to push his friendship with Putin.
In one video uploaded to social media channel Telegram, he implied that Russian forces would be willing to drop a nuclear bomb on a town in the Belgorod region.
"I am afraid that they might harbour some foul thoughts about dropping a little nuke on their own territory," he said while dressed in khaki in a Wagner training camp.
"Lobbing [the bomb] at foreign [territory] is scary, but we can hit our own, to show how sick and psychotic we are."
He has also slammed so-called "elites" including Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for sending thousands of young Russians to the front.
"You sons of bitches. Gather up your offspring and send them to war," he said into the camera.
Earlier this month, he released a video online which appears to show a Russian military commander being held by his Wagner mercenaries.
Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin, the commander of Russia's 72nd Brigade, is seen admitting that while drunk, he ordered his troops to fire on a Wagner convoy.
The Kremlin now appears to have had enough.
The defence ministry announced it wanted Wagner mercenaries to sign contracts before July 1 to bring them under the control of the Russian military.
Shoigu says the integration is designed to increase combat potential, but Prigozhin has vowed to boycott the contracts.
"Wagner will not sign any contracts with Shoigu. [He] cannot properly manage military formation," he said
In an interview with a group of Russian journalists, Putin appeared to send a message to his old friend to fall in line.
"This has to be done and it has to be done as quickly as possible," he said.
Now everyone is waiting to see if Prigozhin will bend to Putin's will — and what happens if he refuses.
What is really going on with Putin and Prigozhin?
Some experts have concluded that despite appearances, Putin and Prigozhin are still in lock-step.
Fiona Hill, a former expert on Russian affairs for the White House, believes that Putin quietly sanctions criticism from ultra-nationalists because it makes him look reasonable in comparison.
She told The Economist that Prigozhin has "definitely perfected bombast", but it's telling that he has so far gone unpunished by the Kremlin.
Like everyone else in Putin's Russia, Prigozhin is likely just trying to stay alive in a system where people regularly disappear.
"The first thing that comes to mind is that a man in his position, who not only has no legal status but is a criminal in the eyes of Russian law, is safer the more he is on display," Russian political scientist Ekaterina Shulman told French online magazine Worldcrunch.
"It is harder to kill him if he is in the spotlight."
Other Russia watchers say despite being a very rich and well-connected man, he appears to be trying to develop a persona as an anti-elite maverick.
"Like any classic populist, he sends anti-elitist messages to the public," wrote Andrei Kolesnikov, for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Yet he is like every other oligarch, and owes everything to his ties with the state and the resources outsourced by that state."
The manoeuvre could suggest that Prigozhin is trying to position himself as a Putin alternative at a time of great flux within Russia.
Wagner is feuding with both the Russian military as well as Chechen paramilitary forces, which are loyal to Putin.
And inside Ukraine, Putin's men are now also fighting their own.
So-called "partisan groups", which want to bring down Putin's regime, are crossing the border into Ukraine to fight their countrymen in the hope of sparking a revolution back home.
For a man like Prigozhin, chaos is both a threat and an opportunity.
"Prigozhin is scornful of people from Moscow's elite Rublyovka neighbourhood, but he comes from the same place as they do: from the very depths of the system," Kolesnikov said.
"The sleep of reason produces monsters; authoritarian regimes produce multifaceted monsters; and he is just one of them."
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