The Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu is having none of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s treachery and has issued an order, approved by Vladimir Putin, demanding all private military combatants to register and sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense. Prigozhin has made it clear that his group won’t be complying with this order.
As expected, Russian telegram is in full support of Prigozhin while there have been reports that Wagner’s POWs in Ukraine are refusing to be handed over to the Russian authorities in prisoners’ exchanges and are instead joining the pro-Ukraine Russian Voluntary Corps.
This is the first time in many years that there is a significant struggle for power in Russia between powerful and distinguished entities. The last time there was a significant struggle for power in Russia was when Putin clamped down on the oligarchs, but that wasn’t a struggle at all. Political opposition against Putin had always been ineffective with Putin winning elections easily without any serious challenge.
This time it’s different. Prigozhin has very wide public support and the Wagner Group that he leads is a very big organisation that can be compared to a multi-national conglomerate. Wagner has operations in multiple countries including Mali, Central African Republic, Sudan, Venezuela, Syria, and currently Ukraine. They have oil and gas companies, energy infrastructure, gold mines, and a large number of shell companies across different parts of the world. Undoubtedly, the Russian state is much stronger and bigger than Wagner and Putin may remain more popular than Prigozhin, but this is still an unchartered territory in contemporary Russian politics, as the post-Soviet Russian state has so far, never dealt with an internal power struggle of this magnitude.
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