Yevgeny Prigozhin knows a thing or two about brute messages. In his ongoing public wrangling with the Russian Defense Ministry, the leader of Russia's private "Wagner" militia has repeatedly posed in front of dead fighters on Ukrainian battlefields to illustrate his demand that Russia's regular military satisfy his troops' "hunger for grenades." It bears the brunt of the battle for Bakhmut, the bloodiest theatre of the war in Ukraine, but because it does not receive ammunition from the leadership, its fighters have to die.
Friedrich Schmidt
Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS.
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Konrad Schuller
Political correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
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Prigozhin is not only starving for grenades. The almost daily videos and audio messages of the 61-year-old businessman from St. Petersburg testify at least as much to an insatiable hunger for attention. Recently, he has been ranting about the military leadership around Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valeriy Gerasimov under crude curses. He used to leave that to his subordinates.
The Battle of the Minions
Recently, he may have overstepped the mark: he didn't even seem to stop at President Vladimir Putin. Ironically, on "Victory Day" in World War II, May 9, which Putin has been using for years to justify his own course, Prigozhin's press service published a 27-minute video. In it, the businessman complains about the regular military, which fulfills its promise to supply "Wagner" ammunition only to ten percent. He refers to the Ministry of Defense as the "Ministry of Intrigue" and puts his opponents in the reputation of treason. One scene shows him visiting troops at the front. A masked fighter complains about how few projectiles he has left in front of a howitzer that is supposed to fire at Ukrainian positions.
This gives Prigozhin cause for a failure that is unprecedented even by his standards. He stands there with his legs wide open, in camouflage clothing and with a patch on which, after the word "Fracht 200", the military code for the fallen, the sentence "We are together" is written. "Instead of spending projectiles to kill the enemy, to save the life of our soldier, our soldiers are killed," he says – and then he adds the monstrous: "But the happy grandpa thinks he's fine." That's not a problem, as long as the "grandpa" is right. But how is Russia supposed to win the war "if all of a sudden, I just guess, it turns out that this grandpa is a consummate ass fiddle?"
But who is this grandpa? – Russian opponents of the regime have long referred to President Putin as such, often in the variant that the comprehensively isolated president is a "grandpa in a bunker". No such attributions are widespread about Prigozhin's usual target figures, Shoigu and Gerasimov.
With these tirades, Prigozhin is taking his dispute with the Russian military leadership one step further. The conflict has been smoldering for a long time, and so far it has been mainly a struggle of various minions for Putin's goodwill. In this fight, Prigozhin and his militia had a momentum for a time last year, when the Ukrainian army forced Russia's regular troops into retreat near Kyiv, Kherson and Izyum.