The Existential Question About Putin’s Mercenary Boss
Why does Russia’s president tolerate Yevgeny Prigozhin, the uppity boss of the private army called Wagner?
Eat or be eaten: Putin and Prigozhin in 2010.
Photographer: ALEXEY DRUZHININ/AFP Alexey Druzhinin/AFP via Getty Images
Yevgeny Prigozhin shouldn’t have said “grandfather.” But it slipped out. That was last month, during one of his vulgar and lurid rants against the Russian top brass. Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company, was posing in warrior gear as a Slavic Rambo, straddling the corpses of his fallen comrades and spitting expletives into the camera.
He was demanding ammo from the Russian army for his Wagner mercenaries, so he could finish the bloody siege for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. He blasted Russia’s overall war strategy. And then, apparently carried away by rage, he heaped scorn on a “happy grandfather” who “thinks he is good.”