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Prigozhin’s gambit: Soledar and the struggle for power [1]

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Date: 2023-01-13

The conflicting, ominous accounts of Russia’s assault on Soledar – captured by Russian mercenaries, or by the Russian army, or still under Ukrainian control – are phantom products of the fog of war and adversarial propaganda. On Monday, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, was photographed in a Soledar salt mine surrounded by his victorious troops; except maybe it wasn’t Soledar, it was an earlier photo from Volodymyrivka, and Soledar was captured by regular troops not by Wagner. Or it wasn’t captured at all.

We have become used to confusion and uncertainty over the course of this terrible war – while the staff of Daily Kos have done an extraordinary job of separating fact from rumour and disinformation. But I would argue that, in the case of Soledar, the conflicting narratives reflect more than the daily back-and-forth of the information war, and Russia’s increasingly desperate attempts to project a narrative of victory. Two remarkable events of recent days seem significant. First, at the very moment Prigozhin was crowing about his single-handed conquest of Soledar, the general commander of the Russian campaign, and Prigozhin ally , General Surovikin was dumped by the Kremlin in favour of the Chief of Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Second, Prigozhin’s claims of victory were rubbished – not only by Ukraine, but by the Russian army. Clearly, Putin is looking to rein Wagner in, at the least to bring Prigozhin down a peg or two.

A further detail, reported by Kos and others, seems particularly striking: while Russia has thrown thousands of its hapless conscripts and tons of munitions into the battle for Soledar, it has massively scaled back its artillery campaign in other sections of the front – by as much as 75%, in some reports. This imbalance suggests either that the Soledar commanders are burning through their stocks of artillery shells, with no thought for maintaining reserves, or that depots in other areas are being stripped bare to supply the glorious battle for a Ukrainian salt mine. In strategic terms, it’s madness: even if Russia can take – and hold – both Soledar and Bakhmut, it will have bled itself dry, just in time for Ukraine’s NATO-supplied spring offensive.

So how can we make sense of this bizarre late spasm of Russian effort? (It is certainly not down to improvements in morale: troops face the prospect of freezing to death, being slaughtered, or burning in their barracks courtesy of HIMARS.) Key to this analysis, for me, is the work of Timothy Snyder, specifically his article “How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end?” published in his Thinking About blog on 5 October. As Snyder succinctly argues, what matters to Putin – and to Kremlin rivals such as Prigozhin – is power: Ukraine, like Syria and Chechnya, is just the latest arena in which the power games of psychopaths are played out. It follows that, as the invasion falters – with all the potential instability that brings – the focus of Russia’s leadership will turn increasingly to the domestic sphere. Snyder writes:

For all of the actors concerned, it might be bad to lose in Ukraine, but it is worse to lose in Russia. … The logic of the situation favors he who realizes this most quickly, and is able to control and redeploy. Once the cascade begins, it quickly makes no sense for anyone to have any Russian forces in Ukraine at all. Again, from this it does not necessarily follow that there will be armed clashes in Russia: it is just that, as the instability created by the war in Ukraine comes home, Russian leaders who wish to gain from that instability, or protect themselves from it, will want their power centers close to Moscow.

It is through this lens, I think, that the assault on Soledar can be best understood. Prigozhin’s true goal is not to capture Soledar or Bakhmut – that, in itself, is of little significance. What matters is the propaganda victory, and how this can be instrumentalised in the looming power struggle within the Kremlin. Wagner is throwing everything at Soledar, not as a prelude to future conquests, but because it might be the last chance Prigozhin gets before the whole campaign goes up in flames. Ukraine’s counter-offensives in Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia have not yet truly begun, but they are coming, and the reckoning for Russia, and for Putin’s regime, will be brutal. Prigozhin, I suspect, has seen the writing on the wall.

As to Prigozhin’s ultimate goal, Peter Rough and Can Kasapoglu argue, in Foreign Policy, that the Wagner chief may have his eyes on the ministry of defence. But I wonder whether that’s the limit of his ambition. Putin’s slapdown this week certainly suggests that he’s wary of the Butcher of Bakhmut. And perhaps he has good reason.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/13/2147057/-Prigozhin-s-gambit-Soledar-and-the-struggle-for-power

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