Wagner Mutiny Rattles the Kremlin’s War in Ukraine
With its good fighters out of the picture, Russia’s manpower problems get worse.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin denied that he had any involvement in the paramilitary Wagner Group, despite European Union sanctions against him and an FBI bounty for his arrest. But as Prigozhin grew increasingly critical of the Kremlin’s tactics in Ukraine, he finally admitted last year that he was the leader of the group and attended funerals for Wagner mercenaries slain in combat. And on Saturday, Prigozhin’s transformation from a shadowy Kremlin ally to a public challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin was complete: In a lightning mutiny, the Wagner Group stormed into Rostov-on-Don, a city of a million people in the north Caucasus, before an eleventh-hour diplomatic intervention from Belarus ended the saga.
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @JackDetsch
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