Russia’s Warmongers Are Scorpions in a Bottle
Divided by rivalries and animosity, they remain united by shared fears of a premature deal with the West and hopes for total victory over Ukraine.
His domestic critics aren’t praying for peace.
Photographer: Sergei Karpukhin/AFP via Getty Images
Ostensibly, it’s hard to find more implacable enemies than Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary army, and Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, an ultranationalist who played a prominent role in the initial phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The two have traded the kind of public insults — and, on Prigozhin’s part, open and credible threats — that preclude reconciliation. Yet they share a fear and a hope that bear directly on Russia’s future after Vladimir Putin’s rule is over.
Putin’s Russia hasn’t stamped out every kind of free expression. Those who support the invasion of Ukraine enjoy an ostensible carte blanche to criticize the top commanders of the “special military operation” and in some cases even Putin himself, to complain about battlefield failures and the war’s slow progress. This spectrum of thought includes “angry patriots” around Strelkov, supposed Putin loyalists such as Prigozhin, and everyone in between — a broad span of grim characters. For them, Putin is too tame: a potential traitor to the radicals, regrettably soft-hearted for the aggressive loyalists. Their combined audience on Telegram runs in the millions: Together, Prigozhin’s press service and Strelkov’s personal channel have more than a million subscribers.