July 5, 2023

A week after Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group made their abortive “march for justice” the mainstream media and their featured experts continue to repeat the same story using inaccurate terminology and shallow thinking. The result is a flawed guide to the meaning of an incident that has generated more heat than light on the future of the Ukraine War.

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In The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli famously advised against the use of mercenaries. He found “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline.” Prigozhin and his Wagner Group are called “mercenaries” and their recent mutiny would seem to confirm Machiavelli’s warning. They do not, however, fit the 16th Century Florentine thinker’s description. Machiavelli’s complaint was that mercenaries find their “stipend… is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you.”

The Wagner Group has fought hard in Ukraine, outdoing the performance of the regular Russian army. It took heavy casualties with shortfalls in supplies and air support. Whether due to jealousy and rivalry with the Russian high command, or just the poor logistics that have plagued the entire war effort is open to question. Either way, Prigozhin had grounds to question how the war was being fought.

The Wagner Group may recruit its soldiers as mercenaries and engage in lucrative business ventures, but Prigozhin is a Russian loyal to his country. He is not a freelancer. In Syria, Africa, and cyberspace, he has served as an agent of the empire. This makes the 17th-century warlord Albrecht von Wallenstein a better historical example than anything out of Machiavelli.

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During the early part of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Wallenstein commanded the Imperial Army of Ferdinand II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and head of the Habsburg dynasty. He was then dismissed because he was unpopular with the Catholic hierarchy. However, the war took a bad turn for the Empire with the intervention of Sweden on the Protestant side and Wallenstein was reinstated. He recruited his own regiments whose officers swore an oath to him alone and usurped the imperial authority in the territories he occupied. Like Prigozhin, he exercised an independent command and accrued great wealth and prestige as he built a large army on the mercenary model which fought well and won several battles.

Wallenstein’s enemies at the Imperial Court seized on rumors that he was plotting to take the Bohemian crown and carve out his own kingdom. Ferdinand ordered his arrest. Wallenstein sought exile in Saxony, but a cabal of his own (truly mercenary) officers were well rewarded by the emperor for assassinating him in 1634. Prigozhin would do well not to hold any banquets in Belarus.

Wallenstein’s death did not cripple the Catholic war effort. Seven months later, the Spanish-Imperial army won such a major victory at Nordlingen that France, which had been supporting the Protestant cause from the sidelines, needed to enter the war directly to stem the Habsburg advance.

It is inaccurate to call Prigozhin’s march an attempted coup. His target was the Minister of War, not the President. Putin has replaced several field commanders for their defeats in Ukraine, but Minister Sergei Shoigu is part of the regime. Prigozhin had long been calling for changes in the military high command and its strategy. Instead, the high command was going to take control of the Wagner Group. In that case, Prigozhin wanted to become the high command. Putin called this “treason.” Prigozhin replied, “we are patriots of our motherland” then backed down rather than “spill Russian blood.” Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, to whom Putin had recently given the support of tactical nuclear weapons, provided Prigozhin a way out while at the same time reinforcing Putin’s image as undisputed ruler of Russia. Without sparking a wider uprising, Prigozhin’s position collapsed so quickly he was compelled to abandon his beloved troops to save himself. It is wishful thinking to believe this incident signals imminent regime change in Moscow.

It does, however, signal two important things. First, Prigozhin exposed the “lie” behind the invasion of Ukraine that is at the heart of Putin’s propaganda and of those in the West who oppose support for Ukraine because they find a contentious world uncomfortable. “The ministry of defense now is trying to deceive society, the president, and tell a story there was insane aggression from Ukraine and that they intended to attack us with the whole NATO bloc,” said Prigozhin. He claimed a “clan of oligarchs” started the war “to rob” Ukraine and divide up its assets, as he said had happened in Crimea after it was seized in 2014. While his hyperbole can be dismissed in the same way as the similar charge in the West that support for Kyiv has been pushed to profit the military-industrial complex, its core confirms the obvious. The invasion was for revanchist conquest not pre-emptive defense.

Putin has made no secret of his belief that Ukraine has no right to independence and should be returned to the domain of Mother Russia. Kyiv’s desire to join NATO did not pose a threat to Russia, only to Putin’s ambition to rebuild its empire. A former KGB officer, Putin laments the collapse of the Soviet Union (which he has recently equated with “historical Russia”) that the West celebrates in the name of peace and freedom. There is certainly no moral equivalence between NATO expansion by the free association of nations seeking collective security and Russia’s long history of expansion by fire and sword. The same history Putin cites to justify Russian domination of its borderlands drives those liberated lands to seek protection from a return to the brutality they so suffered for so long. It is their perspective, not Putin’s, that deserves support.