Using private militaries is hardly a new phenomenon, and Wagner has operated in the Middle East and Africa for years. But what it is doing in Ukraine is unique. Not only is it waging its own war, but it is also currently leading the battle in Bakhmut.

The mystery surrounding its relationship with the Russian military is evidenced by a statement made last week by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who said that “military bureaucrats” had deprived his forces of artillery and ammunition, and that he is therefore withdrawing them from the area and handing Bakhmut over to Russian conventional armed forces.

The battle of Bakhmut has never gone well, but at this point, with the forces that have already been lost in the fight, victory is less strategic than political. For the Russians, losing or abandoning the battle would send the wrong signal to the enemy and its population. But the regular Russian army was not able to impose its will on Bakhmut and in general has not been able to break Ukrainian forces. Introducing Wagner there served several purposes. It increased the size of the force that could be deployed, and it brought in a ruthless force with plausible deniability.

In that sense, cutting off artillery and other ammunition makes absolutely no sense. (There is a hint of confirmation from Moscow that it did, but Ukrainian military reports suggest artillery fire hasn’t let up.) Even if Russia believed cutting off Wagner made military sense, allowing the leader to sound off like this doesn’t. Militaries and their political masters disagree all the time, but a rift this visible is rare.

The mystery, then, is two-fold. Why would the general staff want to cripple Wagner? And why would it do it so publicly? There were financial and technical steps that could have prevented it from happening. For it to have come this far, a malfunction must have occurred at either the senior staff or the ministry level.

If it is deliberate, what could it mean? It could be meant to stop a coup that Wagner might have planned, but a drone might have done a better job. It could be a plan by elements in the government aligned with Wagner to try to demonstrate that the Ukraine war is being lost, or at least not won, by the Russian command. If the view was held that the senior command and the ministers are losing the war, then advertising their irrationality through Wagner would make sense, potentially adding to any movement to remove them. If Putin felt that the current command was failing, but that too many senior officers supported it for it to be removed, this memo from Wagner would be an excellent tool to make the point. (That is, unless the point is to show that Putin has lost control of the situation.)

For now, this is all academic, if still important. The Kremlin appears to have given in to Prigozhin’s demands, and it seems as though Wagner will stay in Bakhmut. Moreover, Gen. Sergey Surovikin, whom Prigozhin described as the only capable general in the Russian army, has been appointed to liaise between Russia and the mercenaries.

But no matter how this plays out, the war is a fundamentally political problem. It has not gone as expected, and no effective alliance has emerged to change that fact. In this situation, one must either mount a massive offensive, the government and Wagner working side by side, or prepare for a negotiation as favorable as possible – one that absolves the emerging leadership of any wrongdoing.

***George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.

Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.



His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.

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