Putin is trying to humiliate Prigozhin

When corrupt Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled in 2014, his private estate at Mezhyhirya turned out to contain an ostrich farm, chandeliers worth thousands and a two-kilo gold loaf of bread. When Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s St. Petersburg estate was raided, investigators found cash, guns — and a bizarre collection of wigs. But what does the eager “through the keyhole” leak of footage from the raid tell us about the state of play in the Putin-Prigozhin grudge match?

Prigozhin himself is still at large. Although we were told the deal was for him to go into exile in neighboring Belarus, its president, Alexander Lukashenko, has said that Prigozhin is in Russia, but he doesn’t know where. Indeed, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov made the implausible claim that the Russian state has “neither the ability, nor the desire” to track Prigozhin’s movements.

There seems to be something of a stand-off. Wagner mercenaries appear neither to be moving to Belarus nor joining other units, as offered. On the other hand, there are suggestions that the regular military has appropriated all or most of their tanks and other heavy equipment. Some of Prigozhin’s Concord Group business empire has been shuttered, some bits seem to be working as usual and some are being taken over by rivals. This is, after all, the usual dynamic in Putin’s Russia — falling from favor is an invitation for sharper-toothed rivals still in the president’s good books to start scavenging for spoils.

At the same time, we were treated to footage from inside Prigozhin’s estate when it was raided by officers of the Federal Security Service on the first day of his mutiny. Amidst the predictably tacky décor that seems de rigueur for Russian new money, from his spa to his personal shrine, were stacks of cash to the value of around 600 million rubles ($6.5 million). To a degree this can be explained by the fact that Wagner is an essentially cash business, with fighters and dependents of the fallen paid in physical money. Nonetheless, the amount of cash is noteworthy, to say the least.

A giant sledgehammer in one room, inscribed “For use in important negotiations,” evoked the infamous scene when Wagner fighters smashed the skull of a deserter, which Prigozhin later endorsed with the statement that he had “betrayed his people, betrayed his comrades.”

Even more bizarre was the sight of not just a military tunic encrusted with medals but a closet full of wigs of varying levels of implausibility and a series of selfies of Prigozhin in various uniforms and disguises. In one, with dark glasses, uniform and expansive beard, he almost seems to be trying to cosplay Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional and clueless “Admiral-General Haffaz Aladeen.” The selfies could be real or could easily have been faked, as the FSB does have considerable form in staging scenes and manipulating photos. However, the way that this exposé was aired on state TV news channel Vesti Rossii suggests a definite campaign to undermine and humiliate Prigozhin.

After all, the scenes of large numbers of citizens from Rostov-on-Don applauding him and his men as they left the city underlines the degree to which he could easily become a catalyst for public dissatisfaction. It is not that they are necessarily applauding a bloody-handed gangster who is almost certainly a war criminal. Rather, this is a reflection of widespread disaffection generated by a whole range of concerns. There are those who accept the myth of Wagner as the most effective fighting force on Russia’s side who feel they have been betrayed. There are those who see in Prigozhin a rare example of a commander willing to speak up for his men. And there are those who are simply responding to someone, anyone, willing to call out the corruption and incompetence at the top of the system.

It is now this, more than Wagner’s guns, which makes Prigozhin dangerous. He may be too dangerous to arrest or to eliminate (yet), but at the very least the Kremlin wants to undermine his public credibility and legitimacy. Hence the selfies, and hence likely future information operations. There is a certain karma here: the man who ran the infamous social media troll farms now gets to experience death by a thousand memes.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK site. Subscribe to the World edition here.