Putin’s beast that would now devour him

Brightly colored plastic roses and carnations were piled high around his tombstone, under the red-and-gold Wagner flag, in Siberia, near the town of Talofka, thousands of miles from the Ukrainian front.

“Blood, honour, motherland, courage,” said a Wagner inscription. A gentle breeze blew across the Trutskoe cemetery as Federal Security Service (FSB) agents watched from a vehicle that had abruptly appeared nearby.

With Russian troops often deprived of vital equipment and sometimes operating as a human wave, Mr. Putin need meat for the meat grinder. Mr. Prigozhin, who recruited from Russian prisons with offers of amnesty and large payouts, could provide it, even from Siberia. He’s been too effective and helpful to throw aside.

In the long battle over the charred ruins of the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut alone, Mr Prigozhin has said Wagner lost 20,000 troops.

The use of Mr. Prigozhin, others suggested, was the apotheosis of Putin’s modus operandi to divide his subordinates and shift influence in recent years from Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov to Mr. Shoigu as the militarization of Russian society progressed, only to undermine the Defense Minister through Mr. Prigozhin.

“Putin likes competition, he likes to pressure Shoigu and likes the theater,” Dmitri A. Muratov, the Nobel Prize-winning editor of the closed independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, told me in an interview. “Meanwhile, the elite around Putin don’t give a damn about their country, they’re just afraid for their lives.”