Ukraine’s defeat in Donbas is a victory for Russia’s growing mafia state

The map is moving again. In Eastern Ukraine, after months of severe retreats, Vladimir Putin’s forces made their first significant advance: capturing the salt mine town of Soledar. It wasn’t, however, General Valery Gerasimov, the Kremlin’s military chief in Ukraine, who first rushed to claim victory — posing in a deep shaft — but Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss and the angry face of the Russian mercenary group Wagner.

From the myth of Achilles in the Trojan War, societies have always sought — or uncomfortably found — reflections of themselves in their commanders. Churchill: the fading of the British Empire. Eisenhower: American meritocracy. The increasingly prominent Prigozhin is uncannily this. This Leningrad-born street bandit, jailed for nine years in the Soviet Union, symbolises the fusion of criminal and political power in Russia.

Wherever Putin has gone, he has too, from personally serving food to the French President, when the man the inner circle know as “the Tsar” sought open doors for his money in the West, to running the troll farm which interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections. The fact that Soledar was captured by Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries, heavily recruited from prisons, is a victory for the Russian mafia state. US officials even believed that what they describe as Prigozhin’s obsession with the towns of Bakhmut and Soledar is to do with his hunger to personally profit from their mines.

In Moscow, elites increasingly view his rise with concern. Russian state media has increasingly covered Prigozhin’s visits to the frontlines, where he dishes out insults to the Russian military’s top brass. While many Russian elites believe he is being promoted by Putin as a kind of bogeyman to frighten them, others see his rise as the face of an increasingly radical faction when it comes to influencing the Kremlin, composed of ideologues, the Wagner Group, Chechen forces and the Donbas separatists themselves.

“The Kremlin has many towers,” goes the old Russian saying, meaning it always has many factions pulling it in different directions. Which one of these turns out to be the tallest may be the key thing to come out of the fighting in the Donbas and not the course of the war. Already, there have been calls by Prigozhin to ban YouTube and he has blamed “traitors” in the presidential administration for this step not having been taken already.

Does Prigozhin’s win herald a wider breakthrough? Spring will make it easier for Wagner infantry to advance and for Russia’s untrained and poorly equipped mobilised forces to operate. However, Ukrainian officials and analysts do not think this will translate to much. Soledar, according to Dr Hanna Shelest, is not viewed as a “strategic town” but one “they have expended huge blood on to seize after months of reversals”. The battle for Bakhmut city — Prigozhin’s real prize — has been ongoing since July, since which Ukraine has recaptured huge territories. The real issue for Kyiv, says Shelest, is the cost — “we are losing our best soldiers as they lose their crazy criminals”.

Senior Nato officials do not expect the war map to stay the same for long. Both sides are expected to take to the offensive — perhaps as soon as next month — and Western governments, with Britain in a leading role, have agreed major reinforcements to Ukraine including tank transfers. With rumours in Moscow of a further mass mobilisation, with as much as half a million men expected to be called up to the frontlines, the shape of the conflict is becoming clear. British Challengers and, possibly, German-made Leopard tanks will collide with the sheer mass of Russian forces that eventually prevailed in Soledar.

The expectation is that Kyiv will make further breakthroughs as partisan activity increases in Russian-occupied territory and Kyiv’s general staff sniffs out further spots — particularly around Melitopol just to the north of Crimea — where Putin’s defences are weak. Should Ukraine be able to reach the Sea of Azov by the autumn and cut a wedge between the Russian occupation zones in Donbas and Crimea, it will turn what is already visibly a failed war into a rout. This could seriously weaken — though probably not overthrow — Putin. Prigozhin, however, will be perfectly placed for even further influence: his constant broadsides against the Russian military bureaucracy the perfect set-up for a new stab in the back myth. He may already be planning it.