The leader of the Wagnerites, Prigozhin, is trying to compete with the Russian Ministry of Defense and other oligarchs for funding.

Recently, the number of private military companies has been growing in Russia. Thus, oligarch Tymchenko, who is close to the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, created his PMC called “Redut”. Ex-head of Roscosmos Rogozin tried to do this, which could be the cause of his conflict with the owner of PVK “Wagner” Yevgeny Prigozhin.

In an interview with , Russian sociologist and blogger Igor Eidman noted that there was the fiercest public dispute between Rogozin and Prigozhin.

“Now Prigozhin is biting off the main pieces there, but others, some Rogozin is thinking, ‘Why shouldn’t I settle there?’. I am sure, by the way, that Prigozhin leaked Rogozin’s coordinates, because before that they had the most violent public dispute. Apparently. , Prigozhin was terribly displeased that Rogozin began to put his mischievous hands on his piece of the military pie, and openly threatened him in public,” he added.

According to Eidman, the leader of the “Wagnerians” Prigozhin is trying to compete with the Russian Ministry of Defense and other oligarchs in order to devour more, to transfer more of these military expenses to himself.

“That’s why there is a struggle, and everyone among Putin’s entourage wants to feast on these military profits. Everyone has climbed in there now, but Prigozhin is trying to defend his piece with the most brutal methods. We see what happened to Rogozin. I think Prigozhin will not give up so easily, he is very aggressive activist, he managed to sell himself to Putin as almost the only effective person in the war,” the sociologist continued.

Eidman emphasized that all the power, all the money and financial flows of Prigozhin are kept at the expense of Putin’s support, “at the expense of the fact that Putin personally crushes him, his entire PMC.”

“If it weren’t for Putin, other Putin cronies, other officials, oligarchs, generals and so on would have eaten him long ago, because Prigozhin behaves very rudely, they don’t like such people. Moreover, he is a non-systemic person who came into the system from the outside. All these officials , generals, officers of the FSB held their positions for decades, seized financial flows for years, and then such a restaurateur, a former criminal, came from the side and began to cover them almost with a checkmate, so if it were not for Putin, Prigozhin would have been devoured long ago by such powerful structures as the FSB he can’t even with his private army,” Eidman summed up.

The role of PMK “Wagner” in the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine

Russia is actively using Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “Wagner” PMK in the war against Ukraine. Thus, the Armed Forces of Ukraine successfully eliminated a group of Russian mercenaries of the “Wagner” PMC when they came forward to storm the Soledar industrial zone.

State Department official Ned Price said that the growing role of the private military company (PMC) Wagner and the transformation of its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin into an alternative center of power is “definitely” a sign of the Kremlin’s desperation over the failures in Ukraine.

The American Institute for the Study of War believes that with his recent statement that near Bakhmut and Soledar there are mines that can be considered an “underground city”, Prigozhin is trying to justify the failures of the Russian army in the direction of Bakhmut. However, he is also trying to raise the status of the PMC.