The unsuccessful attempts of the Wagner PMC to capture Bakhmut led to the fact that its founder Evgeny Prigozhin lost his authority in the eyes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who decided to focus on reforming the regular army.
According to the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in a daily report, Putin is trying to restore the authority and reputation of the Ministry of Defense, which were badly damaged due to failures in 2022.
Despite the declared mobilization, the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff failed to achieve anything significant in the fall and at the beginning of the winter of 2022. ISW believes that after a series of “catastrophic failures” of the Russian army, Putin turned to Prigozhin and his ally, Army General Sergei Surovikin, with a request to continue efforts to strengthen positions and break resistance from Ukraine and its Western supporters.
According to analysts, Putin decided to give Prigozhin and Surovikin a chance to show what they can do using mobilized prisoners on the one hand and brutal bombing of Ukrainian civil infrastructure on the other. Both planes did not reach the goal: Prigozhin’s attempts to capture the Bakhmut ended in failure, and Surovikin’s air campaign, on the one hand, led only to victims among the civilian population, and on the other hand, was flooded with most of the high -precision missiles in service of Russia.
“Prigozhin seemed to be decided during this period that his star really rises and that he could challenge Gerasimov and even Shoigu for the championship in the Russian military sphere,” ISW writes.
According to researchers, “Prigozhin probably imagined that his efforts in Ukraine would bring him military and political power in Russia”: “The command of the Bakhmut direction and proximity to Putin, probably gave him a false idea that he could Use the victory in Bakhmut against the background of military failures of the Russian Ministry of Defense as a trading tool for its own commercial purposes, such as the legalization of Wagner PMC in Russia.
According to exploration of the United States and Great Britain, Prigozhin has about 50,000 mercenaries in Ukraine, of which 40,000 convicts and 10,000 contractors. Excessive confidence in her own strengths and combat effectiveness of her private army played a cruel joke with Prigozhin, ISW writes: after the failures under the Bakhmut, “Star of the Founder of PMC Evgeny Prigozhin began to roll up”.