Yevgeny Prigozhin X Dmitry Utkin X Sergei Shoigu Valery Gerasimov The rivalry between Yevgeny Prigozhin, the then-head of the Wagner Group, and Sergei Shoigu, a member of the leadership of the Russian Federation Ministry of Defence (MoD), began in 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine[2] which ultimately led to the Wagner Group rebellion on the 23rd and 24th of June 2023.

[3][4][5] Following significant casualties of the Russian Ground Forces in the initial stages of the invasion, authorities sought to enlist mercenaries after President Vladimir Putin delayed a mobilization for reservists.

Prigozhin and the Wagner Group were allocated significant resources and gained the authority to recruit inmates from Russian prisons in exchange for their freedom.

[6] Despite lacking any official position or legal authority,[7] Prigozhin gained international recognition with the Wagner Group soon being perceived as his own private army.

[7] In early 2023, Prigozhin announced that Wagner had ceased recruiting prisoners,[8] which the British Defence Ministry interpreted as a governmental ban on such practices.

[15] Prigozhin repeatedly voiced his dissatisfaction with the Kremlin's inadequate ammunition supply, threatening to withdraw his forces unless his demands were fulfilled.

A major surge in popularity came after he publicly accused influential individuals of actively sabotaging his highly profitable catering enterprise in association with the Russian military.

[25] On 24 October 2022, the Institute for the Study of War wrote that Prigozhin and his Wagner were gaining strength, creating parallel military structures to the MoD, which posed a future threat to Putin's power.

[30] Prigozhin also gained international recognition and abandoned his previously secluded personal life, frequently reporting news from the line while wearing military fatigues.

[34] A source of the iStories publication said: [35] Prigozhin is a popular theory among the siloviks: He is the sword of Damocles hanging over the elite, and is needed to curb it and maintain an atmosphere of fear.

[35] Another journalist source from among former security services suggested that the Kremlin was preparing Prigozhin to fill the political niche of the deceased Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and that Prigozhin could also be assigned the role of "supervisor" of war veterans in Ukraine after their return to Russia, so that combat veterans would not create problems for authorities.

[38] On 20 February 2023, in his address to the MoD, Prigozhin said, "I am not poking you in the nose with the fact that you sit down to breakfast, lunch and dinner from gold dishes, and send your daughters, granddaughters and dogs on vacation in Dubai.

[1] Criticizing the idle lifestyle of the children of the Russian elite, Prigozhin noted, "and it turns out that men are fighting, while some people just like to have fun.

On 22 February, Prigozhin published another audio message where he accused Shoigu and Gerasimov personally of not providing ammunition to Wagner detachments.

[46] Prigozhin said to the Russian military commanders: "you sit in expensive clubs, your children enjoy life, you make videos on YouTube.

[46] In the same video, he stated that on 10 May he would withdraw his forces from Bakhmut to the rear camps to "lick their wounds", since "in the absence of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death".

According to Prigozhin, the Russian military department also stopped issuing awards to dead fighters of his PMCs and did not allow Wagner to use special communications and transport aircraft.

"[47][48] According to Meduza, the Kremlin negatively reacted to Prigozhin's words about "grandpa": "of course, he can then say that this is about Shoigu or about an abstract layman, but people draw understandable conclusions.

[25] A number of pro-war bloggers noted that despite Prigozhin's public criticism of the MoD, Wagner received ammunition at the expense of other parts of the front, and "shell hunger" was observed in general along the entire battle line, from both the Russian and from the Ukrainian side.

[50][51][52] On 5 June, the Prigozhin press service published a video in which Wagner members interrogated the commander of the Russian 72nd Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Roman Venevitin.

[53] Venevitin, with traces of beatings on his face, said on the video that he "in a state of alcoholic intoxication" due to personal animosity fired at a Wagner car.

[29] On 1 October 2022 during Ukraine's Kharkiv counteroffensive which expelled Russia from most of the region, Priogozhin criticized the Russian command stating that "all these bastards ought to be sent to the front barefoot with just a submachine gun".

[56][13] In one of his statements, he compared the elite and ordinary people dying in the war, drawing parallels between this "division in society" and the preceding 1917 Russian Revolution, warning of potential uprisings by "soldiers and their loved ones" against such injustice.

[34] On 27 May 2023, milblogger and former defence minister of the Donetsk People's Republic, Igor "Strelkov" Girkin accused Prigozhin of conspiring to employ the Wagner Group to orchestrate a coup within Russia.

In a May survey conducted by the Levada Centre, respondents were asked to identify the politicians they trusted the most, and for the first time, Prigozhin emerged as one of the top ten names on the list, marking a notable shift in his public perception from non-political to political persona.

The general principles of such a movement: a rigid division of society into "good people" and "bad elite", a demand (and promise) to save the nation, and authoritarian methods of implementing these slogans.

[61][62] On the afternoon of 23 June, Yevgeny Prigozhin released a large interview with harsh accusations against the MoD leadership, in which he stated that the MoD deliberately deceived the Russian public and Putin about the upcoming NATO-backed offensives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) in 2022 and about the increase of "Ukrainian military aggression" before Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

Prigozhin said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was ready for negotiations with the Kremlin, but the Russian leadership refused due to its "maximalist positions".

[65][66] On 23 August, Prigozhin and nine others including fellow founder Dmitry Utkin were killed in a plane crash as his private were en route from Moscow to Saint Petersburg.

[69] The Institute for the Study of War assessed that the crash, which they described as a targeted assassination, would ultimately eliminate the Wagner Group as a substantial threat to Putin.