Prigozhin’s ‘treachery’ poses a dangerous challenge to Putin

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the businessman behind the Wagner mercenary army, likes accusing his political enemies of ‘treason’ for not backing him as much as he’d like. Now, though, he appears to have committed that very crime himself – with the revelation that US intelligence reports suggested he tried to cut a deal with HUR, Ukrainian military intelligence.

These reports were part of the trove of classified materials leaked onto the Discord gaming server earlier this year. Taken on their own, they could be regarded as sneaky fakes intended to undermine Prigozhin, yet many other documents within the collection have quietly been acknowledged as real. While it still cannot be taken as wholly proven, in Russia even some of Prigozhin’s erstwhile supporters are accepting their veracity. 

Indeed, when Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was asked about the claims during an interview with the Washington Post, he responded with a prickly defensiveness. This did little to dispel belief in either the Prigozhin claims, or separate US reports that suggested Zelensky himself had raised the prospect of cross-border incursions into Russia – something he has denied in public.