Putin’s acolytes can smell blood

Yevgeny Prigozhin, standing in the darkness next to a row of bloodied dead bodies, was shouting obscenities. With his yellowish, unnaturally hairless face contorted in primordial hatred, there was something about his appearance that seemed decidedly horrific.

The look goes with his reputation. The head of the notorious Wagner (which cut its teeth as a mercenary force in Africa and the Middle East), Prigozhin is known for his untamed brutality and deep cynicism, and for his ability and willingness to get his hands dirty, or bloody. Perhaps that was why he volunteered to use his mercenaries – many of whom were recruited straight out of Russia’s prisons – for what he called the ‘Bakhmut meatgrinder’, the months-long assault on the Ukrainian town where thousands have been killed in intense urban warfare.

Now, Prigozhin claimed, the Russian Ministry of Defence was denying him the ammo he badly needed.