Russia ducks direct confrontation with NATO as it tightens its hold on eastern Ukraine
Originally published at Seymour Hersh on Substack
Over the past two late summer weeks we’ve looked back at past American military disasters, so time now to bring you up to date on the continuing madness in Ukraine.
Let’s start with the fallout from the death last month of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. The mercenary made a fortune renting out his forces as guns for hire, largely in Central Africa, and the group took enormous losses in brutal and successful house-to-house combat earlier this year in the city of Bakhmut against an equally courageous Ukraine army. Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in late June that the Kremlin had paid Prigozhin’s army, many recruited from the country’s prisons, nearly $1 billion dollars between May of 2022 and May of 2023. I have reported in previous columns that the rebellion Prigozhin launched in June was far from the threat to Putin's standing that the Western media consistently reported it to be. It was instead a historically Russian way of sidelining an often troublesome mercenary leader.
Prigozhin and his reduced Wagner force were left in limbo after the aborted revolt, and many Wagner members were absorbed into the Russian military. Putin arranged for Prigozhin and what was left of his mercenary force to be driven into exile in Belarus.
But Prigozhin did not stop there. By early August there were reports of border tensions as the remnant of the Wagner Group made a series of intrusions into the airspace of Poland, and troublesome threats at the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. For Putin, triggering complaints from NATO countries was an unforgivable breach. “That was it,” a knowledgeable US intelligence official told me.
Viktor Orbán, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary who is close to Putin, was one of the few Western leaders to publicly dismiss the importance of Prigozhin’s brief rebellion. In an interview with the Bild, the conservative Germany daily, Orbán said, “When [the rebellion] is managed in 24 hours, it’s a signal of being strong. . . . Putin is president of Russia so if somebody speculates that he could fail or be replaced they don’t understand the Russian people and the Russian power structure”
“Prigozhin was provoking NATO and he had to go,” the US intelligence official said. “The last thing Putin wanted to do was to give NATO further cause to shelve its growing doubts about the endless financing of [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelensky.”
So, the official said, “Putin did it.” Prigozhin had become too dangerous.
The Wagner Group plane carrying Prigozhin was blown apart shortly after takeoff from Moscow on August 23. Along with Prigozhin, six subordinates and three crew members were allegedly killed. The plane had been abruptly pulled off its flight line and serviced the day before. It was then, the intelligence official said, that bombs with delayed fuses bombs were placed in the wheelbase. The bombs were set to explode after the wheels were retracted.
The official also took sharp exception to recent waves of American and European reporting that the Ukrainian counteroffensive that was launched in early June, has begun to make significant progress in penetrating Russia’s three layers of defenses in the past few weeks. “Where are the reporters getting this stuff?” he asked. “There are stories talking about drunk Russian commanders while the Ukrainians are penetrating the three lines of Russian defense and will be able to work back to Mariupol.” The port city of Mariupol, on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov, was besieged by Russian forces in the spring of 2022 and fell after three months of bitter fighting. Once a city of 450,000, it is being rebuilt as a model Russian city and was visited by Putin and Russian TV crews last March. It is in Donetsk Oblast, one of four provinces in Ukraine that Russia annexed last September. He has since tightened Russian political and military control of the region.
“The goal of Russia’s first line of defense was not to stop the Ukrainian offense,” the official told me, “but to slow it down so if there was a Ukrainian advance, Russian commanders could bring in reserves to fortify the line. There is no evidence that Ukrainian forces have gotten past the first line. The American press is doing anything but honest reporting on the failure thus far of the offense.
“What happened to the use of cluster bombs by Ukraine? Weren’t they supposed to open the door? And Zelensky is now claiming Ukraine had hypersonic bombs. He’s been bullshitting us like this as he always does. Where are the engineers and scientists manufacturing them? In a bunker somewhere? Or in Kiev? He’s pretending—stalling as long as he can?
“Here is the key issue,” the official told me. “This kind of reporting from the military intelligence community is going to the White House. There are other views,” he said, obviously referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, that do not reach the Oval Office. “What is going to happen? Will we be supporting Ukraine as long as it takes? It’s not like we are fighting the Führer in Germany or the Emperor of Japan. The other day former vice president [Mike] Pence said that if we don’t defend Zelensky in Ukraine, Russia will come after Poland next. Is that the White House’s policy?”
If so, the official said, it will not be a winning one. “Zelensky will never get his land back.” The Ukrainian leader recently fired Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov amid repeated accusations of corruption. He replaced him with Rustem Umyerov, an opposition party member who, as a Crimean Tatar, will be Ukraine’s first Muslim to serve as a senior government minister.
In a front page story this week, the Washington Post framed the move as a significant step in combating corruption. For the past year, Umyerov served as head of Ukraine’s privatization agency and “gained praise for instituting massive audits and weeding out alleged corruption and misappropriation of funds.”
The intelligence official had a much different view of the new defense minister. “The new guy,” he told me, “is even more corrupt. He ran the sale of government property and made a fortune. Has a huge villa in Majorca.” Umyerov was not on the list of thirty-five corrupt Ukrainian officials that CIA Director William Burns presented to Zelensky during a secret meeting in January. “He was not on Burns’s list,” the official said. “The list was not a telephone book of crooks; just the ones receiving US military and economic financing.” (I wrote about Burns’s meeting with Zelensky in an April column.)
There is no talk today in Washington of the need for a ceasefire and peace talks. As President Biden seeks $40 billion in further aid for Ukraine from an increasingly dubious Congress, what we hear from the Pentagon and the White House is that we are in this war for as long as it takes.
Meanwhile, Putin, the official said, has not been mobilizing his forces based on “our political objectives. He is running a ‘Great Patriotic War’ and does not care if public opinion polls in America see him as another Adolf Hitler.”
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