- The Wagner Group helped Russia claim a victory in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut over the weekend.
- The minor victory comes as Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin continues to publicly slam Russia's military.
After months of brutal fighting in the east, Russia claimed it now controls the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, thanks in large part to Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group forces, according to western intelligence.
Prigozhin, who has been increasingly desperate for a win in recent weeks, announced the ostensible victory over the weekend, even as Ukrainian defense officials insisted Kyiv's forces were still fighting for control of the region.
It's unclear how long Moscow can hold the battered city, which was once home to 70,000 people but has since been left in ruins following months of attritional warfare so ruthless it became known as "the meat grinder."
The Wagner-won victory in the strategically-unimportant city complicates Russian President Vladimir Putin's likely response to Prigozhin's exceedingly defiant and chaotic attitude.
Prigozhin, a one-time close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, oversees the mercenary Wagner Group, which sparked global outrage earlier in the war after offering convicted prisoners a chance at freedom in exchange for their fighting in Ukraine.
The rouge wartime leader's troops played an outsized role in the battle of Bakhmut, sustaining significant losses this year in the vein of tens of thousands of casualties.
Prigozhin, meanwhile, has continually escalated an ongoing feud with Russia's military brass, going so far as to offer Russian troop locations to Ukraine in exchange for the country sparing his for-hire army in Bakhmut, The Washington Post reported earlier this month, citing leaked intelligence documents. Prigozhin later denied the allegations.
In recent weeks, Prigozhin upped his public animosity toward Russia's military, shaming Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov by name and posting videos of dead soldiers piled up near Bakhmut while striving for more ammunition and threatening to pull his troops from the area.
Its ongoing oppositional behavior is deeply unfamiliar to a Russian administration prone to imprisoning or even allegedly poisoning its public critics. And yet Prigozhin continues to play an important role in the war, even after taking a veiled barb at the Russian president, himself, earlier this month.
But Prigozhin's "meat army" is simply too valuable to Russia's struggling war effort right now for Putin to send his former ally to prison, according to Puck reporter Julie Ioffe, who wrote about the tensions building between the two in The Best and the Brightest newsletter this week.
Prigozhin's continued defiance is blatantly undermining Putin's purported power, but a military expert told Insider earlier this month that the Russian president may have no choice but to let Prigozhin go on blabbing.
Wagner's troops, depleted as they may be, serve as much-needed bodies in a war effort that is desperately trying to avoid another unpopular mobilization, Kateryna Stepanenko, an expert on the Russian military at the Institute for the Study of War, told Insider's Ryan Pickrell.
In a rare moment of recognition, Putin even directly congratulated the Wagner Group following their alleged seizure of Bakhmut. Prigozhin said Saturday he would pull his Wagner troops from Bakhmut come Thursday, where they would reorganize and undergo additional training.
Putin also can't risk alienating his ultra-nationalist supporters by going after Prigozhin, Stepanenko said.
"He cannot just simply kill Prigozhin and expect that not to trigger some sort of reaction," she told Insider. "He, of course, could, but that would undermine his appeal to the nationalists, who are the only people that are so inherently invested in his ideology and his belief in this war."