Wagner boss' reported efforts to sell out Russia's army are a serious threat to Putin's leadership, expert says. 'This was treason.'

• The head of the Wagner group reportedly offered to give away Russian troop locations.
• The leaked dealings pose a "serious" threat to Putin, one expert told Insider.
  

Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly vulnerable following a report that one of his closest military allies offered to reveal Russian troop positions to Ukraine, an expert on Russian security and politics told Insider.

Mark Galeotti, a senior associate fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute and the author of several books about Russia and Putin, said the alleged offer from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group, has put Putin in a tough spot.

"It poses a challenge to Putin. For all his macho persona, Putin's a guy who doesn't like making tough decisions, he tends to put them off as long as possible, often too long," Galeotti said.

"Essentially this poses a real serious challenge to Putin's leadership in the sense that he has to act," Galeotti added.

According to leaked US military intelligence, first reported on by The Washington Post on Sunday, Prigozhin offered in late January to give Ukraine the locations of Russian troops elsewhere in the country in exchange for it leaving Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city where Prigozhin's own forces are focused.

Galeotti said the alleged actions, which Prigozhin has denied, pose a threat to Putin's leadership.

"Is he going to essentially deal with Prigozhin ruthlessly as essentially a traitor? Which let's face it that is what this was. This was treason. Or does he look for some kind of fudge or pretend it's not an issue," Galeotti said.

He said that if Putin chooses to ignore the issue, "this will reinforce the views of quite a few people within the elite who are thinking that essentially he's lost his way and is no longer the Putin as once was."

The report of Prigozhin's offer came after months of escalating feuds between the Wagner leader and Russia's military brass.

Galeotti partly blamed the political system that Putin has created for the feud, which he said is a system of "divide and rule" that has resulted in "a whole variety of sharp-toothed political entrepreneurs with overlapping responsibilities competing against each other, trying to rip each other down."

He said that system has worked well for Putin politically, but "really doesn't work well when it's transposed to the battlefield and you have all these multiple different sorts of private armies and different forces."

Galeotti said the report made him think that Prigozhin was "looking for shortcuts," particularly ones at the expense of his main enemy of the moment: Russia's defense minister.

"If he could have delivered Bakhmut while the Russian military was looking assailed elsewhere — in part precisely because of the information that he provided, but still — he would've looked particularly useful to the boss," he said.

Now, following the latest reports, the options for Putin are not enviable.

Kateryna Stepanenko, an expert on the Russian military at the Institute for the Study of War, told Insider's Ryan Pickrell that Putin having Prigozhin killed 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."

And the Washington DC-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War said on Monday that the Kremlin is unlikely to remove Prigozhin anytime soon, partly because "his removal would disrupt the Russian lines in Bakhmut – a risk that Putin is unlikely to take."

While Putin's position appears to be secure, experts and Putin's own former speechwriter have said that Russia's poor performance in Ukraine threatens his position the longer it continues.

Despite rising tensions between Prigozhin's and Russia's traditional military leadership, Putin has yet to publicly intervene.

Galeotti said this showed how "at the moment, really, Putin's not doing his job."

"This whole system depends on him being there as the decider to keep the elite in line, to resolve the elite disputes, to generally provide that kind of strategic guidance," Galeotti said. "And he's been markedly absent."