Status Updates From El Grupo Wagner. Dentro del...

"It is unlikely that any Russian PMC in Africa or Ukraine will achieve the gains that Wagner did. Prigozhin was operating within a unique window of opportunity. No champions in the military will be willing to take the risks that Prigozhin's allies did by so heavily arming and funding an organization, and no private actor will be willing to take the risks that Prigozhin did in competing so directly with the military."

"Conventional wisdom holds that the attacker needs a three-to-one manpower advantage. But Wagner's prison recruits were less valuable to Russia than Ukraine's soldiers were to Ukraine. It didn't matter if Russia suffered greater casualties in absolute terms; the relative impact on Ukraine's armed forces would be worse."

"What was unique about Wagner, what made its forces so successful in the eyes of Russian security elites, was that they sat between proxy and legitimate. They were more deniable than regular Russian forces dispatched to Ukraine, but subject to greater control than wayward volunteer movements and local militias."

"From 2011 to 2019, 711 lawsuits were filed against Prigozhin's [catering] firms with total claims of 900 million roubles. Students found worms and plastic bags in their food. Cadets at an aviation academy found cockroaches in their porridge and human hair in their bread. Across Russia, military academies and schools reported cases where dozens of people were poisoned with salmonella, dysentery and other diseases."

Differs from Galleoti in seeing Putin’s announcement on the criminality of Prigozhin’s coup and leading him to drive on Moscow, rather than as indicating that the “game is up”.