The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, praised the Wagner PMC, noting that it was able to achieve “very impressive results” and the assault brigades of a private military company “always take on an extremely difficult part of the work.” He wrote a telegram post about this after the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) suggested that Kadyrov would not support Prigozhin in an information campaign against the Russian Defense Ministry.
“Already now we can confidently say that Wagner has ironically proved its effectiveness in military terms and has drawn a line under the talk about the need for PMCs,” Ramzan Kadyrov wrote, saying that after completing his work in the civil service, he would create a private military company.
ISW in a new report analyzed the waning influence of the Wagner PMC founder and suggested that the head of Chechnya refused to support Prigozhin in his confrontation with the Russian Defense Ministry.
The authors of the report suggest that Prigozhin is intensifying the information campaign against the Russian Ministry of Defense. So, on January 18, he stated that the Wagner PMC “never had and has nothing to do with the Russian army.” And earlier, on February 16, he publicly visited the wounded commander of the Akhmat special unit, thus trying to enlist the support of the head of Chechnya.
Previously, Prigozhin had already used Kadyrov’s criticism of the Russian military in October 2022 to undermine the reputation of the Ministry of Defense and make the Wagner PMC an elite Russian force in Ukraine. In particular, both of them harshly criticized the commander of the Center group, Colonel General Alexander Lapin. Now, however, ISW analysts suggest, Kadyrov has likely refused to join Prigozhin’s information attack on the Defense Ministry because his ties to the Kremlin and position in the Russian government are more advantageous than political relations with the founder of the Wagner PMC.
