In recent months, the Kremlin has made heroes out of the criminals who have gone to fight and die in the ranks of the Wagner PMC out of the belief that poverty in Russia will ensure that a continuing stream of Russians will be willing to follow the same course, Konstantin Eggert says.
“I have no doubt,” the Russian commentator for Deutsche Welle says, “that Putin’s entourage has cynically calculated to use this means not only to support the army in the field but to ‘cleanse’ the country from the criminal element” (dw.com/ru/kommentarij-cvk-vagnera-menaet-i-izmenit-rossijskuu-zizn/a-64533988).
But it is already becoming clear that the costs of this strategy are far higher than the Putin regime recognizes and that they will constitute real threats to the Putin regime itself in large measure because the Wagner PMC is destroying the state’s monopoly on armed force that…
