Emmanuel Mwamba
Friends becoming Foe; the Case of Vladmir Putin and a Renegade Mercenary Group Leader
The most difficult disease for the body to fight is cancer, because it is the body’s own cells that become abnormal and rapidly divide uncontrollably and destroy body tissues and organs.
Hitler was at the verge of capturing the World until he attacked his ally state, Russia.
Earlier In August 1939, as Europe slid towards another world war, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty.
But the more territories Hitler conquered the more he enviously looked back at Russia.After the fall of France Hitler ordered plans to be drawn up for an invasion of the Soviet Union. He intended to destroy what he saw as Stalin’s ‘Jewish Bolshevist’ regime and establish a Nazi hegemony.
That was the beginning of the end for Hitler. He spread his military might too thin between the eastern and western frontiers. He turned a loyal ally into an enemy.
In this fresh case Vladmir Putin has made similar mistakes. To overcome the weaknesses and corruption of his top army brass and army command, he chose to empower an outsourced mercenary military group, something outlawed in Russia.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian military contractor Wagner Group, became prominent with his mercenary outfit’s sponsored military ventures in Central Africa, Mali, Sudan and recently he scored extra-ordinary military successes in Ukraine.
The trouble with mercenaries is that they come at a price and it might be difficult to completely control them, and your enemy can buy them at a higher price and their venom can be directed against you and cause fatal wounds like a cancer. Like they say an enemy is harder to fight that an external threat.
Now Prigzhin has vowed to march on Moscow and has threatened to capture it for himself, thereby turning his guns against his own bosses and his own country. A coup d’état in the making.
Vladimir Putin has this morning addressed the nation and warned that those on “path of treason” or armed rebellion will be “punished” after the head of the Wagner paramilitary group said his troops had taken control of military facilities in two Russian cities, plunging the country into crisis.
This is a defining and existential threat against Putin and the Russian State. While he faces the military might of the West in the Ukraine proxy war,he now has to deal with a cancer he helped created and grew.
Leaders usually make these established mistakes. Divide and Rule. They create Kitchen Cabinets, Parallel Intelligence units and parallel advisory groups.
Divide and rule is used to gain and maintain power by breaking up larger concentrations of power into pieces that individually have less power than the one implementing the strategy.
In the end, infighting, mistrust, rumours, favouritism weakens the leader as he fails to unite and command these weakened entities.
The Wagner Mercenary Group may change the path and course of this war to the detriment of the gains that Russia has made so far and the threat against Putin’s own hold on power. Now Putin has to rely on his own army that he weakened through this careless Divide and Rule technic!