Some compare him to Alexander Menshikov, the jester of Peter the Great, as ruthless with his enemies as he was faithful to his tsar – which did not prevent the latter from beating him regularly. However, Yevgueni Prigojine is much more than “Putin’s madman”. Incarnation of this gray zone which allows an authoritarian regime like Moscow to carry iron into sovereign countries without appearing in broad daylight, the leader of the Wagner group poses a new kind of challenge to our democracies: to fight an enemy who does not does not exist. Carrying out their sinister activities outside of any legal framework, the minions of Prigojine can afford anything, unlike us, which makes them so difficult to counter. We see it in sub-Saharan Africa (Central Africa, Mali), where their destabilization campaigns, blowing on the embers of anti-French sentiment, have hit the mark. Wagner simply replaced France there.
Democracies have been slow to take the measure of the threat. The executor of Vladimir Putin’s base works, however, has only one objective: to help his master sow chaos in the West and set the countries of the South against him, while plundering their resources.
Worrying drift
Our development was based on the idea that States had the monopoly of force. We are witnessing a disturbing drift: a wild privatization of violence, without any control, giving rise to all kinds of abuses.
It is time to equip ourselves with the legal arsenal which will put a stop to this monster which is emulated – there would be 27 private militias in Russia. The French Parliament understood this well, by unanimously adopting the resolution aimed at including Wagner on the European list of terrorist organisations. All that remains is to convince the other Member States of this… and the Americans, who are thinking about it. The unity of our societies is at stake and, elsewhere, the protection of the most vulnerable populations in the face of the risk of generalized criminalization which is already plaguing Vladimir Putin’s Russia.