The uprising of the Wagner mercenaries caught Kremlin propaganda cold-footed – as did the Kremlin itself, which had no handbook for the propaganda at hand. They worked on it for a week. The results were traditionally presented by Dmitri Kiselev.
A week after the failed uprising of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagnerian mercenaries, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine appears to have received the definitive manual for selling the disaster. Traditionally, Dmitry Kiselyov took on the role of herald and read out the new guideline in his Sunday program “Westi” (News).
The director of the media company Rossya Sevodnya, which operates news portals and radio stations in 30 languages under the umbrella brand Sputnik, is one of the most influential players in the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus. Sometimes Kiselyov demands that the hearts of homosexual accident victims should not be used for transplants, but should be “burned or buried because they are not fit for life”. He once declared that Russia could turn the US into “radioactive ash” at any time, earning him the nickname “Mister radioactive ash”. (You’ll find more about it here.)
It doesn’t matter what it’s about: when it gets dark on Sunday, Kiselev tells what all the propagandists have to drum into their audiences for the following week. Now he explained what the Russians have to think of the Wagner uprising.
“Big money drove Prigozhin insane”
Money is to blame for everything – according to the latest propaganda narrative. “Big money has driven Prigozhin insane. And the sense of allowed arbitrariness that he has felt since the times in Syria and Africa, and which has intensified since the capture of Soledar and Artemovsk (the Russian name for Bakhmut)” , Kiselyov explained as if holding a medical diagnosis in his hands.
Prigozhin imagined that he could personally oppose the Ministry of Defense as well as the state and the President. “Putin speaks of boundless ambitions and personal interests that led to the betrayal. By the way, many think that the Defense Ministry’s refusal to renew the multi-billion dollar contracts with the Prigozhin company Concord for the supply of food to the army was an important factor in the uprising “Kiselyov explained self-righteously, but without naming those who are supposed to represent this opinion.
“To understand the full extent of the ambitions, it is enough to name two numbers,” the propagandist went on to the central point. “The private military organization Wagner, founded by Prigozhin, received a little more than 858 billion rubles under state treaties. That’s almost a trillion,” Kiselyov spat out each word in his own manner. The equivalent is around 8.8 billion euros.
“Under other contracts, Prigozhin-Holding Concord provided services worth 845 billion rubles. This does not mean that it earned as much. But it shows the standards of business and the standards of ambition,” concluded “Mr. radioactive ash.” .
Kremlin propaganda certifies that Putin has broken the constitution
But as is so often the case, without realizing it, the Kremlin’s propaganda put its own boss in a memorable position with the new slogan. Because according to the Russian constitution, private military organizations are simply forbidden. So one would think that there is no way around the following question: How could it be that the state signed contracts with an illegal mercenary group and fed them billions? But Kiselyov did not ask this question. The propaganda relies on the fact that the Russians do not know their own constitution. And that nobody knows that the Wagner troupe was not founded by Prigozhin.
The force is believed to be a project of the GRU military intelligence agency, which was set up by GRU officer Dmitry Utkin after he officially retired from military service in 2013. The mercenaries also owe their name to him. Utkin is known as a great admirer of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler. He introduced the combat name Wagner – in honor of the German composer Richard Wagner, whom Hitler himself had admired.
More money for Prigozhin than for health care
Putin himself relies on the ignorance of his people. Before Kiselyov began to speak of the contracts worth billions, the Russian dictator himself admitted for the first time that the Wagner troupe had been fully equipped by the Russian state. Between May 2022 and May 2023, the mercenary group received more than 86 billion rubles, Putin said.
The figures that Kiselyov presented on Sunday evening were only ten times higher. One has probably come to the conclusion that the sum of 86 billion rubles does not sound dramatic enough. How much state money actually flowed into the Wagner troupe remains unknown. But in an attempt to blame Prigozhin, the Kremlin and its propaganda are willing to publicly admit that an illegal mercenary force received more money from the Kremlin than the Russian government spends annually on healthcare or education.
According to that Draft budget for the period 2023-2025 this year 1.5 trillion rubles are earmarked for health and 1.4 trillion rubles for education. If Kiselyov’s statements are to be believed, the state funds for Prigozhin, at 1.7 trillion, exceed both budgets.
Propaganda destroys the Wagner myth
But the propaganda also prefers to withhold this information from the viewers. Instead, Kiselyov repeated the now ubiquitous Kremlin version of events: Putin prevented major “brotherly bloodshed” by showing mercy to Prigozhin. This thesis is constantly repeated on Russian state television. Instead of Putin the weak, the head of the Kremlin should be seen as Putin the gracious.
Meanwhile, the propaganda machine works to destroy the myth of Prigozhin – even if you created it yourself not so long ago. “Many got the impression that Wagner is the most effective thing Russia has to offer at the front,” Kiselyov unintentionally summed up the result of his own work and said something that was unthinkable just a few months ago.
“Mariupol, with a population of almost 500,000 and all of its underground systems, defended by highly motivated, well-trained and well-equipped Azov fighters, was taken by Defense Ministry units in just over 70 days,” Kiselyov said, suddenly full of praise for Ukrainian ones Soldiers. In contrast, it took the Wagner mercenaries 225 days to capture Bachmut, whose population is ten times smaller. “So much for the question of efficiency. Now Wagner is gone, but the front cannot be broken through. (…) PR is one thing, reality is another.” So if it suits the Kremlin, Kiselev will recognize the difference.