Putin Forgot One Important Lesson from 'The Prince' by Machiavelli By Alex Lo SCMP, July 5, 2023

Russian Wagner mercenary group chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, June 24, 2023

 

Of the many theories about what prompted an aborted coup by Wagner mercenaries, the most straightforward is that it was a dispute over pay

One of my favourite lines from one of my all-time favourite action films, The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage is: “The moment we took hostages, we became mercenaries. And mercenaries get paid!”

Quentin Tarantino apparently refused to take a co-writing credit for the script. This wasn’t known to me when I had already memorised the speech delivered by doomed Navy Seals commander Anderson taking his last stand in the abandoned Alcatraz prison, “General, we’ve spilled the same blood in the same mud, but you know goddamn well I can’t give that order!”

His iambic cadence rising in a heroic crescendo, only ended by a shoot-out that wiped out Anderson’s whole team, could only have been written by someone as skilful as Tarantino. Otherwise, it would just have been another “shoot ‘em up” scene, without drama.

Anyway, I digress. Mercenaries get paid. That was the line that came to mind from news about the short-lived coup that wasn’t a coup staged by the Russian Wagner mercenary group.

The whole world was baffled and mystified. Numerous theories have been proposed. But I prefer the simplest and most straightforward explanation: Yevgeny Prigozhin, the warlord, and his band either weren’t paid, not paid on time or not paid enough.

Why else would Vladimir Putin acknowledge publicly that the Wagner Group had been paid 86 billion roubles (HK$7.5 billion) between May 2022 and May 2023 along with a further 110 billion roubles in insurance payouts? In addition, Putin confirmed that Prigozhin’s catering company Concord received a further 80 billion roubles in army catering contracts?

The guy was just greedy, like all warlords.

As quoted in the Financial Times, Prigozhin apparently reminisced about the good old days in Africa when everyone was paid in cash and on time. “When we were working in Africa, and in Ukraine, and other countries, when we were giving America nightmares then everyone was fine with cash,” he said.

The FT further reported: “The cash payments were at the heart of Prigozhin’s grievances with defence minister Sergei Shoigu, whose decree this month ordering Wagner to sign contracts with the army appears to have prompted the rebellion …

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“Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a one-time Wagner ally who has recently dropped his criticism of Shoigu, said he had urged Prigozhin ‘to leave his business ambitions and not mix them up with matters of state importance’.” The Chechen warlord, who has been implicated in massacres and atrocities, sounds like a fine man of principle.

Joeri Schasfoort, an economist at the University of Groningen and YouTube host at Money & Macro, did some calculations and suggested that Western sanctions may be working after all. The Russian state, he speculated, may be running out of cash to pay Wagner. But then, other reports have suggested that Wagner fighters were perfectly happy to be, sometimes even insisting on being paid in gold, diamonds and even oil. So who knows?

But I think there is one definite moral here. And it is one that’s stated in its classic form in Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s found in Chapter 12, titled “How Many Kinds of Soldiery There Are, and Concerning Mercenaries”.

The Florentine philosopher wrote: “Mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way …

“Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies … They have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you.”

People are always saying Putin is a cold-blooded political realist. Well, time for him to reread Machiavelli. Or watch The Rock.

Putin forgot one important lesson from ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

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