My Take | Putin forgot one important lesson from ‘The Prince’ by Machiavelli
- 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.