THE official Ministry of Defence line on the demise of Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plane — that Prigozhin’s death will have a deeply destabilising effect on the Wagner Group — is true only if Wagner was and is an entity separate from the Russian state.

The MoD echoes something of Vladimir Putin’s own evaluation of his former ally by lauding his personal attributes of hyper-activity, exceptional audacity and a drive for results. 

But in overreaching himself in his dash on Moscow Prigozhin demonstrated the reality that the state cannot tolerate a challenge to its monopoly of force. 

So long as his private army was at the disposal of the Russian state it was tasked with aspects of state policy and sustained by state subventions and supplies.

The moment it deviated from its state-sanctioned role, Prigozhin was — forgive the expression — a dead duck.

In addition to its 1.4 million armed forces personnel, the United States hosts an extraordinarily large number of private military contractors and makes extensive use of them. 

US government adviser PW Singer, author of Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatised Military Industry, wrote that in the 1990s, there were 50 military personnel for every contractor and that the ratio is now 10 to one.

The Bush/Blair/Brown war on Iraq saw the biggest expansion of private military contracting, and the Nato powers operations in Afghanistan saw a further extension.

That the US mercenary outfit Blackwater was a principal beneficiary of a $488 million bundle for security contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Bosnia demonstrates the key role mercenaries play in the projection of imperial power.

Britain pioneered the private military business with a early crossover between special forces outfits like the SAS devoted initially to providing security and protection to Britain’s client statelets in the Gulf and the protection of British commercial and resource interests in Africa.

The Ukraine war is an object lesson in the role of mercenary and irregular military formations. The pivotal Bakhmut offensive exposed the reliance of the Russian military operation of the Wagner Group’s contract fighters. 

On the Ukrainian side its military initially relied on irregular militias connected to oligarchs and Ukraine’s extensive neonazi formations. 

These were mostly incorporated into Ukraine’s rapidly expanded National Guard, but with a peculiar feature that rather than a conventionally and hierarchically organised military structure there developed a horizontal growth of brigade-sized formations, each with highly developed individual identities, propaganda operations, social media accounts and political programmes. 

Tensions exist between the military command and the president’s office, connected, it appears, to the exaggerated expectations President Volodymyr Zelensky had of the long-deferred spring offensive.

Zelensky is sensitive to the mood music coming out of the US, which lends credence to the idea that US state policy is to drag out the war. 

The supply and character of weapons appears calibrated to ensure that the Ukrainian effort is sustained over the medium to long term.

But in last week’s Republican Party presidential debate — and in the absence of Donald Trump who was marching down to Georgia — GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy suggested Ukraine accept the de facto division of its territory.

This echoed the idea floated by Stian Jenssen, chief of staff to Nato boss Jens Stoltenberg, that Ukraine offer to concede land.

Ramaswamy dressed up his plan as a mechanism to drive a wedge between Russia and China, while Jenssen suggested territorial concessions to secure Nato membership for Ukraine.

The important thing about both these suggestions is the frank recognition that there is no military path to the restoration of Ukraine’s Soviet-era integrity.

Stoltenberg swiftly repudiated his man, while Ramaswamy was slapped down by the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile Trump’s leading challenger for the Republican nomination, Florida governor Ron de Santis, suggested that Europe take up the main role in supporting Ukraine. 

This is code for his bid to win the Republican nomination, for which he needs to trump Trump’s claim that the former president would end the war on the first day of a new presidency.

These manoeuvres reflect the reality that opinion in the US is split. Last month CNN reported that polling showed that more than half of people in the US (55 per cent) think the US Congress should not authorise additional funding to support Ukraine, against 45 per cent who say Congress should. Fifty-one per cent say that the US has already done enough to help Ukraine while 48 per cent say it should do more. 

This is a substantial shift from the position in February 2022 which showed nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) who felt the US should have been doing more. 

General David Petraeus, the officer in charge of Operation Surge in Iraq and former commander of the Nato forces in Afghanistan, gave the Wall Street Journal a sober estimate of Ukraine’s situation.

Penetrating modern defence in depth such as the Russians established in southern Ukraine is a tall order for any military, he argues. 

“The US military has done it twice in modern memory, both times in Iraq. In 1991, after pummelling the the Iraqi forces for 39 days from the air, a US-led coalition of 650,000 troops penetrated and outflanked Iraqi defences, crushing the Iraqi military in 100 hours,” he wrote.

He then goes on to point out that Ukraine has none of the advantages the US-led coalition had in those operations. In both Iraq-related cases, the Nato forces benefited from air supremacy, while Ukrainian aircraft cannot operate over Russian lines and cannot prevent Russian aircraft and helicopters from hitting their own advancing troops.

The growing dissonance between the US and Ukraine centres on US criticisms of Ukrainian military strategy, with the US strongly advocating a push south to capture Melitopol and threaten Crimea. Hitherto Ukraine has spread its forces over a wider area and concentrated its effort to the east. 

In bolstering support for Zelensky, EU ruling opinion is more focused on Ukraine’s notorious culture of corruption. The head of military recruitment has been removed for taking bribes to excuse draftees from service and its regional offices purged. Transparency International rates Ukraine corruption at 33/100 and it is 116 out of 180 in the corruption league table.

Last week it was revealed that Ukraine’s first deputy minister of agrarian policy and food and the former deputy minister of economy misappropriated about €1.5 million.

Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov is under continued scrutiny after the Defence Ministry was implicated in purchases of military rations at inflated prices in January this year. At the same time the deputy infrastructure minister was fired in a case linked to an overpriced public purchase of electrical generators. 

Resistance to the draft, trade union opposition to anti-union laws and a pronounced war weariness are evident. Elections to replace the present Rada, purged of deputies from Ukraine’s host of banned parties, cannot take place until martial law is lifted.

The situation recalls Gramsci’s insight when hegemony is contested: “Midway between consensus and force stands corruption or fraud.”

The Ukrainian military command is increasingly conscious of both its lack of manpower reserves and of increased resistance to the draft and is seen as unwilling to commit its troops to a sustained offensive. Rather it has switched to high-publicity drone attacks and dramatic if militarily insignificant operations inside Russia.

But from Nato’s standpoint it is necessary for Ukraine to achieve credible battlefield successes if sufficient domestic public opinion in Nato states is to be maintained in broad support for the war.

The Ukraine military was given a stark reminder of who is in charge last week when Nato Supreme Allied Commander in Europe General Christopher Cavoli and Admiral Tony Radakin, the British Chief of the Defence Staff, met Ukrainian military chief General Valery Zaluzhny.

The immediate result was a reorientation of the military effort to the south, with the commitment of much of Ukraine’s reserves and some success in breaching the first defensive line.

The hope is that these limited local advances will negate the growing sense that the strategic advantage has passed to the Russians, that the sanctions policy has paradoxically allowed Russia to diversify and strengthen its economy while much of the global South has declined to line up with the Nato imperial bloc.

In this general global context the sharpest contradictions have emerged in Germany. The most bellicose of the government coalition parties — the Green Party — has slumped in popularity. While initially 61 per cent of Green supporters backed sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine only 46 per cent of Germans overall supported this.

Last year Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a new Zeitenwende, a turning point in Germany’s military policy and promised to meet US demands to increase defence spending to more than 2 per cent of the GDP — and he repeated this over the summer at the Nato summit in Vilnius. 

For many years, Germany was criticised by Nato partners, especially the US, for not sticking to Nato’s requirement on defence spending but last week a clause pledging to meet the target was removed from the draft of a new Budget financing law, just before the Cabinet passed it to the parliament.

Set against the US drive to mobilise the war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and impede China’s economic and political strategy along the European and Asian land mass, Germany’s new National Security Strategy envisages not just a developing and productive relationship with China — derisking but not decoupling — but even a long-term security rapprochement with Russia.

The extent to which Germany’s support for US strategic aims threatens its manufacturing base was demonstrated when last week China cancelled a $100 billion automobile order.

Britain’s role, now outside of the EU and thus somewhat insulated from these stresses, is to double down on its support for Joe Biden’s policy of fighting the war to the last Ukrainian.

Every time Tory or Labour figures blame the energy price hike and and the cost-of-living crisis on the Russian invasion they draw attention to the self-mutilating effect of Nato’s sanctions policy.

One the eve of TUC Congress the changed military situation presents a problem for Britain’s trade union leaderships, no longer able to avoid confronting reality.

Union leaders need to make up their collective mind whether to back the present US strategy to make Europe and its economy the battleground or support a negotiated peace that preserves as much of Ukraine’s territory as is compatible with Russia’s security.