Remembering Trump's reaction to the Wagner Group mutiny in Russia

It has been more than six months since Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a coup against Vladimir Putin but even after all this time, there are still lessons that can be drawn from the incident on politics in the United States.

There was one politician in particular who revealed his soft spot for Putin when it seemed like the Russian President was about to be ousted by the Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries. You can likely guess which American politicians were talking about.

Former President Donald Trump has always appeared as if he liked Putin a little too much and that fondness revealed itself again when the Russian leader was faced with armed rebellion by one of the Kremlin's most loyal private military companies.  

Trump took a break from ranting about his legal woes on his social media platform Truth Social when the coup was happening and turned his attention to the crises, warning the world that it shouldn’t be routing for Prigozhin and his band of mercenaries to take control in Russia. 

“A big mess in Russia, but be careful what you wish for,” the former president wrote in a message to his followers. “Next in may be far worse!” Trump continued, alluding to the fact that Prigozhin and Wagner in power could be an outcome less desirable than Putin in power. 

If you don't remember the coup, Prigozhin ordered his mercenaries to march on Moscow after alleging that the Russian Ministry of Defense and the country’s military leadership killed a large number of his fighters in an airstrike according to a report from Reuters. 

Some 25,000 of the Wagner Group’s personnel were on-route to Moscow and they were planning to punish those who had attacked them, though Prigozhin later said his March for Justice wasn’t a coup attempt nor was he aiming to remove Putin from power.

"Those who destroyed our lands, who destroyed the lives of many tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, will be punished. I ask that no one offer resistance,” Prigozhin said in a statement according to Reuters, and that punishment could have been terrible. 

Trump wasn’t wrong when he wrote that the next person to take power in Moscow could be worse than Putin and his government since the Wagner Group and its soldiers had committed some of the worst atrocities in the history of modern global warfare by that time.  

The Wagner Group had been accused of using sexual assault as well as mass murder as weapons to control populations in Africa according to CBS News, and the mercenary group often used sledge hammers as a method of execution for both friends and foes. 

Prigozhin’s mercenary group has been so instrumental in global death and destruction that it was labeled a transnational criminal organization by the U.S. Treasury Department in January 2023 in the hopes it would limit the scale of the group's atrocities in Ukraine CBC News reported. 

"Commander Dmitry Utkin, who is a neo-Nazi, named the group after Hitler's favorite composer, the German composer Wagner," Molly Dunigan, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, explained to CBC News in a January 2023 article on the group. 

"The culture of the group historically had just been so brutal and really no-holds-barred, in terms of brutality against civilians in the population in which they operate,” Dinugan added, which might mean Trump’s comment really wasn’t aimed at supporting Putin. 

In an earlier post on the same day as his warning about what to wish for, Trump went off on Joe Biden for what the former president said was Biden’s readiness to take direction on what to do in Russia from China’s Xi Jinping, hinting that Biden was just a pawn. 

“Biden will do about Russia whatever President Xi of China wants him to do. Remember, Hunter & Joe illegally took large amounts of money from both countries, but China right now is the bigger threat,” Trump wrote without providing any proof for his allegation. 

“China & Russia, until Biden came along, have always been natural enemies,” Trump continued, adding that China wanted to take “large portions of largely unpopulated Russian land to have for their much larger population.”

“This is China’s heretofore unthinkable opportunity, much bigger than Taiwan, which to President Xi, can wait!” the former president concluded, making it clear he viewed the conflict as one in which Biden orchestrated events to serve China’s national interests.  

While none of the statements the former president made directly revealed his support for Putin at the very height of the mutiny against the leader in Russia, they did show Trump still believed there were more worrying enemies America had knocking at its doorstep. 

Ranting about Biden being in China’s pocket while also simultaneously pointing out the very real fact that a Russia run Wagner and Prigozhin might not be the right thing to wish for showed the duality of the former president's mind and that he could be a potent political force if he could just get out of his own way.