1 Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2023
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 15, 2023
George Barros, Riley Bailey, Karolina Hird, Angela Howard, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan
April 15, 5pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside
the static maps present in this report.
Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps
complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will
update this time-lapse map archive monthly.
Reporting from some Western sources that Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin called for Russia to end
its war against Ukraine is inaccurate.[1] Some Western reports covering Prigozhin’s April 14 essay on a potential
Ukrainian counteroffensive and the future of the war miscontextualized a rhetorical statement in which Prigozhin
established a strawman argument he attributed to Russia’s “internal enemies” who seek to rationalize Russia
ending the war in Ukraine now.[2] The point of his essay was to attack this strawman, not to advance it. Prigozhin
actually called on Russia to commit to a decisive fight that will either defeat Ukraine or result in a temporary
Russian defeat that will catalyze Russia’s nationalist rebirth and set conditions for future victory.[3] A full reading
of Prigozhin’s essay, titled, “Only an Honest Fight: No Negotiations,” does not lend itself to any reasonable
interpretation that Prigozhin advocated for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Reading Prigozhin’s public communications is not a straightforward undertaking. Much of the nuance included
in Prigozhin’s speech is lost when translating Russian to English. Prigozhin has an idiosyncratic rhetorical and
writing style that relies heavily on deadpan sarcasm, selective ambiguity, aphorisms, vulgarity, and ironic slang.
Prigozhin’s isolated quotes separated from the full context of his messages often lose their initial meaning.
Certain Russian players in the information space have also misinterpreted Prigozhin’s essay, further exposing
fissures between some Russian milbloggers. Pro-Kremlin news aggregator
Readovka
noted on April 15 that
some unspecified Russian-language Telegram channels — like some Western media — simply repeated
Prigozhin’s strawman argument about the seduction of settling for negotiations without “reading any further”
into Prigozhin’s call for a protracted struggle.[4] Readovka endorsed Prigozhin’s actual argument that the
“uncomfortable truth” is that Russia must continue to fight, concurring that negotiations to end the war would
“do more harm than good.”[5] Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin – an enemy of Prigozhin
– leaned into the misinterpretation of Prigozhin’s essay (possibly on purpose) as part of their ongoing blogging
feud. Girkin sarcastically asked, “Do I understand correctly that the Black Clown [Prigozhin] called for the Russian
Federation to reject half of the Donetsk People’s Republic and a third of Zaporizhia Oblast...?”[6] Girkin also
implied that that Russian prosecutors should investigate Prigozhin for his essay, likely for discrediting the
Russian “special military operation,” given that the strawman argument advocates that Russia should simply
retain only territory it currently occupies in Ukraine.[7] Prigozhin’s essay may continue to fuel debate along
existing cleavages in the Russian information space where Prigozhin’s supporters and competitors may use
selective readings of the essay to either praise or malign Prigozhin while advancing their own arguments.
The Russian information space is reckoning with demographic transitions within Russia in a way that indicates
that the nationalist ideologies underpinning the war in Ukraine will continue to have reverberating domestic
