Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the paramilitary Wagner Group, has turned the war in Ukraine into his own show since early May. From the trenches of Bakhmut, on Telegram and other social-media channels, he’s decried the Russian military command as worthless and corrupt, particularly claiming that it has deprived his forces of ammunition. At a time of extraordinary top-down control in Russian media and politics, Prigozhin’s outbursts have left a lot of observers perplexed about just what kind of political or military tug-of-war is playing out in front of the international public.

In a video posted on May 4, Prigozhin showed himself surrounded by the bodies of dead Wagner fighters, hurling expletives at Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff. In another video days later, he threatened to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut if not provided with more ammunition. In still another, Prigozhin referred to a “grandfather” who prefers to store ammunition instead of supplying it to the front: “And what if this grandfather is a complete asshole?” he demanded.

Russians on social media often refer to Vladimir Putin as “ded” or “dedushka,” which means “grandfather,” leading many people to speculate that Prigozhin’s rant was a direct attack on Putin. But most likely it was not. In his videos, Prigozhin refers to Putin as the supreme commander in chief who understands the Wagner Group’s needs and gives orders that would fulfill them. These orders are then sabotaged by the military command.

In other words, Prigozhin is sticking with the lifesaving formula known in Russia as the “good tsar surrounded by bad boyars.” To turn on Putin would be suicide for him: He is waging an unequal fight with the Russian military leadership that has come to look like a fight for his own survival, and in which Putin is his only cover.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Legally, the Wagner Group shouldn’t exist. Russian law holds mercenary activities to be punishable by years in prison. And yet, with Putin’s blessing, the Wagner Group has evolved into a powerful private army with its own heavy weaponry and even its own air force. Its prominence in the current conflict dates to last summer, when the Russian military had suffered disastrous defeats and more fighters were needed on the battlefield. The Kremlin gave Prigozhin access to Russian prisons, where he started recruiting inmates by the thousands. He had no legal basis whatsoever for this recruitment, but the access was a sign of Putin’s supreme trust in him, as well as an example of the Russian president’s signature style of running affairs noninstitutionally, through shadowy informal schemes.

For those prosecuting Putin’s assault on Ukraine, prison inmates have become a valuable commodity and an expendable supply—fuel for an under-equipped war that disdains human life. Starting in 2022, firsthand accounts have emerged detailing the execution of inmates in the Wagner barracks for defection or even for questioning orders. On the battlefield, inmates are sent to their death as cannon fodder. According to Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a charity advocating for prisoners’ rights, out of 50,000 recruited inmates, only 10,000 were still fighting as of January 2023, on account of mass casualties. The majority of the losses were suffered at the Battle of Bakhmut.

The military leadership has never cared for Prigozhin, certainly not since he has started repeatedly and publicly questioning its management of the war. For the FSB, Russia’s principal intelligence agency, as the owner of a private army, Prigozhin is necessarily an enemy of the state. But these enmities couldn’t touch him so long as he had direct access to and support from Putin himself.

Prigozhin’s position has grown less secure since the end of 2022, however. By that point, Putin understood that Russians would accept the mobilization he had announced in late September, and that he had no shortage of manpower to prosecute his war. High-ranking generals seized the opportunity to sideline Prigozhin bureaucratically. Wagner lost access to the prisons, and the Defense Ministry took control of sending convicts to the battlefield (this time, the Kremlin pushed through the necessary legislation to legalize the recruitment).

Prigozhin has responded by stepping up his criticism of the military. He accused Gerasimov of intentionally refusing to supply his troops with munitions. And he has started to cross the boundaries of his designated domain—warfare—and engage in politics.

This spring, Prigozhin hardly seems like the same zealot who, just a few months ago, bragged about executing defectors with sledgehammers and inspired terror in the Russian elite. He has stood up for Alexey Moskalev, the father who was handed a two-year jail term for his 12-year-old daughter’s anti-war drawing. He speaks with respect about Volodymyr Zelensky—a leader whom top Russian officials will refer to only as a “needle freak” or “Ukronazi.” He mocks officials and parliamentarians who urge nuclear strikes on Ukraine.

The irony is profound: A ruthless warlord, who in Soviet times spent years in prison for street robberies and violence, has somehow styled himself as a voice of common sense against an official Russian war narrative that is so grotesque in its hatred that it resembles B-movie villainy. Prigozhin’s common sense is heavily mixed with prison slang and outward aggression, however. Just this week, a member of Parliament noted that the Wagner Group is illegal under Russian law, and Prigozhin’s social networks responded with a video in which Wagner members threaten to come to Moscow’s Red Square and “fuck him and those like him in the ass.”  

[Tom Nichols: The case for increasing aid to Ukraine]

Prigozhin’s popularity is hard to measure, given Russia’s heavily censored commons. But his rise to prominence as a public figure tracks with a growing understanding that Putin’s war with Ukraine has failed and, to an even greater degree, that the military command has proved impotent. That deficiency is now common knowledge across the Russian elite. The retreat from Kherson last fall—led by General Sergei Surovikin, who was dismissed as the head of the military operation afterward and whom Prigozhin treats with meaningful respect—was the war’s only successful military operation, to the extent that it was thoroughly organized and most of the troops and weaponry were preserved.

Putin favors loyalty over achievement. He never wanted his war in Ukraine to produce war heroes; he reserves that status for himself. But now Prigozhin is filling the gap, styling himself as the “people’s commander”: a good soldier, open and straightforward, who has the courage to tell it like it is while the self-indulgent commanders chill in luxury mansions and posh restaurants in Moscow. In one of his latest videos from Bakhmut, Prigozhin is shown addressing his soldiers: “Okay, guys, let’s hope we will finish off these bureaucrats. Our enemy is not the Ukrainian military, but a Russian bureaucrat.”

Defeat is an orphan. The worse the situation at the front, the more appealing Prigozhin’s message becomes to Russians. The question is: Why does Putin allow it? Why does he tolerate a paramilitary warlord exposing the blunders of his military campaign and feeding off the failures of his generals?  

One reason may be practical: Prigozhin’s troops have proved their military efficiency, and they are still needed on the battlefield. Another could be personal. Putin has relied on Prigozhin’s assistance and advice on sensitive matters for a long time, and he has developed a habit of trusting him. Last October, The Washington Post reported that Prigozhin criticized the military command in direct conversation with Putin. One cannot conceive of anyone else allowed in Putin’s chambers who would dare to tell the Russian leader at least some part of the truth about the war.

No trust is indestructible, however. The latest U.S. intelligence leaks suggest that Prigozhin has contacted the Ukrainian intelligence directorate and offered to reveal Russian-troop positions in exchange for a Ukrainian withdrawal from Bakhmut. Will Putin now cast Prigozhin as a traitor and destroy him?

Not necessarily: He can treat the back-channel diplomacy as a legitimate activity. He could even be convinced that Prigozhin was luring the Ukrainians into a trap. Still, Prigozhin is playing with fire. Putin might well tolerate Prigozhin’s attacks on the military command, but as soon as he considers them an assault on the state itself, he will crush him.

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Republican lawmakers in several states have begun the process of rolling back tenure at their public institutions of higher education on the grounds that no one should have a lifetime job. And yet, many national conservatives seem determined to defend Justice Clarence Thomas on those very grounds.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The only career advice you’ll ever need Why so many conservatives feel like losers The most jarring—and revealing—moment from Trump’s CNN town hall Something weird is going on with Melatonin. Dancing Bears

Conservatives, in general, hate the idea of academic tenure. I say this not only as an impression after 35 years in academia (most of them while I was a Republican), but also because conservative officials are taking concrete action against tenure now in states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. (Republicans have engaged in similar attempts over the past several years in North Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and several other states.)

Decades ago, when conservatives were more consistent in their views, their position on tenure proceeded from their worship of markets. They argued that no other business would protect employees from the consequences of poor performance or even misconduct with an unbreakable contract. A coherent position, perhaps, but one rife with incorrect assumptions, as I’ll explain below.

Full disclosure: I have been denied tenure twice, and granted tenure twice. I’ve chaired a tenure committee, and been on both sides of the tenure process. Often, it’s not a pretty business, but it is essential to higher education.

With some variations between small colleges and big professional schools, the tenure process mostly looks like this: A new teacher with a Ph.D. holds the rank of assistant professor for three years, at which time they face a contract renewal for another three years. During that next contract, they will “come up for tenure,” an up-or-out decision, much like the cut the U.S. military makes after certain ranks, or when a professional firm makes decisions about partnerships.

The applicant submits a package of accumulated work, and his or her department will also ask senior faculty at other institutions to review the entire file and submit letters with their recommendations. (I have been asked to write such letters myself.) The entire package then gets a recommendation from the department and is sent up to a higher body, drawn from other departments and usually convened by an academic dean. A final recommendation is then sent to the school president. At any point in this process, the candidate’s application can fail.

There are multiple layers of review here, and sure, there are many opportunities for mischief. (A classic move, for example, is for committee members to solicit letters from reviewers they know will either support or torpedo a candidate’s application.) Candidates who succeed become an associate professor; the title of full “professor” comes years later and requires another complete review in most places. After tenure, faculty are insulated from firing for just about anything except gross misconduct or financial exigencies—say, if a department is eliminated or cut back.

But “misconduct” covers a lot of ground, and tenured faculty are far from unfireable. Falsifying research, engaging in sex with with students (at least, at those schools where such relationships are forbidden), nonperformance of duties (like not showing up for class), and criminal behavior can all count. My first tenure contract was with a Catholic school that had a “moral turpitude” clause, which as you could imagine can mean many things.

Tenured faculty, however, cannot be fired for having unorthodox or unpopular views, for being liberals or conservatives, for failing your kid no matter how smart you think Poopsie really is, or for being jerks in general. This is as it should be: Some opinions will always be controversial; some teaching styles rub people the wrong way; some classes are harder than others. There are, to be sure, cases where professors are so wildly offensive that they functionally destroy the classroom environment—but such cases are rare and should be adjudicated by the institution, not by the state.

The alternative to tenure is to keep faculty on short-term contracts and to abandon the important democratic principle of academic freedom. If faculty can be fired—or their contracts quietly “non-renewed”—for any reason, they will self-censor. If they think the students are unhappy, they will pander. If you want faculty who are confident, will say what they think, and will deal honestly with students, tenure is essential. If you want faculty who will become timid clock-punchers, then contracts are the way to go. The contract system eventually grinds down even the most well-intentioned academics, and, as I once warned one of my own institutions, it turns many of them into dancing bears for student and administration applause.

Dancing bears are exactly what today’s Republicans want. Some of the market-oriented GOP attacks on hidebound faculty many years ago had merit; during my career I saw colleges wrestle with that very problem. The current GOP assault on tenure, however, is about culture, not economics or even education. The GOP base doesn’t like that universities are full of liberals, and so Republican elected officials attack higher education for the rush of approval they’ll get, much of it from people who no longer have kids anywhere near college age. As FiveThirtyEight’s Monica Potts noted, there’s a reason that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed his tenure-review bill in a ceremony at The Villages, Florida’s noted retirement community.

Meanwhile, New York’s Representative Elise Stefanik proudly sponsored a legislative attack on academic freedom, charging that leftism “has pervaded” the State University of New York system and asserting that she was going to do something about it. Elise Stefanik, of course, went to Harvard. But like DeSantis (a graduate of Harvard and Yale), she was going to make sure that the commoners weren’t exposed to any dangerous ideas at the schools reserved for the proles, the rabble whose names are not Elise Stefanik or Ron DeSantis.

Nowhere, however, is the hatred of a guaranteed lifetime job more hypocritical than in the continued right-wing defenses of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The litany of Thomas’s ethical issues is far beyond anything that required poor Abe Fortas to step down from the Supreme Court in 1969. Thomas’s behavior cannot adequately be captured by so gentle a phrase as the appearance of impropriety, the standard set for other U.S. judges. But despite Thomas being utterly insulated from consequences, conservatives deny even that Thomas should face criticism. As Justice Samuel Alito whined recently: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

(Alito is plenty angry about criticism of the members of his own club, but he seems less concerned about attacks on other government employees—especially far less powerful people such as teachers, election officials, and civil servants. But I digress.)

What’s really going on, of course, is that Republicans have given up on persuading their fellow citizens to support them at the ballot box, and so they’ve decided to get what they want by using a tactic for which they once excoriated the left: appealing to judges who have lifetime appointments. Professors with secure jobs are a threat to the republic, apparently, but judges who can throw the country into turmoil with one poorly reasoned opinion must be defended at all costs.

I support lifetime tenure for federal judges and Supreme Court justices, not least because I do not want them to try to time their judgments against impending deadlines for retirement. But Republicans across the country who are railing against ostensibly unfireable elites on campuses might consider being a bit more consistent about one sitting in regal isolation on First Street in Washington, D.C.

Today’s News The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google and Twitter in a victory for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social-media platforms from liability over content posted by users. An 8-year-old girl died in a detention facility in Texas, as the death toll at the southern border continues to rise. Disney canceled its construction plans for a roughly $1 billion office complex in Orlando. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the problem with state bans on gender care.

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Evening Read Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Ellen Graham / Getty; Harrington Collection / Getty.

How to Have a Realistic Conversation About Beauty With Your Kids

By Elise Hu

Talking to my three elementary-school-age daughters about beauty can be hard. No matter how much I insist that their looks don’t matter, that their character is what truly counts in life, they don’t believe me. About a year ago, I was tiptoeing down the hallway after tucking my 9- and 6-year-olds into their bunk bed when I overheard the younger one. “Momma says it doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful; it matters if you’re clever,” she said to her sister. The eldest replied, “She only says that because she’s already pretty.”

As I recount in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital, that moment stopped me cold. But my children were right to be skeptical of my advice. Study after study confirms that prettiness can be a privilege.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I wrote a few days ago about the infighting among Russian elites, who are all keen to blame one another for Russia’s miserable military performance. The Ukrainians are soon to launch a counteroffensive, and the reporter Anna Nemtsova wrote today that she’s never seen the Kremlin so rattled. And rightly so: Russian casualties are mind-boggling. By most estimates, in the battle for Bakhmut, 20,000 Russian men have been killed and 80,000 more wounded. One hundred thousand casualties in six months and mostly in the fight for one city is why both the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group, the privately run army of mercenaries, are now populating their ranks with men dredged out of Russia’s prisons.

Life inside Russia’s prisons is a mystery to most Westerners, but it is actually a very structured hierarchy, based on rules and castes. I want to point readers toward this excellent explainer on Russian prison culture, and why that culture all but guarantees that the prisoners would be an almost ungovernable military force. The decision to use convicted criminals might seem, to Westerners, a sign of brutal resolve, but it was an extreme, even strategically insane move that has hurt Russian operations more than it helped—and produced few advances but plenty of Russian corpses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.