Senior business executives and government officials have watched with growing worry as players they once considered marginal like Yevgeny Prigozhin, known for his Wagner mercenary company and recruiting of prison inmates to fight in Ukraine, have become the public forces behind Vladimir Putin’s push to step up his increasingly all-encompassing war effort.Prigozhin’s open attacks on top military commanders - some of whom have been subsequently removed - and the prominent Putin ally who is governor of St. Petersburg, have added to worry within the bureaucracy about the Kremlin’s unwillingness or inability to defend its own.Putin has no alternative but to rely on aggressive players like Prigozhin and Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman head of Russia’s Chechnya region who has sent thousands of troops to fight, given the poor performance so far of Russia’s regular military and tepid support for the war in his own government, according to one senior official.After years of playing down his links to the Wagner private military contracting company, Prigozhin in late September publicly confirmed he’d founded the group in 2014.Prigozhin’s press office declined to confirm he was in the videos, but said the person in them “looked frightfully like” him."