That just doesn’t happen in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Especially in public.
The Russian president faces the greatest threat to his power in 23 years of ruling the nuclear state. And it’s breathtaking to see the facade of total control he’s maintained all along – the ultimate selling point of his autocracy – crumble overnight.
It was both inevitable and impossible. Inevitable, since the war’s mismanagement had only meant that a system as homogeneously closed and immune to criticism as the Kremlin could survive such a hideous mishap. And impossible, since Putin’s critics simply disappear, fall out of windows or are brutally poisoned. But now the world’s fifth-largest army is halfway through a weekend in which fratricide – turning their guns on their comrades – was briefly the only thing that kept Moscow’s elite from collapsing.
At the time of writing, 24 hours of extraordinary shark-leaping culminated with Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin agreeing to reverse his advance to within 200 kilometers of Moscow’s city limits and send his columns back to “camps” “according to plan”. It was a last-minute U-turn to avoid “bloodshed,” he said. Shortly before this audio statement, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, apparently with Putin’s permission, contacted Prigozhin to negotiate this remarkable pullback, according to a statement by Belarusian officials and reports by Russian state media.
Much about this sudden solution is as strange and inexplicable as the crisis it solved. So far, Prigozhin seems not to have heeded any of his demands. The top leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry is still in office. He has done incalculable damage to Putin’s control of the Russian state, showing how easy it is to seize control of the important military city of Rostov-on-Don and then quickly advance towards the capital. And it took the intervention of Lukashenko, an ally whom Putin treats as a subordinate rather than an equal, to put an end to what had been a terrible weekend for the Kremlin.
The story goes on
More details on how this came about are yet to be announced. And the lasting damage done to Putin by this armed insurgency is compounded by some key decisions the Kremlin boss must now make. Will he pardon Prigozhin and his fighters or withdraw his statement about “inevitable punishment” for “extortion and terrorist methods”? Does he make changes in the defensive elite to appease Wagner’s boss? What does all of this tell the Russian military, the Russian elite and the Russian people about who really calls the shots in the country?
The anger and tension that has been building for months has not abated suddenly. Instead, it was accentuated.
So accustomed are we to viewing Putin as a master tactician that the first volleys of Prigozhin’s disobedience were at times viewed as a ruse – an attempt by Putin to keep his generals on their toes with a loyal henchman as their outspoken critic. But what we have seen – Putin having to admit that Rostov-on-Don, his main military center, is out of his control – refutes any notion that this was controlled by the Kremlin.
However, it is likely that Wagner’s units have been planning some of this for some time. The justification for this uprising appeared urgent and spontaneous – an apparent airstrike on a Wagner camp in the forest, which the Russian Defense Ministry has denied – appeared hours after Prigozhin’s remarkable analysis of the reasons for the war.
He spoke partly the truth about the disastrous beginnings of the war: Russia was not threatened by a NATO attack and the Russians were not being pursued. The only deception he claimed was that Russia’s top politicians were behind the invasion plan, not Putin himself. Wagner’s troops rallied very quickly and advanced quickly into Rostov. That’s hard to do spontaneously in one afternoon.
Perhaps Prigozhin dreamed of urging Putin to make a change at the top of a defense ministry that the Wagner boss had publicly berated for months. But Putin’s speech on Saturday morning dashed that prospect. This is now an existential choice for Russia’s elite – between the faltering presidential regime and the dark, mercenary Frankenstein it created to do its dirty work and turned against its masters.
A fighter from the private mercenary group Wagner stands guard near the headquarters of the Southern Military District in the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, June 24, 2023. – Stringer/Portal
On June 24, an armored personnel carrier (APC) was sighted on the streets of Rostov-on-Don. – Stringer/Portal
It is also a moment of clarity for the Russian military. A few years ago, Prigozhin’s mild criticism would have resulted in elite special forces sending him away in balaclavas. But now he roams free with the clear aim of marching on Moscow. Where were the special forces of the FSB on this nightmare Saturday for the Kremlin? Decimated by war or unwilling to take on their armed and experienced comrades in Wagner?
It’s not the first time Moscow has looked weak this spring. The drone attack on the Kremlin in May must have caused Putin’s elite to wonder how on earth the capital’s defenses could be so weak. Days later, elite country homes were attacked by more Ukrainian drones. Among Russia’s rich, Friday’s events will remove any questions about whether they should doubt Putin’s rise to power.
Ukraine is likely to celebrate the disastrous timing of this uprising in the ranks of Russia. It will likely change the course of the war in Kiev’s favour. But uprisings rarely end in Russia – or anywhere else – with the results they intended to achieve. Deposition of Tsar Nicholas II in Russia in 1917 led to the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin, and then the Soviet Empire.
As this rare Jacobean drama unfolds about Russia’s fundamental human frailty, it is not inevitable that improvements will follow. Prigozhin may not prevail, and the foundations of Kremlin control may not collapse for good. But a weakened Putin might do irrational things to prove his strength.
He could prove unable to accept the logic of defeat in the coming months on the front lines in Ukraine. He may not be aware of the level of dissatisfaction among his own forces and not have adequate control over their actions. Russia’s position as a responsible nuclear power rests on stability at the top.
A lot more can go wrong than right. But it is impossible to imagine that from this moment on Putin’s regime will ever return to its former heights of control. And it is inevitable that more turmoil and change is to come.
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