On Monday I sat with a senior White House official who said of the war in Ukraine—“Barring a major unexpected turn of events, there’s every reason to expect Putin will try to draw the war out until the U.S. 2024 elections to see if we have a change of leadership that works in his favor.”
The major unexpected turn of events took place on Friday.
When Yevgeny Prigozhin, once Vladimir Putin’s caterer, the man whose Internet Research Agency was behind many of the Russia hacks during the 2016 election, led his notorious Wagner Group mercenaries out of Ukraine into Russia to begin an armed insurrection against the government of his former patron it changed the Eurasian strategic landscape overnight.
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Even if the insurrection was short-lived, as appears to be the case as of this writing, its impact will be felt for a long, long time.
The first hours since the onset of the Prigozhin insurrection served as a clear reminder of why we speak of the “fog of war.” Disinformation, rumors and half-truths clouded the air as did the half-baked analyses of many instant and not-so-instant experts on Twitter and cable news who felt compelled to draw conclusions about events they could not see and actors whose ultimate motives were unclear.
In the first stages of this Russian crisis, we felt the high cost of television networks having gutted their foreign news operations over the past two decades. In search of breaking news from reliable sources, many turned once again to Twitter as an information source. But Twitter too had become less reliable and more difficult to use as a source of good information since Elon Musk took it over and stripped away the ability of users to determine who was a verified, reliable source and who was not.
As reports spread that at the request of Vladimir Putin, Belarus’ president Alexander Lukashenko had negotiated a halt to Wagner’s march on Moscow, for all the confusion and uncertainty about the future, several points became clear. The two most important were these: even if the duration of the insurrection was less than a day, Vladimir Putin and Russia were made weaker by it and Ukraine will gain a further advantage in its battle with a divided, depleted, confused Russian military.
In the twinkling of an eye, the Wagner Group mercenaries who had been the front line troops in Russia’s brutal if futile battle for Bakhmut had gone from being one of the principal targets of Ukraine’s much vaunted, somewhat delayed “Spring counteroffensive” to being, if only for a matter of hours, its de facto leaders.
Every gain they made in Russia in support of Prigozhin’s stated goals of bringing down the leaders of the Russian Ministry of Defense and its armed forces, was a blow to Putin’s credibility. Each kilometer down Russia’s M4 highway that Wagner forces traveled was an unintentional advance on behalf of Kyiv and the Western nations allied to support it.
This was clearly not Prigozhin’s goal, he hates the West as much as any Russian extremist, but he had clearly let his previously stated personal animus against Russia’s top defense officials and officers overtake any sense of patriotic duty to the motherland he may once have had.
Confirming that a deal was reached in negotiations with Lukashenko, Prigozhin issued a statement that made his motives clear. He felt Wagner has become a target of the Russian government. But what also became clear was that he lacked the appetite for the ultimate fight that he would have had were his troops to have entered Moscow as they threatened to do. In this respect, Prigozhin not only damaged Putin’s credibility but he undercut his own.
The text of Prigozhin’s statement tried to make him look like a patriot, but of course, given his actions, it came up short. He said, “They were going to dismantle PMC Wagner. We came out on 23 June to the March of Justice. In a day, we walked to nearly 200km away from Moscow. In this time, we did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Now, the moment has come when blood may spill. That’s why, understanding the responsibility for spilling Russian blood on one of the sides, we are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps according to the plan.”
But much damage to Russia had already been done.
The fact that Prigozhin quickly and relatively easily took control of the cities of Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh demonstrated that the Russian military had finally found an adversary they could defeat—the Russian military. (On Twitter, one wag wrote that Russia’s military had gone from being the second best army in the world to the second best army in Ukraine to being the second best army in Russia.)
Vladimir Putin was nowhere to be found during the first hours of this insurrection. But when he did speak, he did not mince words. He called Prigozhin a traitor. (To which Prigozhin replied, “No you are.”) Putin went on to describe Prigozhin’s actions as a “stab in the back” and called upon Wagner mercenaries and others who may be supporting them to stand down. He promised to destroy anyone who does not do so.
“Those who carry deliberately on a path of treason, preparing an armed rebellion when you were preparing terrorist attacks, will be punished,” said the embattled Russian leader. The Russian government announced criminal investigations into Prigozhin, ordered his arrest and raided Wagner Group offices. This was no doubt a manifestation of the threat to Wagner that Prigozhin mentioned in his statement announcing he was standing down.
Meanwhile around Moscow, the Russian military built-up fortifications and were visible in and around the city in numbers that no doubt echoed for citizens of the Russian capital past unrest in 1991 and 1993.
In Washington, the Biden Administration said it was monitoring the situation closely. The same status reports came from other Western capitals. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky asserted that “for a long time Russia used propaganda to mask its weakness and the stupidity of its government” but that now its failings were becoming clear. “Russia’s weakness is obvious. Full-scale weakness.”
While the situation in Russia is still fluid—we don’t know the specifics of the deal Prigozhin reached or how either side in the dispute will behave in the days ahead—there is nonetheless no question that it weakened Russia’s position in Ukraine in manifold ways. Prigozhin prefaced his insurrection by directly contradicting the rationale Putin gave for his invasion of Ukraine. The Wagner Group, a significant force for the Russians, pulled out of that country. Will they return? If so, how will they perform? How many Russian military resources must now be directed toward preventing a repeat of Prigozhin’s march?
Russia’s high military command is under attack and it is, as of now, unclear what changes may take place and how those will be received within the armed forces and across Russia. The result seems likely to be a further downturn in morale among Russian troops whose mood had already been thought to have hit rock bottom.
Rest assured none of this would have happened if Putin’s war in Ukraine was going well. And none of what happened will strengthen Russia’s position in Ukraine or in the world. Surely, the nations that chose to cozy up to Putin following his assault on his neighbor are wondering yet again whether they made the right choice. Surely, among those made most uncomfortable are the Chinese who have watched their embrace of Putin cause them nothing but grief for the past year and who must be making some serious recalibrations about where the alliance goes from here. And, finally, surely, the Putin caucus in the U.S. Congress and their leader Donald Trump, who perhaps thought more Putin intervention might help save him from the consequences of his legal problems, must be watching all this with their hearts in their throats. Betraying your country is one thing. Doing so in support of a monster war-criminal who is also a big time loser with rapidly diminishing credibility and status is quite another.
The odds against Prigozhin unseating Putin via this insurrection were always long, however swift his early gains may have been. Further, even if Putin survives this for now as it appears he has, the success Prigozhin has enjoyed to date has further punctured the illusion of Putin’s strength and preeminence within Russia. Already paranoid, he will have to sleep with one eye open every night from now on unsure from where the next attack on him might come. (Prigozhin will have to do so as well, obviously.) Those around him will no longer view him as invulnerable as they once did. The foundations of Putin’s rule have deep cracks in them. The end for Putin now appears much closer than many of his opponents had dared hope.
In the hours and days ahead the world will be watching to see whether the deal that was reportedly struck holds and what it entails. What will become of Russia’s military leadership? Will it change? How will it react to this harsh repudiation of its strategies and tactics in Ukraine? What will become of Prigozhin and Wagner? Close attention will be paid to whether other voices critical of Putin may emerge. Naturally, a special focus will be on whether these events lead to more heavy-handed tactics on the part of Putin. Constant watch will be directed to whether Russia’s nuclear arsenal remains secure. And, in Ukraine, expect military leaders to swiftly seek to test Russian resolve, how these unexpected events have weakened Russian positions, and then to move to take advantage of the opportunity delivered to them by Russia’s dysfunction.
The unexpected has happened. Now, as is so often the case in history, the edge will go to those who are best prepared to take advantage of it.
