Bakhmut’s conquest made him feel like Julius Caesar conquering Gaul. It was the troops of the Wagner Group and not the Russian army that reached the center of the new Stalingrad. For this reason, it redoubled its attacks against the Russian military leadership and prepared to overthrow the Defense Minister and the Army chief. The mercenary force had begun the invasion in 2014, infiltrating and camouflaging itself as local separatist militias.
That is why they knew the Ukrainian scenario much better than the army that entered in February 2022. Having better results in combat than the Russian military empowered the Wagner group, whose boss the Kremlin allowed to rant against the military leadership to mark the field for their generals. In self-defense, the military leadership provided arms and ammunition to the private army, for which its owner and CEO gradually raised the tone of the attacks against Generals Shoigu and Gerasimov. Until he decided to attack them in their Muscovite headquarters.
Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his march on Moscow with the same conviction that Mussolini launched his “March on Rome” in 1922. He was confident that Vladimir Putin would drive out Shoigu and Gerasimov to give him military control, in the same way as Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy. he dropped Prime Minister Luigi Facta to hand over power to the Duce. Moscow would open its doors to its mercenaries as Rome had opened its doors to the blackshirts. But Putin did not deal with Prigozhin as the last king of Italy did with Mussolini. And when that enriched criminal who had risen up in rebellion caught on, he backed down in a shameful way.
The owner of the Wagner Group went from being a conqueror on a triumphant march to a bandit on the run in no time, because his chances of success did not lie in the firepower of his army, but in the attitude assumed by the president. And he knew he was headed for the abyss when he heard him accuse him of “treason,” equate his rebellion with “a stab in the back,” and promise that the insurgents would be “crushed.”
The march on Moscow could meet the same fate as the Iraqi army caravan marching down Highway 80 in February 1991. In what amounted to a heinous war crime, thousands of Iraqi military and civilians returning to their country for the route linking the Kuwaiti capital with Basra were massacred by US planes and helicopter gunships.
Although the bulk of the Russian army is in the Ukraine, squadrons of bombers could turn Wagner’s motorcade into miles of charred scrap. Without air support, an army cannot march down a route without being decimated from the air. In this way, if Prigozhin tried to march on Moscow it is because he trusted that his old friend and architect of his fortune and power, Vladimir Putin, would allow him to reach the capital and end the generalship.
Why did you think the head of the Kremlin would side with you? Prigozhin had already crossed red lines. The last two were to say that the reasons given to justify the invasion are false and that the Ukrainians are beating the Russian army. Even with such statements, Prigozhin thought that Putin would support him in his clash with the military leadership. That is why when the president appeared aligning himself with his generals, Wagner’s chief turned the caravan in a U, going from a triumphant march with the pretense of a conqueror, to a shameful retreat. In Russia, conspiracies are multi-layered and the true causes and reasons for events often remain a mystery.
It may never be known what Prigozhin wanted to do when he turned the weapons of the Wagner Group on the Russian generalate. His confrontation with Defense Minister Serguey Shoigu and Army Chief Valery Gerasimov was in sight. Also his denunciations of the maneuvers to weaken his army in Ukraine. He clarified that his rebellion was not against the president but against the Ministry of Defense and the military command, but that does not exist. If he stands up against the military authorities of the Putin government, he is standing up against Putin.
And if he marches on Moscow, he is advancing against the government of the man who began to enrich him when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and he sold hot dogs on the streets of the city that had been called Leningrad. He wanted to take military power leaving Putin as president and was betting that the head of the Kremlin would side with him. It is impossible for a caravan of trucks and armored vehicles to advance along a route towards the capital without being devastated from the air.
If they wanted to crush Prigozhin’s private army they didn’t even have to face it with ground troops. They could crush it with air strikes because what Wagner doesn’t have are planes and helicopter gunships to fight in that space. Intoxicated with triumphalism by his military successes in the Ukraine, the bloodthirsty “oligarch” thought that his friend and associate, the president, would not order an attack on his advance towards Moscow; A miscalculation that Prigozhin only realized when Putin accused him of being a traitor, describing the rebellion as “a stab in the back” and warning that he would crush the insurgents.
Yevgueny Prigozhin generated an uprising comparable to the failed KGB coup against Gorbachev in 1991 and which, in the blink of an eye, went from advancing with the pretense of a conqueror, to fleeing like a rat to Belarus. What happened in that blink? The reason for that embarrassing Copernican twist may never be known. The only thing that seems clear is that the unusual uprising revealed the chaos that reigns in the power structure headed by Putin.
The symptoms come from afar. The role assumed by the head of the mercenary force in the Ukraine was in itself anomalous. Since the president did not stop him, his stage centrality grew along with the Napoleonic intoxication caused by military successes. In this possible interpretation of events, the conquest of Bakhmut after a historic battle caused Prigozhin to claim control of the Russian Armed Forces, but he went from triumphant conqueror to defeated coward in a handful of hours.
That is what was seen, although not necessarily what actually happened. What really happened may never be known. But the short-lived rebellion of the Wagner Group showed the darkness of the power headed by Putin and also the chaos that has weakened him since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, meeting there a resistance and a Western commitment that he had not calculated.
