If there is anything that the mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner group has shown, it is that the Kremlin power elite is hopelessly divided and President Vladimir Putin is in a tight spot. Prigozhin, who probably acted in self-interest with his act of defiance because he refused to submit his mercenary army to the authority of the Defense Ministry, has also humiliated Putin. The fact that the Russian president let the Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko conduct the negotiations with his opponent and former chef – at least in front of the stage – and he did not take the lead himself, only reinforces this impression.
The weakness of Putin’s power system, which suddenly seemed to collapse like a house of cards on Saturday, became apparent when Prigozhin’s troops were able to get to within 200 kilometers of Moscow without meeting significant resistance. The flight of part of the Russian elite abroad on Saturday, and the military fortifications that were built around the Russian capital as part of ‘Operation Fortress’, indicate that the panic in the Kremlin was great.
Putin in particular must have been disappointed when he found that he had created his own Frankenstein monster with Prigozhin. After all, the Wagner group was regarded as the Kremlin’s informal battle group, set up to do the dirty work at home and abroad. For example, Wagner played an important role in the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Prigozhin’s mercenaries, supplemented by thousands of penitentiary villains with nothing to lose, have excelled in fighting spirit and sacrifice. As the war progressed, they therefore became popular with the ordinary soldiers at the front, who were sent by the army command, ill-equipped and foraged, as cannon fodder on the Ukrainian lines.
Prelude to a new revolution
Prigozhin’s criticism of the strategy of Defense Minister Shoygu and Chief of Staff Gerasimov further contributed to this popularity. It was therefore seriously taken into account on Saturday that if the Wagner mercenaries did indeed reach the gates of Moscow, they could count on the support of units of the regular army. It could have been the prelude to a new Russian Revolution that would crush the current regime.
Putin has himself to blame for Prigozhin’s uprising and the divisions within the power elite. For years, the successful playing of the different factions in the Kremlin against each other was perhaps the most important quality with which he could consolidate his own position and that of his closest friends.
The security services and the army constantly eavesdrop on each other and trust no one
This divide-and-conquer policy led to mutual distrust among the various ministries and security services. And it is precisely this mistrust that has increasingly started to play tricks on Putin. On the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the opposing security services did not even dare to tell their top boss that the Ukrainian people would not receive the Russian army with garlands at all, as Putin believed on the basis of their reports. As a result, a coup that should have lasted for several days suddenly ceased to exist when Russia actually invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Instead, the raid turned into a drawn-out, bloody war.
Mutual tensions
Since then, tensions between the various security services and the army have only increased. They constantly eavesdrop on each other and trust no one, which is disastrous for the cooperation required during a war. As a result, more and more sand has ended up in the Kremlin machinery and Putin’s system of power is effectively no longer functioning, if it ever functioned properly.
The messages from Wagner’s official channel yesterday on Telegram spoke volumes when it read during the advance: ‘The state no longer exists. Pypa [Poetin, red.] deliberately destroyed all state institutions. The rest has been done through corruption. The end of this celebration of life is over.’
Putin’s blindness to the failure of his way of governing is perhaps best explained by the saying ‘the tsar is good, the boyars are bad’. For centuries, this was an attempt to protect the highest ruler of Russia from the failure of the state and therefore himself. Not the tsar, but the members of the feudal aristocracy were to blame for everything that went wrong in the empire. In turn, Putin would be misled by his ministers. “Proof” of this is regularly provided on Russian state television when one of those ministers is summoned to Putin and receives his boss’s criticism with a humble face at a side table of the presidential office and with his head bowed. promises improvement.
Palace of Mirrors
It is precisely the palace of mirrors that Putin has thus created that has enabled someone like Prigozhin to shatter it by openly criticizing the Defense Minister and Chief of Staff and demanding their resignation. By also reveal that they invaded Ukraine in February 2022 without provocation from Ukraine and NATO, and that in both 2014 and 2022 members of the presidential administration, the FSB and some oligarchs were only out to destroy the to plunder the resources and industry of the Donbas, he challenged the entire Russian power elite.
Both Prigozhin’s march on Moscow and his statements about those in power in the Kremlin have exposed the weakness of the Putin regime to the whole world. The safe retreat to Belarus offered to him by the Kremlin therefore means anything but that the panic has been abated, let alone that Prigozhin’s role has been played out. There is another historical parallel in that regard as Russia wages a war in Ukraine that is unwinnable in the short term. In early 1917, similarly disillusioned soldiers returned from the front in World War I to unleash a revolution in Petrograd and Moscow. In his live televised speech on Saturday, Putin even referred to that when he said that when conflicts behind the army’s back turned out to be “the greatest catastrophe” that led to the destruction of the army and the state and the loss of territory, resulting in tragedy and civil war”.
The highest ruler of that time, Tsar Nicholas II, still believed that his people loved him immensely and would continue to support him. The fact that the war turned out unfavorably for Russia was at most the fault of its divided ministers. After all, the tsar was always good, until the merciless reality showed otherwise. It is precisely this reality that Prigozhin revealed with his march on Moscow.