The coup in a teacup: but will it produce a storm?

This past weekend we were treated to an event as spectacular as it was perplexing. The Wagner group of Russian mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin mutinied against the authority of the Kremlin and took over the city of Rostov-on-Don with its one million inhabitants in a matter of hours, meeting no resistance from the Russian army, national guard or police. Prigozhin then directed a Wagner armoured column with tanks, armoured personnel carriers and air defence trucks to speed their way along the M4 highway towards Moscow, 800km away. They punched their way through numerous amateur roadblocks, again meeting almost no resistance except from some units of the Russian air force, which seemed to be the only part of the Russian armed forces willing and able to intervene. The Russian defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, were nowhere to be seen and it was reported that Putin himself deserted the Kremlin in anticipation that the Wagner forces, having captured the city of Voronezh, halfway along the route, would soon reach the capital.

But then, equally spectacularly, Prigozhin announced that he wanted to avoid bloodshed, halted his column and ordered it to return to Rostov. He announced two days later from his presumed new exile in Belarus or on his way there that he had no intention of launching a coup and seizing power. He wanted to demonstrate the parlous state of the Russian armed forces and the truth of his own criticisms of the commanders by his show of strength in a way that the regime’s propaganda would no longer be able to conceal. Yet his sudden volte-face has left even the most knowledgeable and experienced Kremlin watchers baffled. As Talleyrand famously said on learning of the death of the Russian ambassador: “I wonder what he intended by that?”

In truth, Prigozhin had reached a breaking point in his relations with the defence ministry and the general staff, although up to last weekend he had been careful not to impugn Putin directly. Wagner made up one in four of the Russian forces fighting Ukraine in the Donbas. They achieved the only success that the Russian army has had in recent months, largely capturing the city of Bakhmut in May after bitter winter combat operations. Both Ukraine and the Russian public alike credited Wagner with being the most dedicated and effective branch of the Russian military except for some of the airborne units. But this engagement came at a price. The Wagner group also sustained the heaviest losses. It started the military campaign with around 50,000 soldiers after Prigozhin received Putin’s permission to recruit in Russian prisons in exchange for offering pardons to those convicts who agreed to sign up. The army was then content to use Wagner as shock troops to probe for weaknesses in the Ukrainian defences that the army could exploit in its advances. With its battlefield losses, Wagner was down to around 20,000 to 10,000 troops by the time Prigozhin launched his rebellion. He had long complained, often using incendiary language, that Wagner was not receiving enough equipment or ammunition to sustain its operations, and lately had resisted the army’s attempts to integrate it fully into the regular Russia army. After all, private military companies are illegal under Russian law – even if Wagner has been tolerated for years.

In recent days, the army had issued Wagner with an ultimatum to dissolve and Prigozhin even accused the army of striking one of its units with a missile. Wagner mercenaries are paid much better than Russian conscripts and operate with much more freedom, including when it comes to brutal tactics and committing numerous human rights abuses. They have a distinct loyalty to Prigozhin as their paymaster and deal brutally with deserters in their ranks, including allegations of murdering one with a sledgehammer. So they have reacted with unsurprising hostility to plans to break up the Wagner group, which would not only drain it of its profits and preferential treatment but also dilute its combat power. Prigozhin’s march on Moscow seems to have been designed first and foremost to put pressure on Putin to maintain Wagner and change his military commanders who were being excoriated by Prigozhin for mismanaging the war in Ukraine. Prigozhin’s thuggish behaviour and temerity to criticise the war effort have resonated with many in the Russian military and nationalist circles in Russia. They have been angry at the enormous losses suffered by the army and the military incompetence and lack of direction from the top.

In launching his rebellion, Prigozhin went a step further by targeting Putin directly and questioning the alleged threat to Russia from “Ukrainian fascists”, which Putin had used to justify his invasion. Criticising tactics is one thing but undermining the whole raison d’être for the war was undoubtedly a step too far in terms of the challenge to Putin’s authority. In a system where Putin had eliminated any rival capable of succeeding him, or any opposition, or legitimate succession process, Prigozhin had emerged as his first real rival. Moreover, one with his own private army. Consequently, in the short run, Putin may have had to pardon Prigozhin and his Wagner troops to induce them to stand down their rebellion and give him the opportunity to reconstitute his authority; yet, in the longer run, he will need to eliminate Prigozhin and get Wagner out of Ukraine and Russian politics if he is to remain secure in the Kremlin.

This is an irony, as Prigozhin and Wagner are very much Putin’s own creation and until a few days ago a key instrument of his ability to project Russian power abroad and to sustain the Russian economy. Prigozhin, who started his career as a hot dog salesman, spent nine years in prison and then went on to provide catering services to the Kremlin and used his private security company to advance Russia’s diplomatic and economic interests on four continents of the globe. Wagner mercenaries propped up the Assad regime in Syria, capturing the city of Palmyra from jihadists and allowing the Russian army to limit its casualties and maintain a low profile. Wagner also entrenched itself in eastern Libya helping General Hifter and his Free Syrian Army to sustain its fight against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli, although Hifter was repeatedly repelled. Yet Wagner’s greatest success thus far is in replacing the French as the mainstay of security for the beleaguered governments in Mali, Burkina Faso and the Central African Republic. The mercenaries protect government officials, provide training to the local security forces and protect key economic sites, such as critical infrastructure, oil and gas refineries and pipelines, and gold and diamond mines. They are also meant to fight the jihadist insurgents, although there is no sign that they have tried to do this on a systematic basis, and they have committed numerous human rights abuses against civilians that they are supposed to protect. UN reports have documented these abuses beyond dispute.

Wagner is paid handsomely for its services by taking a cut of the mining profits or production, particularly oil, precious metals and gold. NGOs have reported that this is as much as 25% in the Central African Republic. Prigozhin has used these illicit earnings to finance Wagner’s operations in Ukraine and to help the Kremlin circumvent sanctions. More recently, Wagner has turned up in Sudan, providing assistance to the Rapid Support Forces of General Dagalo in their own mutiny against the military junta led by General Burhan. Wagner’s mix of private army made up of battle-hardened guns for hire and commercial mining and import/export company has made it the ideal adjunct of Russian diplomacy in Africa and the Middle East as it can move in quickly, finance itself and avoid the more costly and risky deployment of Russian forces or the conclusion of formal alliances. Yet Wagner is, in turn, completely dependent on the Russian defence ministry for its weapons, logistics and supplies. In Libya, it operates SU-27 fighter jets and receives intelligence from the FSB and GRU using their satellite and sensor capabilities. The tanks and sophisticated air defence rockets that Wagner paraded in Rostov were certainly not bought on the open market. Hence the relationship between Wagner and the Kremlin has been a deeply symbiotic one. In his address to troops hastily gathered at the Kremlin this week, Putin revealed that his government was financing Wagner to the tune of $2.5 bn every year.

Wagner has been useful to Putin in other ways too. Prigozhin may come across as a gruff and vulgar character, but he understands the power of social media and how to instrumentalise it for political purposes. He set up the notorious Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg, which spread disinformation in a number of NATO and EU countries using fake stories, an army of trolls and fake identities, and also relaying and boosting divisive and polarising content appearing on Western social media. Prigozhin has boasted of the role played by his disinformation and propaganda campaigns in interfering in the US elections in 2016 when the populist Trump, presenting an image of an America in decline and even in carnage, defeated Hillary Clinton. More recently Prigozhin has used his savvy media skills against the Russian high command, showing himself in military uniform in a cemetery for his dead soldiers and accusing the command of being responsible through their complacency and negligence. He has the knack of setting the agenda, getting his statements out ahead of Putin and making the Russian leader look out of touch and behind the operational curve.

Prigozhin comes across as the ultimate patriot and the defender of the frontline troops against the comfortable oligarchs and shirkers at the rear. His popularity, evident in the way his soldiers were cheered on the streets of Rostov, has created the absurd situation that peaceful demonstrators who hold up white pieces of paper to protest against the war in Ukraine or whose infant children paint pictures of violence at school can receive 15 years in jail, while the man who regularly lambasts the Russian high command and launches a mutiny receives a pardon and his troops are thanked for not finally overthrowing the regime. This hypocrisy will not be lost on the average Russian. It is not so easy for Putin to disentangle himself from the Frankenstein that he himself created and who was so useful to him in dividing the Russian military among themselves and forcing the generals, destabilised by Wagner’s ominous presence, to put themselves under Putin’s protection. It has only ever been about how Putin can keep himself in power.

Why Prigozhin decided last Saturday not to go all the way to Moscow remains a mystery. Did he lose his courage at the last minute? Was he betrayed by insiders in the FSB or the Russian military who promised to desert to him but changed their minds at the key moment? Did Putin bribe Prigozhin and offer to protect Wagner and give in to Prigozhin’s demands to replace Shoigu and Gerasimov with the head of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, or General Sergei Surovikin, who is reputed to be close to Prigozhin? Already Putin has made Surovikin into a scapegoat for the failings of the Russian army. He has been arrested, together with his deputy, Colonel-General Yudin, and imprisoned in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow on charges of treason. We may not have answers for some time or perhaps never so we must turn instead to the possible consequences for Russia, Ukraine and NATO.

Inside Russia, Putin has lost much of his aura of invincibility and revealed the fragility of his regime. The contrast between him sneaking out of the Kremlin and Zelensky in Ukraine refusing the offer of a safe passage out the country on the eve of the Russian invasion to rally his people – or even Boris Yeltsin jumping on a tank outside the Moscow White House during the attempted coup in 1993 – is blatant for all to see. In his first TV appearance after returning to the Kremlin, Putin lauded the support from the Russian people standing up for his government against a foreign-inspired conspiracy. Yet there were no spontaneous outbursts of popular support for the regime. Most Russians stayed at home and waited to see how things would play out. The choice on offer was not especially appealing and although the Kremlin’s spokespersons continually point to the 80% of support for Putin indicated in opinion polls, it seems clear that the great majority of Russians tolerate rather than support the regime.

Putin also praised the role of the armed forces, but they too were largely invisible except for some half-hearted attempts as evening fell to place some trucks across the bridges in Moscow. Putin also wavered in his approach to Wagner. On Saturday morning he described them as “criminals” and “traitors”. By Saturday evening, they were patriots and good people who could be integrated into the defence ministry. Then in his TV appearance after re-emerging from hiding, he indicated that he wanted to pursue Prigozhin and perhaps some elements of Wagner as well, while having the rest either return to the front in Ukraine or follow Prigozhin into Belarus. One day later, the Kremlin was confirming that everyone would be pardoned. Even the normally loyal Russian press has pointed to all the inconsistencies and unanswered questions.

Can Putin make a comeback? Quite possibly. Dictators are good at bouncing back and even capable of surviving military defeat – at least for a time – as Milošević of Serbia and Saddam Hussein of Iraq demonstrated in the 1990s. It is risky to plot against them and the consequences of failure can be severe. Putin has been exposed as isolated and vulnerable, but it is still not clear – Prigozhin aside – where a serious and organised opposition to him could come from in an atomised Russian society. Putin will undoubtedly double down, seeing imaginary enemies everywhere, looking for more scapegoats beyond Surovikin and Yudin for the feeble government response to Prigozhin’s mutiny and hitting Ukraine even harder to underscore no change of policy or resolve in the “Special Military Operation”. Stabbing Prigozhin in the back, Putin will keep Shoigu and Gerasimov in office, whatever their level of competence, because removing them at Prigozhin’s insistence would show weakness. Yet the Wagner episode has raised the veil of secrecy about what is actually going on in Ukraine and the losses Russia has suffered for vague war aims and an unsubstantiated casus belli. Questioning of the military operations in narrow circles of military experts and bloggers or on social media platforms like Telegram may become more mainstream, putting the Kremlin on the defensive and raising the issue of how Russia disengages. The Wagner mutiny has shown Russians the increasingly dire consequences of the war in Ukraine for stability within Russia itself.

In the immediate, there is the question of the future of Wagner and whether Putin has a strategy. Prigozhin is unlikely to remain for long in quiet exile in Belarus and will continue to shoot from the sidelines. If Wagner fighters follow him to Belarus, he may try to rebuild his organisation there with the connivance of President Lukashenko, who enhanced his own prestige by brokering the deal between Putin and Prigozhin last Saturday. Lukashenko is in a more fragile position than Putin at home after the fraudulent elections of 2020, which led to massive anti-regime demonstrations. So, he may see Wagner’s use as an extra prop to his regime, although his own security forces have remained depressingly loyal thus far. Lukashenko might use his control of Wagner to extract more economic aid or cheap energy from the Kremlin. He can also undoubtedly use Wagner to intimidate his opponents at home and even his critical NATO neighbours in the Baltic states and Poland, for instance, by launching sabotage operations across the border or pushing more illegal migrants into those countries.

On the other hand, Lukashenko may fear the autonomy of the Wagner troops and try to beef up the Belarusian army by incorporating them within its ranks. In the near term, the Russian Wagner soldiers, if they were to come under the effective command of the Russian defence ministry, could be used in a Russian counter-attack towards Kyiv from Belarus, although Lukashenko has resisted becoming involved in the war in Ukraine thus far. Given Wagner’s past utility to Putin, the latter may try to preserve it as a type of Russian Foreign Legion, deploying in Africa and the Middle East to boost the Kremlin’s quest for friends and clients and plundering local economies but staying well clear of Russian politics and involvement in Russia’s disputes in the Euro-Atlantic area. Or it could dissolve Wagner step by step and build up a wholly new private security company more under the Kremlin’s control, led perhaps by a Kremlin loyalist such as the Chechen warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov. All these options need to be closely monitored by the NATO allies.

When it comes to Ukraine, speculation has inevitably focused on whether the events in Russia will weaken its military defences in Ukraine and enable the Ukrainian army to push ahead more decisively with its current offensive. Again, we have also more questions than answers. The Wagner mutiny has certainly given Kyiv an advantage in the information war, but it is unclear if it has had any durable impact on the 390,000 troops that Moscow has sent to Ukraine. Certainly, the Wagner actions and the spectacle of Russians fighting Russians – a dozen lives were lost in the aircraft shot down by the Wagner column as it advanced along the M4 – will not have helped the morale of the Russian conscripts in their trenches in Donetsk. Yet their morale has been low since the beginning of the operation when they were given no information about where they were going or why they were sent there, and they have still fought on and maintained their discipline. If serious fighting had broken out inside Russia, the Kremlin would have been obliged to bring troops in numbers, like its reserve airborne division, back to guard Moscow or push Wagner out of Rostov; but this did not happen. Only some Chechen forces loyal to Kadyrov arrived in Rostov. So, the strategic advantage to Ukraine seems limited. At best, the Russians may be blocked from pursuing counter-offensives. The Ukrainians claim to have made progress with their offensive in recent days, taking 130 square kilometres of occupied territory and several villages. In the last hours, they have claimed too to have crossed the Dnieper river south of Kherson with heavy armour, which would give them the opportunity to move towards Crimea. Yet it seems that this progress, albeit limited, is the result of long-planned operations and not the exploitation of a sudden collapse along the Russian lines.

Indeed, Putin is likely to double down on his missile strikes against Kyiv and other cities not only to demonstrate that he is still driving the war, but also to deplete as far as possible the impressive Ukrainian air defence capabilities in order to keep them away from the Russian front lines where they could cover the Ukrainian advance. All things considered, the Ukrainians will no doubt be disappointed that Wagner’s mutiny did not last a few more days or weeks, causing more havoc in the senior Russian leadership and putting pressure on Putin to cut his losses in Ukraine and sue for peace. Yet in this scenario they would also need to contend with a cornered Putin who lashes out and provokes one more catastrophe, such as blowing up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant or even using a tactical nuclear weapon. The task for Ukraine remains after the Wagner mutiny the same as it was before: namely to have enough military success to convince the West to keep supplying it with advanced weaponry while persuading NATO to be as forthcoming as possible on Ukraine’s future membership of the alliance at its upcoming summit in Vilnius in mid-July.

Which brings us finally to NATO. The phones were ringing all day Saturday as allies shared information and tried to come to a common assessment. The key thing was for all to adopt a common message and not to play into Putin’s narrative that Wagner was being manipulated by Western governments to bring Russia to its knees. This was not a 1991 or 1993 moment when the allies could enthusiastically endorse a Gorbachev or a Yeltsin as the constitutional power holder against a clique of backward-looking, nostalgic die-hards. Supporting Prigozhin, who in his own way has done as much to harm the West as Putin and who is clearly unsuited to govern Russia, would be political suicide and cynicism of the highest order. The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. Moreover, many innocent Russian civilians may have perished in a full-on civil war between the two camps. There is little that the West can do to influence events in Russia, particularly in a fast-moving crisis situation given that Moscow and Western chancelleries have broken off nearly all contact since Putin’s invasion. Again, this is in marked contrast to 1991 and 1993 when Western signals and actions had a great influence in buttressing Gorbachev and Yeltsin in their hour of need.

The Baltic states and Poland closed their borders on Saturday, fearing a new influx of Russian refugees. Subsequently President Gitanas Nausėda of Lithuania, host of the NATO summit, has called for additional alliance reinforcements along the eastern borders should Putin decide to escalate or use Belarus to destabilise NATO’s eastern flank. Yet NATO’s new standing defence plans for the defence of the eastern allies have been more or less finalised and the specific roles and force generation requirements for each of the allies clearly spelt out. Just a few days away from the Vilnius summit, it is difficult to see how NATO planners could reopen and revise these thousands of pages of plans, particularly as the increased threat level from Saturday’s drama along the M4 in Russia is not easy to prove. This said, Germany – in a sudden reversal of policy provoked by the events in Russia – agreed to Lithuania’s request to station a full armoured brigade of 4,000 troops in the Baltic State. NATO has seen that threats can suddenly come out of nowhere and as much from the things that the Kremlin doesn’t control as from those that it does. A deliberate armed attack by the Russian army is just one of many scenarios that NATO planners need now to worry about.

Ukraine has argued predictably that the instability inside Russia is a further reason for the country to be given a date and a concrete roadmap for NATO membership at Vilnius. Zelensky has called this achieving “political membership”, but NATO is working its way to a difficult compromise on Ukraine for the summit, which will reiterate the Open Door policy, pledge more support for Kyiv, create a NATO-Ukraine Council and probably an agreement that by working with the alliance on interoperability and common standards Ukraine will no longer have to go through NATO’s lengthy Membership Action Plan in order to qualify for admission. So close to Vilnius it seems unlikely that NATO will feel that Putin’s travails are a convincing reason for a change of heart and strategy. The war is set to continue and NATO has been clear that Ukraine cannot become a NATO member until some form of peace, or durable ceasefire, has been achieved. ‘Steady as she goes’ and ‘stick to the plan’ will probably be the leitmotif at NATO headquarters.

At the same time, crises inside Russia always place the alliance on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, there is the hope that a serious challenge to Putin’s dictatorship – no matter what its origins or objectives – will shake things up inside the country and create opportunities for constructive engagement and more moderate Russian behaviour. On the other hand, instability or chaos in Russia, a nuclear power with still a mighty army, makes the situation volatile, unpredictable and thus potentially dangerous. Prospects for a more democratic Russia are balanced by well-grounded fears of an even more aggressive, or even outrightly fascist regime, emerging. Diplomats prefer the devil they know.

Has all this just been a coup in a teacup? A domestic Russian power spat that ended up going nowhere and was replaced by business as usual in 24 hours? Maybe yes, or maybe no. The advocates of a seismic watershed happening in Russia may not be wrong, but they have a harder case to prove than the advocates of ‘circulez, il n’y a rien à voir’ (‘move along, nothing to see’) as the French gendarmes were fond of saying after road accidents, and as Putin would like to convince both his people and the rest of us. In the short run, business as usual seems set to prevail and Prigozhin seems set to be, like Rasputin, one of these colourful characters of which Russian history is full. They come close to power, but they never really get inside its inner circle and their own exaggerated self-belief proves to be their undoing.

Yet the march on Moscow last week showed that dictatorships are often more fragile than they seem and the power of the mighty rests on illusion and quicksand. A small abnormality in the system that exposes the lack of solid institutions and of popular adhesion at the heart of that system can produce a rapid, cascading effect. Clearly, when push comes to shove there are not many people that Putin can rely on. Despite all the talk of a “Special Military Operation”, the chickens from the disastrous Ukraine war are coming home to roost in Russia and the classic cover-up will be more difficult in the future. Those who try to achieve absolute power paradoxically make themselves more vulnerable. Prigozhin, for all his many flaws and crimes, has at least the merit of having pulled the fake clothes off the emperor. The way is open finally for a better, more decent individual to follow up and return Russians to the truth and to reality.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.