A rattled Vladimir Putin’s political end is approaching. All that really matters now is whether it comes sooner or later.
Having appeared on national television to warn of a coup attempt by traitors -- and an impending civil war -- Putin abruptly reversed his position only a couple of hours later. The Kremlin announced that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief protagonist, would go into exile in Belarus and all charges against him had been dropped.
It’s little wonder that Prigozhin, the one-time hot dog vendor who rose through the ranks of Putin’s patronage to head up the infamous Wagner Group, was at the center of the political maelstrom. Chafing for weeks at the requirement for Wagner fighters to integrate into the Russian armed forces, Prigozhin became enraged when a Wagner base was attacked by Russia’s military.
His response was nothing short of extraordinary: to drive a convoy into Russia, swearing to confront Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
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After seizing the Southern Military District headquarters at Rostov-on-Don, Prigozhin announced his intention to continue on to Moscow. Once the convoy reached Voronezh, having covered half the distance to the capital largely unmolested, Putin took to the airwaves to vow that anyone who stabbed Russia in the back would be liquidated.
Amazingly, the Wagner Telegram channel responded by saying Putin was mistaken and that Russia would have a new president soon. Wagner’s convoy rolled north until it was only a couple of hours’ drive from the Kremlin.
And then everything suddenly stopped. The Kremlin’s spokesman announced a compromise brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Prigozhin would receive safe passage to Minsk, where he would apparently retain control over Wagner’s extensive operations in Africa. Wagner fighters would not be charged with treason and they would be integrated into the Russian military. As for Shoigu, nobody seemed to know.
Even by Russian standards, this outcome was completely bizarre. And the upshot can only be that Putin has been badly damaged by the melodrama.
Stopping coup attempts -- and this was more a mutiny or insurrection -- can strengthen authoritarian leaders if they are put down quickly and harshly. But this hasn’t happened. Putin backed down, not Prigozhin.
Other questions abound. How did Prigozhin so easily manage to take over the southern headquarters after announcing he was coming and without a fight? How was his convoy allowed to get so close to Moscow so quickly, waved through checkpoints? Why did Russia’s Air Force not intervene, beyond a few helicopters? And how did Russia’s intelligence services apparently fail to spot Prigozhin’s move?
This strongly suggests that elements of virtually every one of Russia’s security services was likely complicit in Prigozhin’s move -- or at least apathetic to it.
Prigozhin has set a precedent by openly criticizing the president, moving against him and forcing him to blink. That will not go unnoticed by Russia’s elites, whom Putin has bound closely to him through alternating cycles of fear and reward. Once an autocrat is unable to deliver on threats of punishments for malfeasance, the risk in taking action diminishes markedly.
Putin’s messaging will now need to perform new feats of rhetorical gymnastics. It is already hard enough to spin his climb-down from “looming civil war” to “everything is fine.” It will be even harder to explain why Prigozhin -- who had been lauded as a hero close to Putin -- could claim with impunity that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was based on an untruthful pretext.
With every quashed insurrection comes a search for the guilty -- and the inevitability of purges. That’s likely to be a lengthy process involving the Russian military and its intelligence agencies.
Prigozhin enjoyed significant support from middle-ranking Russian officers, and these individuals are likely to be the target of the regime’s ire. Paradoxically, they are often the more competent and battle-seasoned soldiers. Morale, already low, will be even more badly damaged.
Ultimately, Russia’s security agencies will realize they don’t need to submit to purges anymore and that the main culprit for Russia’s failures, Putin, has been enfeebled by his own actions.
And that’s perhaps the gravest concern for Putin. Having for years encouraged the Kremlin’s powerful elites to compete for his favor, he’s now given them a powerful reason to unite against him.
Sussex is a fellow at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at Australian National University. He wrote this for The Conversation.