LAST UPDATE | 29 Jun 2023
WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN addressed his subjects on 24 February last year to announce the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his mission was to project Russian power. Sixteen months later to the day, on 24 June, he again spoke to the Russian nation, but with a very different story.
Far from projecting military might abroad, Putin’s hold on power at home was in mortal danger from an armed insurrection of the notorious Wagner Group led by Yevgeny Prigozhin. Struggling to make sense of what was unfolding, observers tried to reach for precedents. After all, Russia’s history is essentially long periods of authoritarian rule punctuated by brief interludes of chaos signalling transition from one autocrat to another. Perhaps we were witnessing another such regime breakdown?
In his hastily convened emergency address on state television, Putin compared the situation to 1917, when Russia, embroiled in a long, unpopular, war in Europe, had victory “stolen” by Lenin’s toppling of Tsar Nicholas II. Once again, Russia faced “exactly” the same challenge as it endured “a strike in the back of our country and our people”.
The Prigozhin rebellion highlighted many unpalatable truths for Putin. The regime’s fragility is such that Russia’s military was unable to stop Wagner’s rapid advance – 800 kilometres in a single day – let alone suppress the revolt.
Rostov-on-Don, one of Russia’s largest cities, was taken without a fight, despite being the headquarters of the Southern Military District and operational base for the war in Ukraine.
By way of comparison, for most of the last year Russian forces have advanced and retreated by just a few metres every day around the small Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. In just nine hours, Prigozhin progressed further into Russia than Kremlin forces managed in Ukraine during the last nine years.
The other unsavoury reality for Putin is that there was no popular mobilisation in his defence. When Soviet generals tried to overthrow Mikheil Gorbachev in 1991, spontaneous mass demonstrations quickly proliferated throughout Russia. But on Saturday, Putin’s compatriots looked on indifferently, waiting to see who would prevail.
In Rostov, there were visible signs of support for Wagner and some locals vied for selfies with the chief mutineer.
Prigozhin’s spectacular but short-lived rebellion ended with an expedient compromise, allegedly brokered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, which allowed Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries to continue operations in Belarus. It is clearly a quick-fix rather than a long term solution. Indeed, this could be the opening act of a longer and even more dramatic play.
The insurrection has done irreparable damage to Putin’s authority. Like any dictator, Putin relies on the perception that he is a strongman who enjoys a monopoly of coercive power.
From the beginning, Prigozhin’s rebellion made the Russian president look weak and indecisive.
Indeed, there are credible reports that Putin fled Moscow on Saturday to take refuge in his native St Peterburg. It was Prigozhin who presented himself as the resolute and restraining force who could have taken Moscow but decided otherwise to avoid the inevitable loss of life.
Public challenges to dictators rarely end amicably. If Prigozhin is not punished for treason, what credibility does Putin’s brand of authoritarian strongman enjoy? The Russian president has proven remarkably intolerant of those he perceives as rivals or traitors. For Putin, Prigozhin is clearly both. Ambitious Russian elites will watch closely to see how Putin tries to reclaim his carefully cultivated image of invulnerability.
Saturday’s unexpected chaos eclipsed Prigozhin’s extraordinary confession made on the rebellion’s eve. In a video released on his Telegram channel, the Wagner leader destroyed the entire rationale for Russia’s war in Ukraine and accused Moscow of lying about the reasons for the invasion.
Prigozhin rejected the Kremlin’s narrative that the war had been initiated to protect ethnic Russians or to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine.
He said there had never been any plan for Ukraine or NATO to attack Russia and that any differences with the Ukrainian Government could have been resolved peacefully: “When Zelenskyy became president, he was ready for agreements. All that needed to be done was to get off Mount Olympus and negotiate with him.”
So why then was the full-scale invasion undertaken? Prigozhin said “the war was needed by the oligarchs” in order to plunder Ukraine for the benefit of Russia’s leaders. The invasion’s goal was to install Viktor Medvedchuk, a Putin ally now exiled in Russia, as president of Ukraine and to divvy up the country’s assets. “They were stealing loads in Donbas, they wanted more”, he reflected, before adding that these were the same people who allowed their children to evade military mobilisation to “enjoy life and have fun in Dubai and elsewhere”. Suggesting that the war in Ukraine could lead to a repeat of the events of 1917, he concluded with a characteristic directness that “We are at such a point
that we could fucking lose Russia”.
This short-lived rebellion demonstrates clearly how Putin responds to pressure. We have been consistently told that Putin shouldn’t be humiliated or pushed back lest he “escalate” Russia’s war in Ukraine. But we see now that when cornered, Putin backs down and is willing to do what’s necessary to stay in power.
Like any bully, he tries to exploit weakness but is intimidated by strength. Instead of brutally repressing the treacherous insurrectionists, as he promised on Saturday morning, Putin simply cut a deal with Prigozhin.
There are vital lessons to be learned from this debacle when considering how best to respond to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Putin will threaten all sorts of retaliation for crossing his own imaginary red lines but, when needs must, he can and does change tack, adapt his narrative and, with the aid of a pliant state media and docile citizenry, spin a different story. It is not for Ukraine or its supporters to provide the Kremlin with an off-ramp or a non-humiliating way to retreat from earlier positions. That’s Putin’s job.
Power in Russia matters much more to Putin than victory in Ukraine. Therefore the quicker he is convinced that the war in Ukraine weakens his reign, the faster the war will end. We might already be approaching that point. Russia’s difficulty is unquestionably Ukraine’s opportunity.
Donnacha Ó Beacháin is Professor of Politics at Dublin City University. For more than two decades he has worked and researched in the post-Soviet region and has been published widely on the subject.
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