WHEN future historians look back on these times, it is likely that they will pick Feb 24, 2022, rather than June 24, 2023, as the key turning point in the decline and fall of the would-be 21st-century Russian empire. Whatever he might have been led to believe, or hoped to achieve, Vladimir Putin signed the death warrant of the status quo when he embarked on his criminal misadventure in Ukraine. Last weekend’s blustering blowback was just another milestone in Russia’s tragically stupid trajectory.
The events of recent days cannot, however, be dismissed as just another hurdle in the “special military operation”. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner forces essentially cake-walked into the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the headquarters for its combat operations in nearby Ukraine, and threatened to march on Moscow, getting within 200km of the capital.
There were unconfirmed rumours about Putin fleeing Moscow, but a number of his key allies definitely flew out of the capital. A visibly shaken Putin addressed the nation for a few minutes on Saturday and then again on Monday, decrying treason without naming Prigozhin, and describing “most” Wagner troops as patriots who would be integrated into the regular army.
Both Putin and Prigozhin were on the same page in citing the desire to avoid bloodshed as the reason for halting the Wagner posse’s advance towards Moscow. The deal involved sanctuary for Prigozhin in Belarus, which makes no secret of being beholden to Russia. The idea that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko might independently have negotiated a truce in daylong conversations with Prigozhin is preposterous. He did what Moscow asked him to do.
Is this the beginning of the end for Putin?
What exactly that might be is uncertain. It was unclear at the time of writing whether the Wagner chief was actually in Belarus. The fate that awaits him is even more opaque. Will he actually be able to regroup his forces, or will he effectively be a prisoner awaiting the guillotine? Only time will tell. It’s safe to say, though, that Putin’s own head is less safe than it was last week, even though there is no guarantee that it will roll in the foreseeable future.
Even though Prigozhin has lately exposed the absurdity of the premise on which the invasion of Ukraine was launched, he has usually directed his blame for Russian military inadequacies in the conflict towards the defence minister and the military chief, Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, and the Russian elites more broadly, sunning themselves on the beaches of Cyprus or Dubai as the children of less privileged Russians die in the killing fields of Donbas. Since Saturday, he has excoriated Putin as well.
Prigozhin is in every way Putin’s creature. After spending nearly a decade in Soviet jail for robbery in Leningrad, he emerged from prison and set up a hot dog stand, graduating to restaurant ownership, where he was noticed by the city’s deputy mayor, then a little-known apparatchik with a KGB background. Putin’s patronage turned Prigozhin into a caterer for Moscow schools, then the Kremlin and eventually the army. The next step for him was to take over the Wagner group of mercenaries, modelled on the US outfit Blackwater. He didn’t have any combat experience, but then, he also probably couldn’t cook up a decent borscht.
Wagner proved very useful to Putin in Ukraine in 2014, as well as in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali and elsewhere in Africa, and he relied upon it a year ago to prop up the flailing invasion of Ukraine. Wherever Wagner was deployed, it gained infamy for its brutality. Its role in Bakhmut last year reflected familiar fascistic tendencies. The accuracies in Prigozhin’s critique of the Russian establishment also imply that he could be a better military commander than Putin or his ilk. Crucially, he has spelt out why Moscow’s casus belli was a farce.
The provocation involved in the Nato encroachment on Russia’s borders since the 1990s cannot be laughed off, but it would be absurd to construe it as reasonable cause for Putin’s belligerence. Nor can the West’s gung-ho revanchism contribute to a positive outcome. The idea of a visibly weaker Putin no doubt appeals to his adversaries. And the prospect of him departing the Kremlin in custody or in a cortege is not altogether unrealistic. But what might follow remains unclear, and current thinking about Russia ranges from speculation based on inadequate knowledge to wishful thinking.
It’s worth remembering that post-Soviet Russia fell into the grip of Western-guided elites, and the outrageous corruption in turn enabled the Putin regime. Russia ideally deserves a future guided by neither the likes of Putin or Prigozhin, nor the West’s neoliberals or neoconservatives. That remains a distant dream. For the moment, as Putin put it last October, “The sower of the wind … will reap the storm.”
Published in Dawn, June 28th, 2023
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