A coup attempt is in motion in the heart of Russia—the first the country has seen in 30 years, an armed revolt different from any other, including the big one, the Bolshevik Revolution, back in 1917.
Or is it?
For the past 24 hours, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brash commander of the Wagner Group, a prominent mercenary force, was mounting a direct challenge to Vladimir Putin’s rule. Ironically, Putin had created Wagner as an elite unit, headed by his old friend Prigozhin, that could wage proxy wars in places—Syria, parts of Africa, and notably, as of 2014, in eastern Ukraine—where Putin preferred to maintain deniability.
In doing so, Putin—never as clever a strategist as many believed—ignored Machiavelli’s warning that a leader shouldn’t rely too much on mercenaries, who are by nature “ambitious” and “unfaithful.”
Over the past several months, as the invasion of Ukraine turned disastrous, Putin turned more and more to Prigozhin, whose troops—a hodgepodge of veteran fighters and thuggish prisoners promised freedom if they joined his group for a while—proved more successful than the regular army, capturing the city of Bakhmut after long, deadly fighting. But Prigozhin complained that his men weren’t getting enough ammunition. He also criticized Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the main army commanders for fighting dreadfully and treating their soldiers like cannon fodder. When Shoigu pushed the Wagner Group to come under the army’s control, Prigozhin ignored him. On Friday, he released video footage purporting to show that army troops were shelling his militiamen and declared war on the high command.
Then he took what some considered a step too far. His aides reportedly hacked Russian state TV to air a long speech by Prigozhin, not only denouncing Shoigu and other officers as “evil” and “corrupt,” but also dismissing the initial rationale for the invasion—that Ukrainians were committing genocide of Russians in the Donbas region—as false.
He stopped short of holding Putin responsible for the lie, blaming his generals for deceiving the president. But everyone knew that this was Putin’s war, Putin’s rationale. The FSB, Russia’s security agency, issued an arrest warrant for Prigozhin, charging him with inciting armed mutiny. After a delay of several hours, Putin—who, like the American president, is commander in chief of the army and so took Prigozhin’s attacks as inescapably personal—said his former friend had stabbed Russia in the back and called on all responsible Russians to stop his ambitions.
The Wagner Group then released this statement on its Telegram channel: “Putin made the wrong choice. All the worse for him. Soon we will have a new president.”
By that point, less than 24 hours into the revolt, Wagner units had overwhelmed Rostov-on-Don, headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, which commands military operations in Ukraine, and moved northward to Moscow, capturing other towns of roughly 1 million people along the way, with seemingly little or no resistance.
It seemed likely that the face-off would end with either Putin’s or Prigozhin’s head on a spike. Given the stakes, the action, and the all-in rhetoric, it was hard to see how both could survive.
Then, around 8 p.m. Moscow Time on Saturday, Prigozhin released a statement:
Right now the moment has come when blood could be spilled. Therefore, understanding all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood would be spilled on one side, we are turning our convoy around and going back to our base camps, according to the plan.
So the coup is off? Wagner Group is headed back to Ukraine? (Or back to Rostov-on-Don?) Was all this a demonstration of Prigozhin’s power—not just over his nemeses in the Russian officer corps, but also over Putin? Did it end with Putin making a deal? (Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was said to have negotiated a deal with Prigozhin. Does that mean Lukashenko did not fly off to Turkey, as had previously been reported?) Does Putin now retract his earlier characterization of Prigozhin as a traitor?
It would be difficult for Putin or his entourage to claim that they’d faced Prigozhin down. Video footage showed columns of Wagner tanks rolled into Rostov-on-Don with no resistance. One clip caught Prigozhin talking, somewhat amiably, with Russia’s deputy defense minister and military intelligence chief, who happened to be at the Rostov headquarters. (Did they make a deal?) Reports—as yet unconfirmed—told of whole army units defecting to Prigozhin’s command.
Even before Rostov was taken, Putin and his entourage had appeared less than confident. Two former military commanders, who had previously been supportive of the Wagner Group, appeared on TV to urge the mercenaries to abandon Prigozhin’s quest and get back to fighting the Ukrainians. After several hours of silence, Putin did the same in the name of national unity. Meanwhile, tanks and armored personnel carriers were rolling into Moscow to defend government buildings and erect barriers around Red Square.
One could imagine mercenaries, soldiers, and ordinary Russian citizens wondering: Why would these leaders need to make these kinds of appeals if they weren’t in real trouble? To the extent that Prigozhin’s victory would have relied on a wide variety of opportunists testing the winds and going with the side that seemed to be winning, these appeals might have helped Prigozhin—and certainly made his boasts more credible.
Even if Prigozhin does turn his men around, that doesn’t mean this clash is over. Even before the invasion of Ukraine, senior military officers had been resentful of Putin’s entourage of former FSB agents—a feeling intensified by the influence that these spies have had on Putin’s war tactics, which were opposed by many officers. If Prigozhin was looking for officers to split away from Putin, he might not have found the task very difficult—as long as he could show them that he might win. Are these officers still on Prigozhin’s side? Will Prigozhin displace the senior commanders? Rather than Wagner subordinating itself to the Russian army, will it now rise to become the elite corps within the Russian army?
Whatever happens, Putin’s control is slipping. Friday night, he had asked the most steadfast allies of the former Soviet Union—the leaders of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, who, with Russia, make up the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Putin’s half-baked answer to NATO—for a public show of support. They all stayed mum, calling for a restoration of “law and order” but otherwise calling the situation an “internal Russian matter.”
No one had ever confronted Putin before, not without flying out a window or falling down a flight of stairs. Prigozhin confronted him—and seems to have emerged with a stronger hand. How much stronger, we will probably soon find out. (Will Shoigu be ousted as defense minister? Will Prigozhin be given a free hand in running Ukraine operations?)
It is not at all clear how this whole episode will affect the war in Ukraine. If the Russian army needs to reposition troops to deal with possible rebellions inside Russia, that would impede new mobilizations of troops to Ukraine. And if Russian troops, many of whom already resent their fate as cannon fodder in a failed war, view the political revolt back home as definitive proof of Putin’s illegitimacy, that might push them to lay down their arms and flee the battlefield.
Then again, it’s worth noting that Prigozhin has never called for an end to the war. If the Wagner Group is returning to the battlefield, with its commander given a higher rank, he may insist on new tactics, strategies, and officers to wage a more effective fight.
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