If Vladimir Putin doesn’t make sense, he doesn’t make sense, and he cannot last

benfell

See updates through July 20, 2023, at end of post.


Fig. 1. “The atomic cloud over Nagasaki 1945.” Photograph from Office for Emergency Management. Office of War Information. Overseas Operations Branch, New York Office, News and Features Bureau, (12/17/1942 – 09/15/1945), by Charles Levy, August 9, 1945, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Russia has launched a missile attack against several Ukrainian cities, targeting civilians and energy infrastructure, drawing international condemnation. Vladimir Putin claims it is in retaliation for[1] what the Russians claim was a truck bomb attack, orchestrated by Ukrainian “special services,” that severely damaged the Kerch bridge between Russia and Crimea.[2]

There may be reason to doubt this barrage can be sustained. The head of the British Government Communications Headquarters says that Russian forces are exhausting their supplies and munitions.[3] That likely includes missiles. When it was first reported that Russia might be exhausting its inventory of advanced missiles, this foreshadowed less accurate missile and artillery strikes which would be more dangerous for civilians,[4] but Russia is targeting civilians anyway,[5] and if indeed Russia is exhausting this inventory as well,[6] well, what next? If some analysts are correct, even going nuclear would be insufficient to improve Putin’s fortunes and might draw a devastating conventional counterstrike from the West.[7]

It’s possible that some of this information is wrong, but I am remembering the lesson I learned from the dot-com crash: If it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense, and it cannot last. Putin hasn’t made much sense about Ukraine anytime this year,[8] and he hasn’t been making any more sense lately.[9] If this information is right, it gets really, really hard to see how Putin’s war can continue and how he can last,[10] even if, for now, his position still appears secure.[11]

Update, October 11, 2022: I have added citations to existing footnotes and it isn’t just Lewis Page[12] who thinks going nuclear would not improve Russia’s military position,[13] leading to a light modification of the original text. In general, Vladimir Putin appears ever more to be acting out of desperation, delusion, and fury; indeed, some might call it a military-grade temper tantrum, potentially even with nuclear weapons.[14] For all of it, there is still no coherent path to victory. Putin still isn’t making sense.

So on one hand, there is the suggestion in my original post that Putin must surely fall;[15] this is, after all, no way to run a war, let alone a country. On the other, he appears ever more the cornered, wounded animal, albeit with nuclear weapons (that, admittedly, he may not actually be able to use[16]), and thus, all the more dangerous. It’s a scary, scary time.

Update, October 12, 2022: This is how Jade McGlynn ends her Telegraph op-ed, published under the tempting headline, “Desperate Putin is out of time as rival elites begin to circle:”

Put yourselves in the Russians’ shoes: you can either accept as false the premise of this war, in which Putin has tied up your national identity, and demand the radical overhaul of society in the face of terrifying force, or you can pretend the real issue is that the military and politicians haven’t been trying hard enough and, once they start doing so, Russia will win.

The second narrative is much less demanding and much more tempting, but it will only exacerbate Russia’s problems since Russia cannot win. The Ukrainians are not for breaking. Every Russian attack just makes them more defiant. This is why Putin will not reassert authority over his unruly elites or the public if he continues to pursue a path of escalatory aggression. But it is difficult to ascertain another way out and he has left himself very little, if any, space to turn back.

At some stage, however, the elites will have to make a choice: whether to prop up [Vladimir] Putin or save themselves. History suggests the latter is far more likely.[17]

It’s a flawed headline. McGlynn’s argument is more that Vladimir Putin’s escalation of his war criminality in Ukraine and his appointment of Sergei Surovikin, also known as “General Armageddon,” to lead it[18] are a response to Russian war hawks. She suggests that Putin is doing this under compulsion[19] from the one source of war criticism he has permitted.[20]

I think to infer from these moves that Putin is losing agency, as McGlynn does,[21] would require that Putin is doing something he hasn’t tried before in less challenging times. But these tactics are not new. Indeed, “General Armageddon” has built his career in the Russian military, including in Syria, including under Putin, on them.[22]

Certainly, we see desperation. Putin’s war has gone wrong from the start. And certainly there will be consequences.[23] He will lose agency. Events will swirl beyond his control. But I do not see evidence that this is already happening and it is premature to say that it is.

Update, October 16, 2022:

Since the [Russian missile] onslaught began on Monday [October 10], more than three dozen people have been killed and scores more wounded. Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure appears to be the main target, meaning that some residential areas have been plunged into darkness, leaving civilians confronting the possibility of facing winter without power.

But conditions on the battlefield continue to favor the nimbler, more highly motivated and better armed Ukrainian military, which seems likely to retain the advantage over Russia’s lumbering, poorly equipped and exhausted army, at least for the foreseeable future.[24]

Remember what I said about Liz Truss and flailing? How flailing rarely turns out well for the flailers?[25] It’s the same with Vladimir Putin in his war on Ukraine. Almost nothing is going right for Putin[26] and it’s increasingly clear that he continues the fight merely out of delusion.[27]

What’s interesting is to see the tankies come out of the woodwork on Twitter. Now that Putin is losing and losing badly,[28] they are desperate for a ceasefire, to “save lives,” they say. I’ve previously noted that they seem only to object to U.S. imperialism, not to anybody else’s imperialism and tyranny.[29] Now we’re seeing that they actively support and embrace Russian imperialism, support and embrace Putin’s tyranny.

To my great dismay, this appears to include the Green Party in the U.S., leaving me no one on the Pennsylvania ballot to vote for, only a smorgasbord to vote against: Democrats for neoliberalism, Republicans for white Christian nationalism, capital-L Libertarians for capitalist libertarianism, and Greens for being, well, tankies.

Update, December 30, 2022:

[Vladimir] Putin, who started his career as a Soviet KGB agent, has always kept his own counsel, relying on a close inner circle of old friends and confidants while seeming to never fully trust or confide in anyone. But now a new gulf is emerging between Putin and much of the country’s elite, according to interviews with Russian business leaders, officials and analysts.

Putin “feels the loss of his friends,” said one Russian state official with close ties to diplomatic circles, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “[Belarusian President Alexander] Lukashenko is the only one he can pay a serious visit to. All the rest see him only when necessary.” . . .

“There is huge frustration among the people around him,” said one Russian billionaire who maintains contacts with top-ranking officials. “He clearly doesn’t know what to do.”[30]

There remains a divide between ‘pragmatists’ who see the war as lost and ‘hawks’ who want to escalate further.[31] Yevgeniy Prigozhin, whom Julia Ioffe thinks might lead a coup against Vladimir Putin,[32] is of course among the hawks[33] and the notion of the war as ‘existential’ for Russia[34] persists as India and China worry that Putin will go nuclear.[35]

What’s probably most dangerous here is the appearance that Putin lacks a plan.[36] That’s the precise formulation that leads someone who thinks he can “fix it” to step in and if, indeed, that person is Prigozhin[37] or someone of similar mind, then the war might get bloodier still.

Update, February 19, 2023:

But business executives and state officials say [Vladimir] Putin’s own position at the top could prove precarious as doubts over his tactics grow among the elite. For many of them, Putin’s gambit has unwound 30 years of progress made since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin’s vision of Russia horrifies many oligarchs and state officials, who confide that the war has been a catastrophic error that has failed in every goal. But they remain paralyzed, fearful and publicly silent.[38]

Be careful what you wish for: The only name I’m even hearing as a potential successor to Vladimir Putin is Yevgeny Prigozhin.[39] And as opponents of the war desert Russia, they leave behind a Russia more unified in support of the war by default.[40]

I certainly agree it is necessary to depose Vladimir Putin to end his war on Ukraine.[41] But now we must ask, how can this be accomplished such that it doesn’t make matters worse?

Update, February 22, 2023: Emigration is one factor in a ‘purification’ of Russia, in which departing dissidents leave supporters of Vladimir Putin’s war even more dominant in Russian society.[42] But dissent is being repressed as well.[43]

Meanwhile, Putin is playing to the ‘tankies’ with his decision to withdraw from the last nuclear arms treaty with the U.S.:

Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who was a Russian specialist at the White House National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, told the Guardian that Putin was “playing to the rifts in the United States”. The strategy was to increase political discord in an attempt to embolden calls for an end to US support for Ukraine.

“It’s playing to all those people who want Ukraine to surrender and capitulate to avoid a massive nuclear exchange and world war three, a kind of nuclear armageddon,” she said.[44]

He’s losing the war in every other way. But he still has a chance to manipulate public opinion, both at home and abroad,[45] and it’s really his last shot.[46]

[Vladimir] Putin may be a dictator, but even dictators have to justify losses. . . .

Putin has put himself and his country in a desperate situation, and he has run out of options, including nuclear threats. This is not to say that the risk of nuclear conflict has evaporated; as I noted on the most recent episode of the Radio Atlantic podcast, there is still plenty of room for Putin to do something foolish and set a terrible chain of events in motion. But after a year, it seems that the Russian president’s plan—if it can even be called that—is to consign more of his young men to the Ukrainian abattoir while hoping that the West somehow tires of the whole business. . . .

The Russian president is still counting on Kyiv and its armies to collapse, or perhaps on an election to remove Biden, or for Europe to lose its nerve, or for China, perhaps, to come to Moscow’s rescue (which would be both a balm and a deep humiliation). But he also knows that time may be running out at home: After a year of war, there are only so many young men left to kill and only so many generals left to blame.[47]

Update, March 16, 2023: Julia Ioffe understands that Evgeny Prigozhin (“[Vladimir] Putin’s Chef”) has enemies,[48] but I’m not gonna pretend I know what’s going on with him and the Kremlin. I’m just pretty sure it isn’t this:

The mercenary boss dubbed “Putin’s Chef” said authorities are choosing to deprive Wagner of ammunition which has slowed progress in the blood-soaked battle to take Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. “The objective is simple,” [Evgeny] Prigozhin said: “PMC Wagner should not take Bakhmut.”

His comments, which were made during an interview with several Russian media outlets on Wednesday, are the latest development in an escalating war of words between Prigozhin and the official armed forces of Russia.

“Our actions today of course cause envy,” Prigozhin said, referring to jealousy among Russia’s military establishment. “So because we have successes, while in other places successes are not what they’d like to be, then instead of—remember what grandpa Lenin said: we all thought we were all meant to live well, but instead, they made it so that everyone lived the same but poorly.”[49]

Prigozhin goes on to complain that he’s been

deprived access to military phones. “Leave me the phone! Set wiretapping on it,” [Evgeny] Prigozhin said. “Know what I’m talking about, and call me sometimes and say: ‘Prigozhin, you’re a cunt, go fuck yourself,’ and hang up. At least like this. What’s the point of cutting it?”[50]

Were I Prigozhin, instead of the pointless bellyaching, and if we are to take him at his word, I’d be asking what the Kremlin really wants in exchange.

I don’t take Prigozhin at his word. Because even in an utterly corrupt country, he wouldn’t have gotten where he has[51] by being so stupid. He’s smarter than this.

Whether he is luring Ukrainian forces by projecting weakness or he is up to something entirely else, I deeply doubt his sincerity.

It’s hard to imagine he can really take Bakhmut without ammunition though he boasts that he will.[52] His claim of “shell hunger” is either bullshit, meaning he has ammunition enough to win the fight, or he loses.

I also wonder who his real audience is. Obviously, if he’s trying to lure Ukrainian forces, then that’s who his complaints are aimed at. If he’s really aiming his remarks at Russian audiences, then I suspect he’s laying groundwork for the coup a few folks suspect him of plotting,[53] with a subsequent purge of his enemies in the Kremlin. It could well be both.

Update, May 15, 2023: There is only one name I have seen put forward in speculation about a coup to depose Vladimir Putin: Yevgeny Prigozhin.[54] Suffice it to say, Prigozhin would be unlikely to improve on Putin. Not that we wouldn’t pay attention anyway just for the bizarreness of Prigozhin’s unrelenting and harsh criticism of the Russian invasion effort in a regime that is, um, selective about what dissent it tolerates.[55]

But because this possibility exists, we have to pay attention to the relationship between the two men and to that between Prigozhin and the Kremlin. An article in the Toronto Star is one of a very few that address even one of these relationships in the present context.[56]

In such a tightly controlled regime, the right to speak freely and critically has traditionally been one granted by Putin alone. So Prigozhin’s virulent and repeated criticisms of the Russian military’s battlefield failings have confounded those trying to understand how the man who used his catering and restaurant businesses to build political connections at the highest levels is still standing.

With Russia’s military efforts stalled and on the eve of a Ukrainian counteroffensive aimed at retaking occupied territory, only one explanation makes sense to [Abbas] Gallyamov: “[Vladimir] Putin depends on [Yevgeny] Prigozhin more than Prigozhin depends on Putin.” . . .

Writing for the Royal United Services Institute in March, Ukrainian military intelligence analyst Oleksandr Danylyuk said that a prolonged public spat between Prigozhin and the military leadership could be a plot to have the defence minister and chief of staff replaced, or to convince Ukrainian military planners and intelligence analysts that the Russians are in disarray.

Danylyuk, an expert in Russian hybrid warfare and its special services, also argued that Prigozhin’s angry, madman persona “also benefits Putin personally, as it supports his strategic narrative that regime change in Russia would also be bad for the West, given that even more aggressive individuals may come to power.”[57]

If Russia indeed is hamstrung for manpower and ammunition,[58] then Putin needs Prigozhin’s soldiers. They’ll both need ammunition but that remains the case whether Prigozhin is in command of the Wagner Group or not. And I think if Putin doubts the ability of Kremlin military leadership, he’ll want as many ‘competent’ commanders as he can get (whether we agree that Prigozhin is in fact competent is another question, pretty close behind whether Putin does something meaningful about the Kremlin military leadership that has, by all accounts, failed so spectacularly).

But there is no debating [Yevgeny] Prigozhin’s bitter frustration with the grinding fight in Bakhmut. He has complained, publicly and privately, that the Russian Defense Ministry has not given his fighters the ammunition and other resources they need to succeed. Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, has seen some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Over the past few months, in a grinding back and forth measured by city blocks, Ukrainian and Russian forces have taken steep casualties.[59]

It’s time, really time, to start watching for pieces that don’t add up. There is of course the entire botched-up war itself; what this war says about Russian military corruption, preparedness, and capability; and of Putin’s czarist fantasies. All really rather quite mind-boggling enough.

But get to questions like that of Putin and (a treasonous) Prigozhin,[60] and how an army can possibly expect to fight without bullets,[61] and yeah, damn it, I’ve got some pieces that aren’t adding up.

Update, May 17, 2023: A Washington Post report raises a possibility that the report—from leaked U.S. intelligence[62]—that Yevgeny Prigozhin offered Ukrainians Russian troop locations[63] is an attempt to smear Prigozhin.[64] Prigozhin hardly needs smearing, but the idea that such leaked intelligence, which so far seems to have been the real thing, would be a ‘hoax’ in just this one case seems a bit over the top.

Meanwhile, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas’ woes in persuading companies to decline deals circumventing sanctions on Russia will surely sound familiar to anyone who has read George Seldes’ account of U.S. corporations who couldn’t resist more deals with Nazi Germany.[65] The simple fact is that capitalists are in business to make money even if, as Vladimir Lenin is alleged to have suggested, it means selling their hangman a rope to hang them with.[66]

But those (including me) who wonder how Vladimir Putin can continue this war will find support for their doubts in a Washington Post op-ed:

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a longtime [Yevgeny] Prigozhin ally, has now appeared to break with the Wagner chief, harshly criticizing his threats to withdraw from the front. As a result, the three principal Russian forces in Bakhmut — the Wagner Group, Kadyrov’s Chechen militias and the regular army — are openly feuding with each other as Ukrainian troops advance.

Meanwhile, [Vladimir] Putin has conspicuously failed to explain to the public how his security forces failed to prevent two drones from reaching the Kremlin and neglected to thwart the car-bomb attack on a key Russian warmonger, Zakhar Prilepin.

Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov told me the Kremlin is “shaking.”[67]

All this pales, really, before the spectacular failure of Russian forces in Ukraine,[68] but it can only add to the question of how much longer Putin can last.

Update, June 24, 2023 (substantially revised): In the end, it wasn’t the story a lot of people (including me) had to be thinking it might be:

Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced a deal late on Saturday that Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin would depart for Belarus in return for being spared prosecution, after an abortive rebellion in which his troops made a dash for Moscow.

The announcement, carried by the Tass news agency, came shortly after embittered warlord Prigozhin announced his men were turning back from Moscow to avoid a devastating civil conflict. In a voice recording posted to his Telegram channel, Prigozhin said his troops would turn back after advancing within 200 kilometers of the capital.[69]

It’s still a hell of a story:

Wagner [Group] troops, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, earlier in the day took over the main military headquarters for southern Russia, in Rostov, and other installations there, encountering virtually no resistance from the regular armed forces. Wagner also sent columns of troops northward toward Moscow, as the Russian army rushed to cut off highways and defend the capital city.[70]

This after Yevgeny Prigozhin had promised to bring “justice,” whatever that actually means, to the Russian defense ministry and to the country as a whole, and the Russian government replied with, among other things, a warrant for Prigozhin’s arrest.[71]

[Yevgeny] Prigozhin, smarting over the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine, announced early on Saturday that his mercenaries had seized the major southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, a logistics hub for Putin’s war, and threatened to push on to Moscow. Wagner forces also appeared to be well established in the city of Voronezh, 500 kilometers south of the capital.[72]

This morning (June 24, 2023), in separate articles, Anne Appelbaum and Yaroslav Trofimov confirmed that the Wagner Group moved into Rostov. But we still didn’t have a clue what was really going on beyond that it sure looked like a coup attempt. Appelbaum called it a “civil war,”[73] but I think for it to be a civil war, this has to be more than one ambitious military commander and his forces; it needs significant popular support on each side and I still don’t really see that.

I’m not yet prepared to call it a coup. History shows they are especially difficult in Russia, and I want to see how many friends [Yevgeny] Prighozin has in Moscow. But the Wagner mercenaries have proven to be tougher and better organized than the army, and the far right is robust. ([Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine can largely be seen as shoring up his right flank.)[74]

It’s worth a detour to see what we think of what we know about Russian public opinion: We saw that some people say they support Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine but we still can’t know beyond stereotypes whether they in fact do.[75] And we saw that some people are snitching on people who don’t support the war,[76] for whatever benefits they might derive and for whatever scores they may hope to settle in doing so, reminiscent not only of the Soviet Union but of the U.S. “terrorist” roundups in Afghanistan that snared many innocent people.

Apart from the right-wing bloggers, I have seen absolutely zero public support for Wagner or Yevgeny Prigozhin, who got many (my impression is ‘most’) of their recruits from Russian prisons. And I’m pretty damned sure that we don’t know jack shit about what the Russian public, with any sense of proportion, really thinks of the Ukraine War or Putin.

The evidence we actually have is of people protesting and fleeing Putin’s military draft.[77] And what’s worse, all of the information I have on Russian civilian public opinion is several months old.

I am simply not seeing anything like adequate evidence for any claim on Russian popular support. I’m deeply skeptical that anybody has that support. So I think Appelbaum’s “civil war” label was at least a step too far. Trofimov, for his part, called it rather an “insurrection”[78] while U.S. government sources are calling it a “coup.”[79] For now, I’m sticking with an attempted “coup.”

A senior Eastern European intelligence official said the service was scrambling to get a clear picture of events but added that “time is not on [Vladimir] Putin’s side.”[80]

All that said, it’s Prigozhin now who’s telling at least a partial truth that Ukraine did not threaten Russia. He claims, unverifiably, that Putin was duped by his military leadership.[81]

We do not know that anyone in Russia who is not on Telegram heard anything Prigozhin said. We do not know that anyone in Russia dared to repeat it. But I have to think that Putin is vulnerable,[82] that his support is soft at best.

The right-wing military bloggers who’ve supported Putin but have complained that the invasion lacks vigor[83] couldn’t have been enthusiastic about Putin but seemed unlikely now to support Prigozhin. We were now well past the point where talk was what mattered and so we still don’t know that their backing substantially matters anyway.

Putin’s military forces have uniformly been reported to be demoralized in the war on Ukraine. It had remained to be seen whether they would resist Prigozhin, join him, or stick with Putin,[84] and if Putin has any inkling at all of how his war in Ukraine has been going, he has to know that he didn’t actually have an answer to that question, and he probably didn’t want to put it to the test.

So where was Prigozhin’s support? Those 25,000 fighters he claimed to have—“[s]ome of these will be ex-convict chancers but others will be the best Russian soldiers, former special forces and former members of the Kremlin guard.”[85] And we don’t even trust that he has those—he claims after all that a Russian military strike took out a large number of his soldiers.[86]

Appelbaum refers to a “hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country [that] is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.”[87] One thing to watch for was that it might not only be Putin who deceived himself, and so it proved:

After a day of heightened military tensions — with shells fired in Voronezh and Chechen fighters being dispatched to take on Wagner in Rostov — the uprising suddenly fizzled out in the evening. Ultimately, Moscow appeared an improbably ambitious target for [Yevgeny] Prigozhin and Russian regular forces appeared unable to do much to counter Prigozhin in the south. . . .

“At the moment there is an completely constructive and acceptable option of resolving the situation, with security guarantees for the Wagner PMC fighters on the table,” [Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko’s office’s] press release claimed. If there are such guarantees, they will be a bitter pill for [Vladimir] Putin, who promised to punish the rebels.

Given [Dmitry] Peskov’s statement that Prigozhin will depart for Belarus, it now seems the Wagner commander has failed to to secure his core demands.[88]

This isn’t a win for either Prigozhin or Putin. But Prigozhin will presumably have some safe place in Belarus or perhaps a point beyond. Putin, on the other hand, likely remains in serious trouble.[89]

In the short term, I predict an even more brutal war in Ukraine as Putin strives to get the right-wing bloggers back on side.

Update, June 25, 2023 (revised):

We can at this point only speculate about why [Yevgeny] Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly. One possibility is that Prigozhin had allies in Moscow who promised to support him, and somehow that support fell through: Perhaps his friends in the Kremlin got cold feet, or were less numerous than Prigozhin realized, or never existed at all. Prigozhin, after all, is not exactly a military genius or a diplomat; he’s a violent, arrogant, emotional man who may well have embarked on this scheme huffing from a vat of his own overconfidence.[90]

Mostly, there isn’t much new from last night (June 24, 2023). But Nick Allen, at the Telegraph, reports that Vladimir Putin found only lukewarm support even from his allies, who called it an ‘internal matter,’ as he faced down Yevgeny Prigozhin. There is a sense that this may not be over, as the Wagner Group has forces and relationships with governments around the world;[91] even eliminating the forces in Russia or Ukraine would not eliminate the organization.

Perhaps. But as I think with Donald Trump and the January 6 coup attempt, you tend to only get one shot at it.

First, [Vladimir] Putin has suffered a huge political blow, and he has survived by making deals both with [Yevgeny] Prigozhin and with his own colleagues in the Kremlin that are, by any definition, a humiliation. And second, Yevgeny Prigozhin has changed the Russian political environment surrounding Putin’s war in Ukraine.[92]

I don’t think we know the full content of those “deals.” But my expectation is that Prigozhin is done[93] and so, too, soon, will be Putin,[94] whom I would advise to make an escape into exile, sooner rather than later.

[Yevgeny] Prigozhin drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. [Vladimir] Putin, however, may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation. All of the options were terrifying: Ordering the Russian military to attack armed Russian men would have been a huge risk, especially because those men (and their hatred of the bureaucrats at the Defense Ministry) have at least some support among Russia’s officers and political elites. Killing Prigozhin outright was also a high-risk proposition; with their leader dead and the Russian military closing in, the Wagnerites might have decided to fight to the death.[95]

Update, June 28, 2023, revised through June 29, 2023:

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the idea that the rebellion shook Russian authorities or [Vladimir] Putin, instead insisting that it “demonstrated a high level of consolidation of society, political forces and the military around the president,” even as Russian analysts said the opposite was true.

Peskov tried to explain the contradiction of dropping treason charges while some Russian activists are in prison simply for social media posts critical of the war. Peskov said the deal was a necessity born out of “a rather sad event, an extraordinary event.”[96]

Even as repercussions begin in Russia,[97] we’re well into the post-event bullshit phase of what I guess more people are calling the Wagner Mutiny than anything else. Basically, this is where 1) all the pundits (excluding Julia Ioffe, who, if memory serves, has been on vacation) who haven’t written anything about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s coup/mutiny/insurrection/rebellion decide they need to get in on the action, but don’t really add anything new, and 2) the subjects of their discourse all try to spin what happened in their own favor. Generally speaking, trust this even less than what you heard at the time when nobody knew what the fuck was going on. What you’ll see here is mostly me catching up on details.

There’s a lot we don’t know about what really happened, and what continues to happen in the couloirs of power. In the two days since [Yevgeny] Prigozhin choked when he was within striking distance of Moscow, the Kremlin has been furiously sweeping up the damage. After a deafening 48-hour silence, [Vladimir] Putin can’t seem to stop speaking. He gave a taped, Monday-night address, then spoke on a red carpet in a Kremlin courtyard, then went inside and met with—i.e., talked at—some servicemembers. (Throughout, he refused to acknowledge Prigozhin by name, a vindictive anonymity reserved for Putin’s worst enemies, like Alexey Navalny.)

People who had been quiet during Prigozhin’s march—the defense minister, the heads of various security services, the most prominent propagandists—have resurfaced for some vigorous rewriting of the weekend’s events. Prigozhin, in the meantime, has landed in Belarus where [Alexander] Lukashenko has already started building camps to house his fighters. And even though the F.S.B. dropped its criminal case against him, there were some local media reports that Prigozhin has found the only high-rise hotel where the windows don’t open. “If we’ve learned anything over the last 23 years, it is that Putin goes after people he feels betrayed him,” said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “He seems to not tolerate betrayal; he values loyalty over competence.” Personally, I’ve been asking people if they think Prigozhin makes it till his next birthday: June 1, 2024.[98]

So what do we actually know? It appears that Yevgeny Prigozhin saw defense ministry moves to require Wagner to sign a contract that would bring the latter under the former’s control as an existential threat to Wagner.[99] It’s rare that I’ll doubt Ioffe, who writes,

[Yevgeny] Prigozhin was the strongest, most obvious rival [Vladimir] Putin had. He had his own private army, tens of thousands of men who had criminal pasts and were loyal to him personally, and who, having been through the gauntlet of the war in Ukraine, were skilled at violence and clearly unafraid. Sure, Prigozhin’s march revealed damning details about the defense of the Russian homeland: as Prigozhin advanced, the Russian military mostly melted away. But Prigozhin, for whatever reason, blinked first. And that means Putin won.

Having survived a coup, Putin is stronger, not weaker. And Putin didn’t even get his hands dirty trying to wrangle Prigozhin. He let everyone else—from [Alexander] Lukashenko, to his negotiating team, to his spokesman—come down to Prigozhin’s level and talk, while he removed himself from the capital and the situation, clearly demonstrating that he didn’t think Prigozhin’s march was worth his time or energy.[100]

Ioffe is almost always right. She here interprets the bully as having faced down another bully and as looking stronger for it.[101] But I think nearly everyone else, including myself, is interpreting the failure of Putin’s forces even to resist Prigozhin as a sign of acquiescence, certainly not loyalty to Putin,[102] and Putin’s departure from Moscow[103] as a sign of fear not indifference, rather that Putin uses apparent indifference to cover fear, which, in the world he grew up in and never really grew out of, that Ioffe herself has described,[104] he dare not admit to. Crucially, everyone knows this.

[Vladimir] Putin “knows they look weak” after Russia dropped charges against Wagner to avoid an open firefight that would have likely killed thousands, said a sanctioned figure within Russia’s elite.

“It’s real tough guy stuff,” the person said. “It’s like when you go into the prison cell for the first time and punch the biggest guy you can find in the face to show nobody can mess with you.”[105]

I think “real tough guy stuff” would have said to hell with the casualties, we’re gonna fight. Neither Putin nor Prigozhin showed such mettle:

[Yevgeny] Prigozhin lost his nerve on Saturday. He had a golden opportunity to seize power at a moment when [Vladimir] Putin was surprised and vulnerable. The Russian military had many of its resources in Ukraine rather than Russia, and Wagner’s heavily armed forces had at least the potential to outgun the remaining Russian security services guarding Moscow.

But Prigozhin’s moment was fleeting. Now the odds are good that Putin will have his rival murdered. The Russian leader has had opponents thrown out of windows for far less. To think that [Alexander] Lukashenko, a Putin stooge, will protect Prigozhin in Belarus is madness. Moscow has a long reach; Putin has had plenty of opponents assassinated in the West, and Minsk, the capital of Belarus, might as well be a suburb of Moscow.[106]

I also don’t buy the theory that [Yevgeny] Prigozhin’s men were scared of a bloodbath in Moscow. All of them had seen worse on the battlefields of Ukraine. Many were hardened criminals who saw the meatgrinder of war as preferable to prison. Moreover, the forces tasked with defending Moscow seemed far better at slamming unarmed urban intellectuals to the floor than fighting real, armed peers. (Also, given the Ukrainian drones that exploded over the Kremlin, Moscow may not be as well-guarded as we think.) Rather, I think that Prigozhin truly didn’t want to unseat Putin. He wanted to talk to him and get his point across, to get what he wanted from the big boss, face to face. But with Putin unwilling to meet with him, the prospect of trying to take Moscow had become not just bloody, but pointless.[107]

Okay, we don’t actually know that Prigozhin lost his nerve, but given support in Moscow that didn’t materialize,[108] it’s probably the best explanation for what happened, and Ioffe effectively refutes—not that she should have to—Prigozhin’s nonsense claim to have been avoiding a bloodbath.[109]

Even if Moscow isn’t thrilled by [Vladimir] Putin or his invasion of Ukraine, the specter of [Yevgeny] Prigozhin marching into their city and taking over threw certain things into perspective. Prigozhin is a terrifying brute, someone to the far right of Putin. Putin’s rule has been brutal but has become that way gradually, in a way that most Russians have learned to accommodate and accept. It is a familiar brutality whose rules they can now more or less guess. Prigozhin was bearing down on the capital with his mass of hardened criminals, true barbarians at the gate. What would they do when they got there? Would they do things that would make Putin seem soft and gentle by comparison?

When [Nina] Khrushcheva [Former Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev’s grandaughter] arrived in Moscow, she told me that she kept hearing Prigozhin referred to as a rapist and a murderer. “Whatever we think of Putin, it’s better than rapists and murderers,” she told me, elaborating on the mindset of people she’s been speaking with in the capital. “I heard it several times on Saturday, especially when Wagner got to Lipetsk [300 miles from Moscow]. We don’t need this.”

Putin had long built his legitimacy on the lack of alternatives, or on the fear of what the alternative might be. He was the thing standing between Russians and revolution, civil war, he argued, the stuff their great-grandparents only miraculously survived. It was hard to make that argument with Navalny, a white-collar democrat. But Prigozhin was that nightmare incarnate, the best advertisement for another 20 years of Putin that Vladimir Vladimirovich could have hoped for. And when it came time to make the choice, when it was banging on the city gates on Saturday, the Moscow elite didn’t hesitate. “Before Saturday, the Russian elite didn’t have the sense that they had to choose between [Putin and Prigozhin],” said the well-connected Moscow source. “Then when one of them started a coup, it turned out that no one supported Prigozhin. I don’t know a single person that supported him.”[110]

Perhaps the most important revelation to emerge from [Yevgeny] Prigozhin’s coup attempt is that Russia is too dependent on Wagner mercenaries to effectively confront them, Mark Voyger, the director of the master’s program in global management at the American University in Kyiv and senior fellow at Center for European Analysis, told Defense One. “The fact remains that these are still the best trained, the most motivated, the most cruel, the most brutal but still the most capable…forces that the Russian command currently has at their disposal…The Russian military cannot conjure up new forces in the foreseeable future capable of doing, you know, even a portion of what Wagner was doing.”

That’s in large part because Wagner forces could operate according to their own rules, unlike the Russian military, Voyger said. The force is composed of veteran fighters, but also convicts straight from prison. That will make it very hard for the Russian military to fold the mercenaries into formal service, he said, though the Russian military had stated plans to do precisely that by the end of the summer—likely the main catalyst for Prigozhin’s march in the first place.[111]

In quoting Mark Voyger, Patrick Tucker repeats what many have said. Putin faces not only an opponent he cannot tolerate but the prospect of fighting a war of his own making that brings him only humiliation, that he relied on a now-neutralized force to fight.[112]

Some analysts struggle to see [Vladimir] Putin tolerating the presence of the insurrectionist forces within his camp in the months ahead. Others doubt [Yevgeny] Prigozhin will slip into obscurity in Minsk and reckon he may remain a parallel source of influence over the Russian public. For years, Putin consolidated his power by both suppressing any alternatives to his rule and cultivating a cohort of de facto warlords, like Prigozhin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who seemed loyal to him if not the overall chain of command at the Kremlin.[113]

In the wake of [Yevgeny] Prigozhin’s attempted coup, there’s been a lot of full-throated certainty in the Western media—and in U.S. media, especially—that [Vladimir] Putin has been mortally wounded and that his regime is weaker than ever. Look as I might, I just don’t see it.[114]

Count me—I’ve been saying it for a while—among those who think Putin is doomed,[115] but the truth here is nobody knows. There’s a certain amount of hubris (not to mention that of pundits) inherent to this situation, where Prigozhin imagines he can keep Wagner in Belarus and where Vladimir Putin imagines he can remain in power, fold Wagner into the Russian military, and get his revenge against Prigozhin regardless. Which of these, if any, will happen? We won’t know until we know, but taking out Prigozhin is, I’m guessing, the easiest on this list, and Prigozhin would have to be even stupider than he seems not to anticipate that Putin will try.

All this said, it must surely be clear in Moscow that something will need to be done about Putin. The picture that can no longer be hidden is that Putin rules from fear and the price of his rule is not only high but repugnant. The question will be how and when, not if.

Update, July 10, 2023: The story of the Wagner mutiny has become bizarre. We might have suspected that this didn’t fall into the mold of failed-coup-and-exile when Yevgeny Prigozhin returned to Saint Petersburg and retrieved money and weapons the authorities had seized. It was thought Prigozhin might also have visited Moscow[116] and this now appears to have been confirmed as it seems Prigozhin, alone with numerous other military commanders, met with Vladimir Putin about the war, apparently as if the mutiny had never occurred.[117]

Julia Ioffe has been writing, very nearly alone, that Putin emerged from the failed mutiny strong[118] and Tatiana Stanovaya tweeted that “Putin doesn’t need Wagner or Prigozhin. He can manage with his own forces. He’s now certainly convinced of that.”[119] But what we’re seeing is that Putin does indeed need Prigozhin, very, very, badly, and it’s very, very hard to reconcile Prigozhin’s travels with Putin’s reputation for murderous retribution and the wide expectation that Prigozhin was accordingly a dead man walking. To embrace Ioffe’s view is to ignore that Putin now seems very much out of character, and I just don’t see how this is in any way a sign of strength.

Update, July 12, 2023: A few days ago, I concluded that “[Vladimir] Putin is not, in fact, in control of the Russian government, even within the Kremlin, let alone outside it.”[120]

It was not [Vladimir] Putin but the “collective Putin” (a mystical figure including, among others, Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus) that decided the outcome of the crisis. Putin the individual was irate and humiliated by Wagner’s betrayal and went on TV threatening “to be harsh”. But the “collective Putin” concluded that it would be wiser to negotiate with the rebels and find an exit strategy. We now know Putin met [Yevgeny] Prigozhin and other Wagner commanders on June 29. For someone obsessed with treason and betrayal, this was a bitter pill to swallow.

What has changed? Primarily, the relationship between Putin and the Russian elites. He now fears them no less than they fear him. He fears less their voice than their exit. Many of his closest collaborators blame him personally for the current state of affairs. It was Putin’s decision to instrumentalise the competition between Wagner and the defence ministry that ultimately led to Wagner’s march towards Moscow.[121]

Does Putin in fact have something to fear from Russian elites? Perhaps. I’m thinking that isn’t actually the important question, that we should rather ask whether Putin does fear the elites, for it will be the fear that drives his decision making rather than the substance or absence thereof behind that fear.

From the beginning of the Ukraine war, there have been questions about Putin’s sanity, his grasp of reality. There is an entire concocted history to justify the invasion. There is the striking divergence between how the war is going and his war aims even before we get to “Peter the Great” delusions of grandeur. There has been his increasing reclusiveness and seeming disdain for competence in favor of loyalty. It’s all been quite thoroughly insane, but there has been a peculiar refusal, despite the delusions, despite even the nuclear threats, to accept that Putin is indeed bonkers.[122] I think we might be seeing an actual crack-up now.

I’m thinking that, if so, this will not be the end of the Putin regime that anyone foresaw. It will not substantively be a coup that does him in, though there might be one as an instrument to remove him from power. It will not be his death, though that’s certainly been earnestly hoped for and of course could happen at any time. Principally, Putin’s end will be Putin self-destructing.

Update, July 20, 2023:

The blurry clip, apparently filmed at dusk, showed a man resembling [Yevgeny] Prigozhin addressing a crowd of at least several hundred men in military fatigues. He vowed to continue operating the Wagner Group in Africa and turn the military of Belarus, his new host country, into “the second army in the world.”

“Congratulations on the arrival to the Belarusian land. We fought well. You have done a lot for Russia,” Prigozhin said in the clip, posted by the ‘Wagner Unloading” Telegram channel and verified by The Washington Post. “Now, what is happening at the front line is a disgrace in which we do not need to participate. And now we need to wait for the moment when we can prove ourselves in full.”[123]

Vladimir Putin is strong, wrote Julia Ioffe.[124] but a ‘collective Putin’ settled with Yevgeny Prigozhin following the Wagner mutiny rather than having him, as we would expect, killed,[125] even as a purge of upper Russian military ranks proceeds,[126] all because Russia needs Wagner to fight in Ukraine.[127] Putin himself admits failure to “oust” Prigozhin.[128] And now Prigozhin says Wagner won’t fight in Ukraine.[129]

It’s possible that Prigozhin isn’t as stupid as everyone seems to think. It’s also possible that he just isn’t as stupid as Putin and the Kremlin.

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