The Insurrection, Coup, Civil War… Whatever It Is/Was, In Russia Grabbed All The Front Pages

Is It The End For Putin Anyway?

Yesterday we woke up to reports that the Wagner Group was in a full-scale rebellion and that Russia didn’t seem to have any troops to stop their march on Moscow. Putin gave a TV address about treason-- noted that Prigozhin, who happens to be Jewish, had stabbed Russia in the back-- and then fled on his private plane. Helicopters were firing on Wagner Group columns but without much apparent success. Reuters confirmed that Prigozhin's private Wagner militia were “in control of Rostov-on-Don, a city of more than a million people close to the border with Ukraine, and were rapidly advancing northwards through western Russia” and that one of their journalists “saw army helicopters open fire at an armed Wagner column that was advancing past the city of Voronezh with troop carriers and at least one tank on a flatbed truck. The city is more than half way along the 1,100-km (680-mile) highway from Rostov to Moscow… In Moscow, there was an increased security presence on the streets. Red Square was blocked off by metal barriers.” Russia’s army is bogged down in Ukraine— losing more territory— and unable to defend the capital!

Tom Nichols painted a picture that looked like an insipient civil war between forces loyal to Yevgeny Prigozhin and forces loyal to the ministry of defense, which Putin has now adhered to— or did before he fled Moscow for parts unknown. “The Russian government, which has long welcomed Prigozhin’s assistance in conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, has apparently had enough of all this, especially now that Prigozhin is dismantling the Kremlin’s rationalizations for the war— and by extension, making Putin look like a fool or a liar or both. The Russian security services have opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for instigating a coup and issued a warrant for his arrest, something they could only do with Putin’s approval.” Nichols posed 5 questions which he tried to answer.

1. Why is this happening, and why is it happening now?

Think of this conflict not as a contest between the Russian state and a mercenary group, but a falling out among gangsters, a kind of Mafia war.

A government doing a lot of bad things in the world can make great use of a cadre of hardened and nasty mercenaries, and Prigozhin has been making his bones for years as a tough guy leading other tough guys, ultranationalist patriots who care more about Mother Russia than the supposedly lazy and corrupt bureaucrats in Moscow. The Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, is led by a political survivor named Sergei Shoigu, who has managed to stay in the Kremlin in one capacity or another since 1991. Shoigu never served in the Soviet or Russian military, yet affects the dress and mannerisms of a martinet.

Prigozhin and Shoigu, both personally close to Putin, have good reason to hate each other. Shoigu’s forces have been humiliated in Ukraine, shown up both by the Ukrainians and Prigozhin’s mercenaries (a point Prigozhin hammers home every chance he gets). Prigozhin claims that Shoigu has withheld ammunition and supplies from Wagner, which is probably true; a defense minister is going to take care of his own forces first. The two men have a lot of bad blood between them, and Prigozhin might have been hoping to displace Shoigu or move up somehow in the Moscow power structure. But Shoigu is no rookie, and a Russian Defense Ministry edict was about to go into force requiring all mercenaries to sign up with the Russian military, which would place them under Shoigu’s control.

This order was likely an important part of the conflict we’re seeing now. I do not know why the Russians would hit Wagner’s forces— or whether that is what happened— but the tension between Prigozhin and Shoigu was unsustainable. Prigozhin, however, is a hothead, and this time, he has gone too far, essentially forcing Putin to choose between them. The fact that there is now an arrest warrant out for the Wagner chief means that Putin is siding with his defense minister; meanwhile, the Russian security service, the FSB, called Prigozhin’s actions a “stab in the back” for Russia’s soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

My friend and veteran Russia-watcher Nikolas Gvosdev summed it up to me tonight by saying that Prigozhin might be the better fighter and leader, but Putin is choosing loyalty over competence. As Michael Corleone might say: It’s the smart move.

2. Is this the outbreak of civil war in Russia?

A full-scale civil conflict— for now— seems unlikely, if only because Prigozhin has no institutional base and no major force beyond his fighters, who are a pretty unsavory bunch. He claims that his forces have entered Rostov, but it’s unclear if that’s happened. (If Wagner’s troops gain control of Rostov, they could seize more arms and imperil Russian military supply lines in Ukraine.) Prigozhin is, in any case, making a dangerous appeal to the anger and desolation of the regular Russian military, the men who’ve been taking a beating in Ukraine, asking them to stand aside as he hunts down the defense minister.

While civil war might not be in the offing, someone in Moscow seems worried. Russian television has reported the story tonight by denouncing Prigozhin’s claims of an attack as lies, and noting the criminal case now open against him. Weirdly, two Russian generals thought it was a good idea to issue grim videos asking the military to ignore Prigozhin’s appeals. One of them is General Sergei Surovikin, the supposedly iron-fisted leader Putin appointed last year to destroy Ukrainian resistance. He failed and Putin fired him.

Surovikin appeared on camera with a rifle in his lap and spoke in a slow and halting voice. “The enemy,” he said, “is just waiting for our internal political situation to deteriorate.” Such appeals from senior military people raise another possibility.

3. If it’s not a civil war, is it a coup— with support in Moscow for removing Putin?

Prigozhin in the past was always careful to avoid criticizing Putin, instead blasting Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov. After a year and a half of disasters in Ukraine, however, a lot of angry officers in Moscow may well agree with Prigozhin and want Shoigu and Gerasimov gone— and might well be holding Putin responsible for not firing them. But Shoigu is Putin’s man, and while that relationship is clearly under a great deal of strain, opposing the minister of defense and threatening the stability of the ruling clique in the Kremlin during wartime are not small things.

Right now, none of this looks organized enough to be a coup. But coups sometimes look ridiculous in the offing— the 1991 coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a complete clown show— so the possibility remains that Prigozhin has friends in Moscow who are working with him. Military failure has been known to threaten the stability of Russia’s governments in the past, as Russian imperial leaders endured in 1905 and then again, for the last time, in 1917.

4. Does any of this endanger the United States or NATO?

Instability in a nuclear-armed country is always worrying. For now, although the Kremlin is likely in turmoil, there is no evidence of imminent violence or government crack-up. Russian nuclear control is likely divided among Putin, Shoigu, and Gerasimov, and none of them have vanished or been displaced (as far as we can tell). That’s the good news.

Of more concern is the possibility that Prigozhin’s gambit all along was the leading edge of an effort by hard-right Russian nationalists to push Putin to be even more violent in Ukraine, more confrontational with the West, and perhaps even to provoke a conflict with NATO. So far, tonight’s chaos does not seem to involve the U.S., NATO, or even Ukraine, but a fight among Russian gangsters, in part over whether Russia is being brutal enough in a war of unprovoked aggression, is something to watch.

For now, with Wagner out of the picture— or perhaps even in open revolt against Russian regular forces— the Ukrainians have caught a break. But there are still a lot of bad things that can happen in Moscow in the next few days, or even hours. As the political scientist and Eurasia Group president, Ian Bremmer, noted tonight: “Putin’s never looked weaker than right now, in the Ukraine war, and at home, which is welcome— and extremely dangerous.”

5. Now what?

The fact that Prigozhin’s threats could make the Kremlin’s teeth clench to the point of issuing alerts and emergency news broadcasts suggests that Prigozhin is not the only angry ultranationalist out there. It’s also possible that none of this is true, that this is not a coup so much as it is a settling of accounts among a group of violent and terrible men. Perhaps Prigozhin is just a hard case who thought he could move to Moscow by stomping on Shoigu’s neck, literally and figuratively, and he overplayed his hand. But no matter how this ends, Prigozhin has shattered Putin’s narrative, torching the war as a needless and even criminal mistake. That’s a problem for Putin that could outlast this rebellion.

A few hours later, The Atlantic published a piece by Anne Applebaum, Russia Slides Into Civil War, doubting that even experts (like herself) can know with any certainty what the motive of the key players are, especially Prigozhin who claims to command 25,000 fighters. “Prigozhin,” she wrote, “has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to ‘paranoid tantrums.’ Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.”

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” The snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war— all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city— once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov— and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”— there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile— we have no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, because so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it), you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler), of Bellingcat, and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev), formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open-source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke with him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress,” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB security service, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think— though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play— Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin— are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that Shoigu, the defense minister, come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation this morning. A Telegram channel that is believed to represent Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months— years, really— Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a facade of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.

Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: They failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.

There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance this morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.

Late yesterday, in another Atlantic column, Nichols wrote that Putin who was, almost needless to say, backed by Trump during the coup, is in big trouble. “The Russian dictator,” he wrote,”has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game. Putin reportedly worries a great deal about being assassinated, and so perhaps he wanted to hunker down until he had more clarity about who might be in league with Prigozhin. But whatever the reason, he vowed to deal with Prigozhin decisively and then blew town, probably to his retreat at Valdai, in a move that looked weak and disorganized… [Putin] is now politically weaker than ever. The once unchallengeable czar is no longer invincible. The master of the Kremlin had to make a deal with a convict— again, in Putin’s culture, among the lowest of the low— just to avert the shock and embarrassment of an armed march into the Russian capital while other Russians are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine… [T]wo things appear certain. First, Putin has suffered a huge political blow, and he has survived by making deals both with 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. Prigozhin’s rebellion and its effects will last beyond today, but how long he will live in Belarus— or stay alive in Belarus— to see how the rest of it plays out is unclear.”

Last night troops loyal to the government were desperate to prepare defenses around Moscow, including anti-tank ditches dug into main highways! The Guardian reported that “Photos and video from Moscow have shown the Russian government establishing checkpoints at the southern outskirts of the city guarded by sandbagged machine-gun emplacements, and infantry fighting vehicles patrolling the city near government buildings, including the Kremlin and State Duma. Prigozhin was seen with a second detachment of troops that captured the headquarters of the southern military district in the city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday. Those troops appeared to be entrenching themselves in the city, laying mines and establishing checkpoints. A resistance there could be ‘very messy,’ said one military expert, considering Wagner’s extensive experience at urban combat during the battle for Bakhmut… A former defense official said Russia’s defensive forces were severely depleted, with most combat-ready units currently engaged in Ukraine. It may be difficult for law enforcement agencies to engage the Wagner detachment, the person said.”

Moscow’s mayor has told citizens to stay in their homes and has declared Monday a no-work day. Then, late Saturday Putin’s puppet in Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, announced that Prigozhin accepted a proposal to “stop the movement of armed persons of the Wagner company on the territory of Russia and take further steps to de-escalate tensions.” This was widely reported by official Russian media but Prigozhin was uncharacteristically quiet for hours until finally announcing that his fighters advancing on Moscow would turn back: "They wanted to disband Wagner. We set out on June 23 for the ‘March of Justice.’ In a day we marched just short of 200 km from Moscow. During this time, we have not shed a single drop of the blood of our fighters. Now is the moment when blood can be shed. Realizing all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed, we are turning our columns around and leaving in the opposite direction, to our field camps, according to the plan.” With the Wagner troops also starting to withdraw from Rostov-on-Don I wondered what Putin had promised Prigozhin. So far all we know is that Putin is dropping the charges against him and letting him move to Belarus under Lukashenko's protection. I'm sure there's more to it than that.

Yesterday, Foreign Affairs featured a timely conversation between executive editor Justin Vogt and preeminent Russia historian Stephen Kotkin. Everyone wants to know what happens from here but Kotkin began by talking about what a big mistake it is for Putin to be social media obtuse and illiterate, unable to match Prigozhin. “I have,” said Kotkin, “long been calling the Putin regime ‘hollow yet still strong.’ It remained, and remains, viable as long as there is no political alternative. Now, we might see just how hollow the regime is. Putin has unwittingly launched a stress test of his own regime. He had already lost his mystique with the bungling of the aggression against Ukraine. Mystique, once lost, is near impossible to regain. The old cliché about the emperor and clothes. He still possesses enormous power, rooted in structures he built around himself, such as his Praetorian Guard, and those he unbuilt— his razing of the landscape of political possibilities besides himself, and severe repression to demobilize the populace. There is one thing that all dictators properly fear: an alternative. And Putin, shockingly, after years and years of indefatigably suppressing alternatives, of promoting nonentities to his inner circle to ensure no one could threaten him, has allowed one to take shape.”

Authoritarian regimes build up formidable military and security services, but these are purposely divided against themselves by the leader, to control them, to make them dependent on him. The leader deliberately gives them overlapping jurisdictions, heightens their inherent rivalries at every turn, and sits back and watches, usually with glee. But in this case, Putin has conjured up his own nemesis.

I’ve been saying for some time that the way to get Putin’s attention, to destabilize his regime, was to identify and recruit a defector from the inside, a Russian nationalist, a person who appeals to Putin’s base, but one who recognized the separate existence of a Ukrainian nation and state. Preferably a defector in uniform. And Putin has gifted us a candidate.

It’s early. We have to be careful not to indulge in wishful thinking. Coups in Russia have a terrible track record. Globally, almost every coup fails. The odds are long. But now, at least, there are odds.

It’s easy to dismiss Prigozhin as a lowlife, a commander of some death squads— militia figures who had been imprisoned for murder or rape and whom he personally recruited in penal colonies. He himself served a long prison term, by some accounts nine years. But he also in some ways represents an alternative that might have appeal: an authoritarian Russian nationalist who recognizes the war is a mistake and, whether fully intentionally or not, effectively ends the war, or at least the current active phase of it. That’s the one kind of person who could threaten Putin— and Putin did nothing as it unfolded in real time, on videos that the whole world watched.

Prigozhin might seem to be an unlikely contender. But in some ways his background is more suitable to the moment than Putin’s. Both are from St. Petersburg, but Prigozhin, despite serving time, is from the intelligentsia. His mother is an artist; she runs a gallery in London. He speaks better Russian than Putin. In terms of social class, he’s actually a level above Putin. And Prigozhin’s artistic side is visible in his videos. He cannot count (his math is terrible, another revelation of his videos). But look at his pithy and pointed vocabulary, his cadences, his ability to assume the role of tough guy, heart-on-the-sleeve Russian patriot, the truth teller who calls out the opportunists, the morons, and the thieves Putin has appointed.

To an extent, Prigozhin appears to have learned from [Russian dissident] Alexei Navalny’s superlative video performances. Navalny is still alive. He is in prison, facing renewed sentencing on trumped-up charges. As long as he’s alive, he too represents an alternative. Another Russian nationalist, of a very different stripe to be sure, but one who also says out loud that the war was a terrible idea and is hurting Russia.

…Here’s the bottom line: even if it is now snuffed out, an alternative was allowed to arise. All this unfolded in real time, on video, over months and months. Putin did not intervene earlier and allowed things to get to this point. Stunning. Either he has descended into utter incompetence or he has less operational control than his media machine has been letting on. Or both. I expected him to be better at Authoritarianism 101. I expected him to understand this was the one threat in real time. I expected him to end the games, end the pitting of rivals against each other to control them, because it had become dangerous to him personally. I overestimated him. I would not want to make the opposite mistake and underestimate him now, though.

And, as David Ignatius put it last night, "Putin looked into the abyss Saturday and blinked. After vowing revenge for what he called an ‘armed mutiny,’ he settled for a compromise. The speed with which Putin backed down suggests that his sense of vulnerability might be higher even than analysts believed. Putin might have saved his regime Saturday, but this day will be remembered as part of the unraveling of Russia as a great power— which will be Putin’s true legacy."