The solution to Putin’s Prigozhin problem may be terminal
Putin’s Prigozhin fix feels temporary
Yevgeny Prigozhin was never going to take power in this weekend’s brief but dramatic uprising. Nor did Russia’s most powerful mercenary ever pose any immediate threat to Vladimir Putin. But the Wagner Group chief remains an enormous problem for the President. In the Russia that I’ve been watching for 33 years, there’s no room any more for both of them. Even with Prigozhin moving into a life of exile in Belarus, Russia’s neighbor to the west, Putin will feel cramped, and may feel compelled to clean house.
This weekend, Prigozhin became a fast ticking PR disaster for the president. With every frantic and angry video the Wagner chief sent, every bit of footage showing his tanks and troops rolling toward Moscow, the reputational fallout for Vladimir Putin grew. And I’m not talking about the Russian President’s popularity abroad. That’s irrelevant now. What matters to Vladimir Putin is what Russians think about what’s happening.
Millions of Russians were gathered around their grills last weekend, chicken and lamb skewers in one hand, phones in the other, voraciously consuming and sharing the news with one another. People say there's no free press in Russia, but Telegram, a messaging and social media app where Russian discussion groups have millions of followers, is alive with news about the war and the weekend’s jaw-dropping headline was Prigozhin’s mutiny.
Russians’ appetite for the news has been insatiable. Alongside the very serious and alarming content for the Russian browsers to digest, there’s also a healthy amount of humour and memes – poking fun at the chaos. And it’s easy to understand why. Nothing quite like this has happened since at least the attempted coup d’etat in 1991.
I’ve been living in Russia on and off since 1990, interviewed Vladimir Putin and been an eyewitness to some of the country’s biggest crises during the president’s rise to power and his 23-year reign. Russia lurched from crisis to crisis in the years between the breakup of the Soviet Union and Putin’s arrival on the scene in 1999. The young president built his brand around political stability and decisive action, achieving a state of order and calm that many Russians appreciate. Even the takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region did little to disrupt the lives of ordinary people.
That carefully crafted image has come under threat since Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine last year. Ever since then, the once unthinkable seems to be happening with increasing frequency.
Russia’s Ukraine operation failed to live up to expectations as a quick and easy victory, cross-border incursions into Russian cities, drone attacks in the country’s heartland and on the Kremlin itself contradict the self-assured narrative. Now – the most spectacular aberration of all: one of Putin’s closest allies launched an uprising, seizing one of the country’s most important military bases, taking his forces to within 130 miles of the Russian capital and threatening to fight in Moscow if he didn’t get what he wanted, only to call it off as suddenly as it started.
This entire episode couldn’t possibly be more off-script. The Kremlin has portrayed the conflict so far as a fight against the entire West. Russia is struggling, the argument goes, because it’s battling the world. But no one can suggest that Prigozhin, a wanted man in the West, is being propped up by Ukraine’s allies. There’s no external scapegoat this time.
What happens now?
Exiling Prigozhin to the neighboring country of Belarus was a practical if inelegant and imperfect solution to the escalating crisis Putin faced Saturday. It’s also consistent with Putin’s often risk-averse, pragmatic approach to problem-solving.
In Russia, problems are more easily forgotten if they’re resolved quickly, and there is some chance that Saturday’s spectacle will amount to little more than a flash in the pan…for now.
Out at their dachas, Russians were keeping time. In an anonymous poll released on Telegram as events unfolded, 29% of Russians said that this “dark patch” would be over in two days. Another 32% said in less than a week. I can’t vouch for that poll, but it feels right. I’ve witnessed many of Putin’s high stakes hostage scenarios - where hundreds of lives were risked (and lost) - and he never takes more than a few days to act. With Prigozhin, he came in ahead of schedule.
But Putin, in the service of a quick resolution, also kicked the can down the road, and he didn’t kick it very far. Belarus isn’t Barbados. It’s only a six hour drive from the Belarusian border to the Russian capital, and Putin has reason to be concerned that the can…now that it’s all shaken up, may yet explode.
Why Prigozhin is a threat
There was no one quite like Prigozhin on Russia’s political landscape. In a nation of more than 140 million yes-sayers, where it’s extremely dangerous to break with the government line, Prigozhin says whatever he thinks.
And what he thinks is that Russia’s military leadership is immoral, corrupt and incompetent. In one video last week, he essentially negated Russia’s entire justification for the war.
"The war was needed ... so that [Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu could become a marshal ... so that he could get a…medal," he said."The war wasn't needed to demilitarise or denazify Ukraine."
Prigozhin has avoided directly attacking Putin by name - in line with a centuries-old Russian tradition of never criticising the tsar himself. But there’s no confusion about who Russia’s commander in chief is.
While many of Russia’s elite despise Prigozhin for his insubordination, many outside of the ruling class respect him and see him as a man of his word. He lives by the codes of the underworld and that means he does what he says he’s going to do and takes care of his own. His mercenaries are paid on time and so are their widows (even in cash).
Prigozhin had been able to carve out a safe space for himself to speak his mind, compensation for organising both mercenaries and convicts to fight in Ukraine, and earlier for running disinformation campaigns during the last U.S. election. The Russian president is a very loyal man, but I can’t imagine him continuing to tolerate an alternate narrative about the war. If Prigozhin fails to toe the line from his new digs, something will have to be done about him.
Prigozhin reportedly received security guarantees, but he’ll be very aware that Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko, a long-time Putin ally, is in no position to protect him.
The upshot: Putin’s staying power is at risk
Russians have come to expect stability, but the mutiny undermines the perception that Putin can guarantee it. And that’s not the Russian president’s only problem.
I travelled to the Russian capital shortly after the invasion and sat down with Dmitry Trenin, then the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. I had been interviewing Trenin since 1995 and wanted to get his take on what might come next. What stuck with me was what he said about what the war might mean for Vladimir Putin.
“There are only two ways Russian leaders have been forced out of power. One, failure to feed their own people. There’s no danger of that. Two, a perception that they have mismanaged a war to the extent that it ends in defeat.”
In other words, it’s OK for a Russian leader to lose a war if it’s perceived as unwinnable. But it’s a different story if Russians feel a war could have been won, but was lost because of poor execution. Most Russians thought Ukraine was a very winnable war when it started. After all, the country took Crimea without a single casualty.
Sixteen months since the war began, Prigozhin’s rallying refrain that the war is being mismanaged, resonates with the many Russians.
I suspected that Prigozhin might be allowed to leave Russia in exchange for his eternal silence. My Russian sources called such a scenario HIGHLY unlikely and they may yet be right. Let’s see what becomes of Saturday’s “agreements.”
In a Saturday morning address, Putin described Wagner’s actions as “armed mutiny” and “treason” and described it as “a stab in the back of our troops and the people of Russia.” He said the perpetrators “will suffer inevitable punishment, will answer both to the law and to our people.”
And yet, no one involved was put behind bars - or worse. How are ordinary Russians supposed to interpret that?
Russia’s PR machine quickly kicked in with the “all clear” message before the weekend was out, focusing on Defense Minister Shoigu’s visit with the troops (without saying where he was) and trying to turn the narrative back toward the threat from the West.
“As the president noted, virtually the entire military, economic, information machine of the West is directed against us,” Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said on Monday. Interestingly, much of the official comment seemed to exaggerate the extent of the threat to the Russian state, rather than minimize it.
Whatever Prigozhin’s fate, Putin’s PR disaster will linger. As it stands, a prominent Russian has stood against the state and lived to tell the tale. This is not fixed, and Russians standing watch around their backyard barbecues will know that.
Ryan Chilcote has served as CNN’s Moscow-based Correspondent, and covered Russia for Bloomberg Television, where he hosted a television series called “Ryan’s Russia”, and most recently the PBS NewsHour, receiving a DuPont award for his part in the channel’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. Chilcote’s reporting of the Beslan hostage crisis garnered him an Emmy nomination.
Ryan has been travelling to Russia since 1990, has interviewed Vladimir Putin and produced hundreds of reports from Russia and the former Soviet Union.
Ryan Chilcote after interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on October 2, 2018.
For more on Ryan and his reporting, go to:
https://www.ryanchilcote.co.uk