Days after Russia extricated itself from its biggest domestic political crisis in decades, President Vladimir Putin and the Wagner mercenary chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, continue to deal with the reverberations. Amid the uncertainties, this much is clear: the saga has produced no winners, only losers. Belarus’s president Aleksandr Lukashenko put it well, even as he drew attention to his role as peacemaker: “I asked people not to make a hero out of me, neither out of me, nor out of Putin, nor out of Prigozhin.”
For Putin, the consequences of the turmoil are obvious. The Wagner group’s unimpeded march to within 200km (127 miles) of Moscow took Russia’s military and intelligence services by surprise and exposed the Russian system writ large as utterly inept – a far cry from the image of competence and strength that Putin has cultivated assiduously since rising to the presidency in 1999. Wagner’s capture of Rostov – a city of a million and the headquarters of the southern military district – and its northward march toward the capital along the M4 highway left Russia’s strongman looking like a hapless bystander. That, at minimum, tarnished his image – an essential ingredient of his overweening power.
Despite Prigozhin’s insistence that he and his men were not out to unseat Putin, the entire affair ended up drawing attention to the Russian defense ministry’s overall mismanagement of the war in Ukraine. That war, it has to be said, is Putin’s war through and through. An attack on the Russian generals running the day-to-day war effort is thus an attack on Putin as well.
In a 27 June speech, Putin assured the Russian people that all was well, that he had been on top of things all along and ordered the security forces to stand down to prevent fratricidal bloodletting. What Putin left out was that he relied on a foreign president, Lukashenko, to end the mayhem and agreed to drop criminal charges against Prigozhin, the same man Putin described hours earlier as a traitor out to foment revolt against the Russian state.
Whether Putin negotiated out of fear or out of a desire to prevent civil war is irrelevant; the fact remains that he came to the table and offered significant concessions to get himself out of a situation he was ill-prepared to handle.
While some analysts have argued that Putin’s rule was never truly threatened by the rebellion, Putin’s actions suggest he believed otherwise. Security forces in Moscow were placed on high alert. The M4 highway was blocked to seal off the capital. At least two oligarchs reportedly fled in their private jets. The internet was censored to prevent the spread of Prigozhin’s defiant statements, though he turned to the popular messaging app, Telegram, to rally support.
Russians both inside and outside the elite doubtless noticed all this. As one Russian businessman said, “Putin showed the entire world and the elite he is no one and not capable of doing anything. It is a total collapse of his reputation.” Putin hasn’t been mortally wounded, but he had faced his first full-blown insurrection – one he couldn’t handle with the competence and decisiveness critical to his aura.
Yet Prigozhin hasn’t won either. Barring a political crisis in Russia that allows him to re-emerge, his political prominence has ended. His enormous wealth is at risk and his connections to the high and mighty have been severed – both depended on his close ties to Putin, which date back to the 1990s, when the latter was St Petersburg’s deputy mayor.
The Wagner group’s future remains unclear. Some of its soldiers may join Prigozhin in Belarus. The remainder will find other callings or sign contracts with the Russian ministry of defense. Wagner’s operations in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic may continue, but the future of those is uncertain as well. Wagner will never be what it was, in Russia or abroad.
While Prigozhin’s challenge to the Russian authorities may be over – at least for the time being – his words and deeds will reverberate within and beyond the Kremlin. While he was very much a member of the Russian elite, Prigozhin’s scathing attacks on those running the war in Ukraine highlighted some indisputable truths.
The Russian army is no closer to “demilitarizing” Ukraine than it was 16 months ago. Aside from the recent capture of Bakhmut, which has been reduced to rubble after nearly a year of artillery barrages and the taking of the nearby town Soledar in January, Russians troops have not gained any new ground since the spring of 2022. Though the figure has been disputed, the US Defense Intelligence Agency assessed in April that the Russian army has sustained as many as 43,000 fatalities in less than a year and a half – nearly three times what the Soviet army lost during its decade-long occupation of Afghanistan (the same assessment placed the high end of Ukraine’s troop fatalities at 17,500).
These sacrifices have netted Russia less than 20% of Ukraine’s territory, which some 300,000 Russian soldiers are now defending from a western-supplied Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Russian army’s performance has been lackluster and the war shows no sign of ending on terms that Putin can credibly spin as a victory.
Prigozhin, despite his man-of-the-people proclamations, was part of the Russian plutocracy. Still, his savaging of the Russian elite’s corruption, ill-gotten wealth and opulent lifestyles likely resonate with many ordinary Russians. Prigozhin, donning combat fatigues and a flak jacket, cut a stunning contrast to Putin, who remained in the Kremlin or in his plush residences at Novo-Ogaryovo and on the Black Sea. As Prigozhin pointed out more than once, Russia’s generals sit comfortably in their offices, far from the battlefields and safe from the consequences of their bad decisions. The mercenary boss also took aim at the offspring of the rich and powerful, including defense minister Sergei Shoigu’s son, Danila, who has been spotted vacationing in Turkey.
Prigozhin may disappear from the center stage of politics – or even vanish altogether. But he may well have provided a script that some future rebel might use to indict the system and rally support against it. That could be his enduring legacy.
Rajan Menon is the director of the grand strategy program at Defense Priorities, a professor emeritus at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York, and the co-author of Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order
Daniel R DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek
