The rebellion ended as quickly as it began. Less than a day after Wagner Group mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin led thousands of his men into Russia and made a beeline toward Moscow, he called it off and pulled them back. In a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin received immunity from prosecution — Russia’s Federal Security Service charged him with an act of insurrection, which carries a 20-year prison sentence — exile in Belarus and the ability to live another day. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been atop the Russian system for nearly 24 years, averted what was the most serious threat to his rule.
The standoff between the two men is over, at least for now. Prigozhin’s forces have pulled out of Rostov-on-Don, the southern city of 1 million people that Wagner captured with no resistance from Russian security forces. In his first comments since striking an arrangement with Moscow, Prigozhin defended his actions as a response to “an injustice” his fighters were subjected to by the Russian military establishment. Putin is back in the Kremlin after Moscow was essentially locked down over the weekend. All is apparently back to normal after a dizzying 24 hours.
Public facades, however, can be deceiving. Putin and Prigozhin have come out of the episode physically unscathed, and both will do their best to convince the Russian people that they emerged from the chaos as the victor. Yet the facts point in a different direction: There are no winners in this story. Putin and Prigozhin both lost. The Russian political system as it has existed since Putin rose to national leadership in 1999 is starting to look like an old toilet that doesn’t run properly.
Public appearances are important for Putin. But the optics have been terrible for him since Saturday. He no longer looks like the archetypical strongman who has a commanding hand on the system he leads. (U.S. intelligence officials suspected something was bubbling at least a week ago.) Instead, Prigozhin exposed him as a mere mortal who was clueless that something like this could occur under his watch.
Yes, the insurrection was aborted, the Wagner Group retreated and Putin managed to de-escalate the situation without much blood being spilt. But it’s impossible to see the aborted rebellion as anything other than a public humiliation for a man who doesn’t tolerate public humiliations. The list of those humiliations is long and deep. Putin had to negotiate with someone, Prigozhin, he called a traitor just hours earlier. He decided to allow the person responsible for the short mutiny to leave, this after he pledged to the Russian people that those who played a part in it “will pay for this.” Resistance from the Russian army was pitiful; Wagner managed to shoot down seven Russian military aircraft and came within less than 200 miles of Moscow. When push came to shove, the only troops that were apparently ready for combat were Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s band of fighters.
“Putin made himself look not as a commander in chief, but rather as a leader for rent or an AI-generated clone of himself,” Vladislav Zubok of the London School of Economics told me. “His appearance at the time when Moscow was asleep reminded some of October crisis of 1993. He suppressed his emotions, but people could sense he lost his usual self-confidence and did not know what to say.” Putin seemed listless, as if he were an old man sitting on a rocking chair, oblivious to what was going on around him.
On the surface, Prigozhin looks newly emboldened, a man of action brazen enough to roll the dice against the entire Russian state to rid the country of military leadership he views as wimpish, careless and incompetent. Civilians cheerfully greeted his men as liberators in Rostov-on-Don, giving Wagnerites food and water. Prigozhin was smiling for selfies, as if he were an American politician on the campaign trail in Iowa.
Prigozhin, however, would be utterly stupid to think that he’s in the clear or that he bested Putin. For one, the charges against him haven’t yet been dropped. Until that happens, he is still technically a wanted man. Even if authorities eventually close the criminal case against him, Prigozhin will live the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. The list of people who have crossed Putin and lived to tell the tale isn’t very long: High-profile political dissidents (Boris Nemtsov), journalists (Anna Politkovskaya) and ex-spies (Alexander Litvinenko) have all been killed by the Russian state. If Russian assassins can kill traitors in the middle of a park in Berlin, they can do the same thing in next-door Belarus.
Finally, Prigozhin’s entire creation is now in the crosshairs. Putin used to look at the Wagner Group as a valuable extension of the Russian state — a group of battle-hardened fighters who allowed Moscow to project influence in places as far afield as the Central African Republic without having to dirty up the regular Russian army. That interpretation is most likely tarnished now.
“I think that Russia has become overly reliant on Wagner, and it has served as the tip of the spear of Russian foreign policy,” Colin Clarke of the global security consultancy Soufan Group told me. “I’m not sure the Kremlin can carry out its objectives without Wagner, or a similar private military company, so I’d suspect there are some real conversations happening in Moscow about how to proceed.”
A lot of real conversations in Moscow are occurring at the moment, no doubt.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
