Though they’ve avoided open bloodshed, it is hard to imagine that Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin will ever be reconciled. The Russian leader has a political motive to deal harshly with his maverick warlord or risk appearing weak, a cardinal sin in Kremlin politics. And the Russian leader has never been known as one to forgive a betrayal.
The extraordinary events of the past 48 hours – Prigozhin’s armed mutiny, Putin’s call for “brutal” reprisals, an 11th-hour peace deal – might appear to have resolved themselves. The leader of the Wagner mercenary group has halted his armed mutiny and march on the Russian capital, apparently in exchange for an amnesty and exile in Belarus. He is no longer on course for civil war with Moscow.
And yet, few believe this is the end of the affair. At some point Prigozhin will surely have to pick up the tab for his foray into revolutionary politics. And Putin must make good on the threats that he issued on national television on Saturday or make an embarrassing about-face during the most dangerous days of his 23 years as Russia’s supreme leader.
The real cost of Prigozhin’s uprising is still being assessed, but it has seriously damaged the prestige of Russia’s army, which inexplicably failed to stop the insurrection, and undermined the sense that Russia can remain stable even as it unleashes daily violence on neighbouring Ukraine.
During their campaign, Prigozhin’s armed mutineers shot down at least two helicopters and killed around 15 Russian service personnel, many of them airmen.
Mercenaries armed by the Kremlin occupied a Russian city of more than 1 million people for a day. People in the city saw Prigozhin off as a hero, a spontaneous, raucous reception that Putin will doubtless be jealous of.
Russian armed forces dug anti-tank trenches into federal highways, cancelled trains and flights from much of southern Russia, closed museums and parks, and declared Monday a holiday in Moscow as they announced a counterterrorist operation.
Baza, a Russian news agency with sources in law enforcement, said Prigozhin had sent 1,000 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, and other military hardware toward Moscow, a convoy with the potential to plunge the Russian capital into chaos.
Even as Russians in Moscow and Rostov continued about their daily life on Saturday, it was clear that the country’s stability was a mirage, and that Muscovites could wake up with Wagner soldiers on the Arbat or tank fire on the streets, bringing back memories of the chaos of the early 1990s. That illusion has a price as well.
Most tellingly, Putin came on TV to make a nationwide address, something he has done only twice in the course of the war, to tell the public he would put down Prigozhin’s uprising brutally, describing it as “internal treason”.
Since then, he has been silent and failed to keep that promise, instead allowing Prigozhin to strike a deal through Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko and potentially leave Russia for exile.
On its face, the deal looks ridiculous. Prigozhin has always been a risk-taker, according to those who know him, and not one to sit in exile in Belarus while his mercenary army is dismantled. It is unclear why he would accept security guarantees from Lukashenko, a wily politician who nonetheless is under significant pressure from Russia. And why would Putin allow a potential rival to remain in a neighbouring country, when it would be far simpler to have him killed or imprisoned?
The Russian leader does not suffer betrayal and is known to divide those who oppose him into two categories: enemies and traitors. Former spies who defected to the west such as Sergei Skripal have found that Putin can wait years to seek revenge.
Nor does he suffer challengers, a fact illustrated strikingly by the assassinations and imprisonment of much of Russia’s opposition. He will have noticed that Prigozhin’s march helped to unleash some of the pent-up anger among Russians who may not oppose the war or feel any sympathy for Ukrainians but are nonetheless angry at their own elites and the perceived injustices of daily life.
Andrei Kolesnikov, the columnist and Carnegie analyst, writes in a forthcoming piece shared with the Guardian that Prigozhin was escorted out of Rostov-on-Don as a hero by people “grateful for the show in the middle of a dull reality”.
Prigozhin may have been betting on Putin joining his rebellion, giving the president the option of shrugging off the failures of the war in Ukraine. Alexander Baunov, a former diplomat and analyst writing for the Carnegie Endowment, said that Prigozhin’s denunciations of the war and of the army were actually an invitation for Putin to join in his march, and allow him to once again assume the role of the outsider taking on a system of corrupt and ineffectual generals. It failed.
The core of the anger on the streets of Moscow was anti-elitism, he said, a vein of anger that Prigozhin could tap into by cultivating a populist following.
Baunov wrote: “Prigozhin shifted responsibility not only for failures and losses, but also for the very beginning of the war from Putin to Shoigu and other corrupt officials, as if inviting the president to join the march on the ministry of defence and more broadly on the entire Russian system and even lead it.”
But he failed, Baunov said, and in doing so opened an “incurable wound” in the Russian elite, as both sides accuse the other of betrayal.
