Vladimir Putin tried this week to show he was firmly in control after the dramatic attempted mutiny by mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin.
But among the Kremlin and business elite, many powerful players aren’t buying it.
A banana republic was the phrase one used to describe the spectacle of Prigozhin leading his column of tanks and fighters to within 124 miles of Moscow and then being allowed to leave for neighboring Belarus without facing criminal charges. Another said the Russian president’s botched handling of the uprising was more of a shock than Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine last year.
For many insiders, the dramatic events shredded what remained of Putin’s carefully crafted image as the guarantor of "stability." The upheaval underlined how the 70-year-old leader is increasingly out of touch and unable to control events the way he once did, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss such sensitive issues.
As Putin strives to reassert his grip on power, the turmoil only deepened the anxiety and alarm about the country’s direction that many among the economic and business elite have been feeling since the February 2022 invasion, they said. Some worried it could lead to even more repression inside Russia.
“It was obvious that Prigozhin was getting out of control but most thought it wouldn’t reach an open armed outburst. It did,” said Yevgeny Minchenko, a Moscow-based political consultant. “All the elite groups are trying to build up their own security resource because it’s now clear that force matters.”
To some, Putin’s public efforts to appear on top of the situation looked foolish, only emphasizing the obvious reality of how ineffective and weak the events had shown his leadership to be, the people said.
For all the alarm among members of the elite, the insiders said they see no alternative to Putin. Despite the shock, there are many people who do see Putin as a stable leader, the people said. They still depend on his patronage and protection for their prosperity and security as the war and sanctions have cut off many of their remaining overseas ties.
On Tuesday, state TV showed Putin meeting top security officials and military officers in the Kremlin, sternly thanking them for their support.
But he gave no explanation for why he allowed Prigozhin, a former protege whose rebellion he blamed for the deaths of troops who tried to stop it, to leave without punishment. Instead, he said that his government had paid Wagner more than $3 billion over the last year and wasn’t sure how all the money had been spent.
Putin’s assertion that the quick end of the 24-hour revolt had shown the unity of Russians behind him was belied by footage of adoring crowds cheering Prigozhin and his fighters as they pulled out of a southern city they’d occupied.
The president continued to work the phones with friendly leaders, seeking to explain the events in a call with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and others around the globe.
But his closest ally, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko allowed himself a rare public jab at the Russian leader’s overconfidence.
“We got the situation wrong,” Lukashenko said in an outspoken postmortem Tuesday to local media about his role in brokering the deal that defused the uprising. “Both Putin and I thought it would just go away on its own — well, to be honest, I didn’t really think that, but it doesn’t matter. But it didn’t go away on its own.”
There were signs that hard-liners who had supported Prigozhin’s criticisms of the military leadership for failing to prosecute the war in Ukraine aggressively enough were mounting a push for greater influence, insiders said.
“This was not a coup attempt but it certainly opens the door for a possibility like this in the near term,” said Alina Polyakova, president of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington.
But pressure was growing from the camp that has argued for a sweeping expansion of the war effort including a Soviet-style broad mobilization of civilians and the economy. So far, Putin has resisted those steps, seeking to insulate Russian society from the impact of the war in order to ensure public support.
“We’ve seen only the first episode so far and a sequel will follow,” said Nikolay Petrov, a visiting fellow at the Berlin-based SWP think-tank. “The beneficiaries are the party of supporters of escalation, who are behind Prigozhin, which, with or without a weak Putin, will try to replay the failed war.
“Maintaining the status quo, which was good for Putin, now looks impossible,” he added.
For the moment, the Kremlin continued its public support for Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, a close Putin ally who had been Prigozhin’s main public target.
But domestic security forces will now get tanks and other heavy weapons they had previously been denied, Viktor Zolotov, the longtime Putin ally who heads the National Guard, said Tuesday, according to Tass. He gave no explanation for how that plan fit with Kremlin assertions that there was no further risk of upheaval. On the contrary, Zolotov said, “This is a very acute issue now.”
In a sign of a further crackdown, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, ordered a probe into who among state officials and corporate executives had left the country during the crisis, demanding those who did be publicly punished.
Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist whose influence has surged amid the war, warned of worse unrest if Putin doesn’t carry out “personnel changes in several key agencies” in a commentary published Tuesday.
“If we don’t change anything, the catastrophe will repeat itself and this time it will be fatal,” he said.
