After the mayhem, the messaging.
In the aftermath of Wagner’s aborted weekend uprising, Vladimir Putin and his obedient media networks are trying to craft a narrative of the unrest that paints the Russian president and the system he presides over in the best possible light.
“As Vladimir Putin said a few minutes ago … a civil war has been prevented in Russia,” a news anchor intoned sternly at the top of the bulletin on Tuesday afternoon.
Shortly before, Putin had addressed more than 2,000 law enforcement and military figures assembled in a square inside the Kremlin walls, thanking them for their service.
“You have defended the constitutional order, the lives, security and freedom of our citizens,” he told them. “You have saved our Motherland from upheaval. In fact, you have stopped a civil war.”
Even for Putin’s usually nimble propagandists, painting the shocking events of the weekend as a win for the Kremlin is proving a hard sell. At the same time as claiming the country was on the brink of civil war, Putin and the state television networks have insisted that the uprising enjoyed no real support and was always doomed to failure.
On one leading talk show, guests agreed with Putin that it was “the tremendous unity of the Russian people” against the coup attempt that had doomed it to failure, a remarkable rewriting of a public response that was, at best, moderately apprehensive about the prospect of conflict, and which saw no sizeable displays of spontaneous support for the government.
Even harder to explain away is how a regime that prides itself on predictability could have allowed this to happen. State television has trumpeted political stability as a key achievement of the Putin system for two decades. That stability has been severely eroded since last February’s decision to launch a full-scale assault on Ukraine, but the ease with which a former minion could turn on Putin and order his troops to march on Moscow is an extremely awkward fact.
On normally raucous political talk shows on Tuesday, guests seemed unsure which points were fair game to make and which were off limits. Some, taking Putin’s cue, refused to mention Prigozhin by name, while others called him a terrorist and said he would face serious punishment. It was mostly left unsaid that security services have quietly dropped their case against a man who threatened an armed insurrection at the weekend, and that Prigozhin has simply been allowed to retreat to Belarus.
From Minsk, the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, gave his version of the weekend’s events on Tuesday in a long and rambling address full of behind-the-scenes insight into his phone calls with Putin that the Kremlin is unlikely to thank him for making public.
Lukashenko took credit for resolving the crisis, claiming that when he first spoke to Putin, the Russian leader had said there was no point trying to mediate as Prigozhin would not speak to anyone. “Look, it’s pointless,” Lukashenko claimed Putin told him. “He’s not picking up. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”
Lukashenko said he subsequently did manage to get through to Prigozhin, and after listening to “half an hour of swearing” managed to talk down the Wagner leader and strike a deal to avoid bloodshed. He also claimed to have talked Putin out of killing Prigozhin.
“I said to Putin: ‘Yes we could take him out, it wouldn’t be a problem, if it doesn’t work the first time then it would the second.’ I told him: ‘Don’t do it, because afterwards there will be no negotiations and these guys will be ready to do anything,’” Lukashenko claimed.
Lukashenko has long been more frenemy than friend for Putin, and the Russian leader will not have enjoyed having to publicly thank his neighbouring dictator for “help” in solving an internal Russian crisis, let alone Lukashenko’s subsequent “candour” over his role in the drama.
Russian television news ignored the many embarrassing segments of Lukashenko’s address, focusing instead on reinforcing Putin’s questionable claim that the lesson of the weekend was that the Russian people are united against any threats.
The goal of this rhetoric is “to rewrite the narrative of Prigozhin’s putsch as one of consolidation and consensus”, Sam Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London, wrote on Twitter.
“Putin’s rhetoric is aimed as much at the elite as at the masses: ‘See,’ he’s saying. ‘Everyone’s with me, so don’t jump ship.’ The question is whether the elite buy it,” he said.
