The Russia rebellion: ‘A bizarre game of chicken in which Putin & Prigozhin both chickened out’

‘MAFIA KINGDOM’: The Kremlin. Picture by Alex Zarubi

The Accidental Diplomat, a column by Paul Knott

The weakness of Putin’s regime has been starkly exposed by Prigozhin’s brief advance on Moscow

The situation in Russia remains confused after last weekend’s bizarre game of chicken between President Vladimir Putin and warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin – in which both chickened out once they realised the risk to themselves.

On Saturday morning as his rebellion gathered pace, Prigozhin declared himself to be “ready to die”. By that evening he was ready to take a big cheque and a house in Belarus instead. Meanwhile, Putin quickly went into hiding, from where he vowed to punish the mutineers before later agreeing to let them off scot-free, despite their having just killed thirteen Russian servicemen and taken their insurrection most of the way to Moscow. 

But no deal between people like Putin, Prigozhin and those in power in Russia means much. They are not politicians, government officials or military leaders in the way we might commonly understand those titles. Rather, in terms of how they think and act, they are better understood as Mafia gangs – minus the supposed “men of honour” code much-loved by Hollywood in its fictional portrayals of mobsters. Most of what they do is focused solely on putting themselves in positions that enable them to steal as much as possible. 

As such, the supposed “agreement” between the regime and Prigozhin’s Wagner mob is likely to go out of the window (as indeed Prigozhin might yet too), as soon as it suits either’s self-interest to ditch it. Indeed, Putin’s angry speech on Monday denouncing those who committed treason suggests it is already unravelling. 

Another important aspect to understand is the nonsense of Prigozhin and the Kremlin’s claim that his Wagner organisation is a “private military contractor” – or mercenary force, in common parlance. To all intents and purposes, Wagner is an arm of the Russian state. It was built up with the connivance of the Kremlin to do its dirty work whenever it wanted some degree of deniability or needed to bypass the corrupt and cumbersome command structure of the official Russian armed forces. Although in the weird world of Kremlin double-speak they also sometimes liked people to know that Wagner is in fact state connected, for the purposes of fearmongering.   

Until the deniability part of this odd equation was abandoned when the Kremlin needed Wagner’s help with the mess it had got itself into in Ukraine, Wagner was mostly sent to places like Syria and the Central African Republic to brutally prop up various vile Russia-aligned regimes. In exchange, Prigozhin and co. are permitted to hoover up those countries’ precious raw materials to sell illicitly, pocketing the proceeds after paying the required kickbacks in Moscow.  

The rise of Wagner was in keeping with Putin’s Mafia boss way of operating. He has always found it useful to set up rival power structures beneath him, so that he can play them off against one another and referee their squabbles, thus making himself the kingpin. Such a system, he believed, also stops anyone getting strong enough to challenge him. 

‘PUTIN’S ROTTEN SYSTEM IS DECAYING AROUND HIM’: Picture by Don Fontijn

In this, as in so much else, Putin has miscalculated. Putin helped to build up Prigozhin from being a minor thug whose early career included being sentenced to 12 years in prison for a string of violent burglaries and involving minors in crime, to the point where he got too much of a taste for power, money and notoriety.

Having started to outlive his usefulness and pushed his luck too far with his criticisms of the Kremlin regime and threats to the leadership of the regular army, Prigozhin appears to have realised that the walls were closing in on him and his Wagner gang. The desire to preserve their lives and their lucrative criminal operations overseas appears to have been the main motivation for their brief going rogue escapade last Saturday.  

No-one outside of those directly involved in Russia can possibly know with any certainty what will happen next. 

What we do know for sure is the weakness of the Putin regime has been starkly exposed by Prigozhin’s ragbag of violent criminals travelling 800 kilometres unopposed up the motorway towards Moscow, taking control of major cities along the way. The lack of any effective response by the official armed forces or even significant expressions of support for Putin, from domestic or international sources, during these hours revealed him to be anything but the “strongman” or “master strategist” he has previously been portrayed as. 

Putin’s main tools of maintaining power – fear and the illusion of control – are now almost as shot to pieces as his sense of judgement. His disastrous invasion of Ukraine had already revealed this as having been wrecked by years of paranoid self-isolation from objective information and everyone except the most craven yes-men on the make. 

It is certainly possible that Putin’s rule could now collapse quickly and suddenly. But my best educated guess, based on years of working on and observing Russian politics, is that he will hang on for a little while yet as the rotten system he has built decays around him. 

With grim irony, it is this ruinous system which may save him in the short-term. In order to reduce any threat to him, Putin has placed snakes, thieves and mediocrities (most are all three) in pretty much every high-level position in Russia. This means that those closest to power do not trust each other enough (with good reason) to be able to organise a plot against Putin, even if they had the competence to do so. All are focused solely on clinging on to their place at the corruption trough and will only act, if at all, once it is certain that Putin is dragging them down with him.

‘RUSSIA’S DISARRAY IS A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY FOR UKRAINE’: Picture by Taine Noble

No-one should anticipate an uprising by the Russian people either. Most of those brave enough to have opposed Putin are either dead, in jail or living abroad. The broad mass left behind are paralysed by fear, pickled in propaganda and nationalistic bigotry or hiding behind the convenient cynicism the regime has cultivated in them for years, that “all politicians are the same” and “there is nothing I can do about it”. This attitude, of course, enabled things to get this bad in the first place and stands in stark contrast to their neighbours in Ukraine, and elsewhere, who have stood up for their freedom and sought something better for their country than dominance by evil dictators like Putin.  

So, for now, the likeliest, such as it is, source of an effort to unseat Putin remains Prigozhin and his Wagner mob acting in a further desperate attempt to save themselves, if they cannot find another way out. Certainly, another assault by them or Prigozhin meeting with some misfortune both seem more probable than him quietly settling into retirement in Belarus. For the outside world, a success for Wagner is as unappealing as Putin staying in power, given the similar but even more unstable combination of violent criminality with a veneer of fascism they represent.   

There is very little that the West can or should do to directly intervene in the situation inside Russia. The priority has to be to protect our own security and that of Russia’s neighbours by sealing it off as far as possible. Let Russia stew in the rancid problems of its own making until it sorts them out for itself.  

Perhaps the only crucial contact that needs to be maintained involves helping to safeguard Russia’s nuclear weapons if it descends into chaos. That is an uncomfortable prospect, to say the least, but it has been managed before in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed. Having Putin in continued charge of them is scarcely more reassuring anyway and, ultimately, the threat from Russia cannot be reduced until he has gone. 

In any case, the risk of any sort of Russian attack, let alone a nuclear one, on a NATO country has been diminished even further by Russia’s deepening weakness. The Kremlin knows that the conventional response from NATO would finish off much of what’s left of the Russian military in short order. What the world does need to make clear to Moscow immediately, though, is that any action by them to trigger a nuclear disaster at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, a war crime Russian forces are flirting with committing, will be met with the same response. 

Beyond emphasising that deterrence, the one step we must take to boost our security is to urgently ramp up our support to Ukraine in every way possible. The Russian army there is well dug-in behind minefields at the moment and news of the developments at home is probably being kept away from its foot soldiers. But as it filters through, it will further damage their already feeble morale, as will shortages caused by their fragile supply lines. These lines have been further weakened recently by the insurrection and Ukrainian military action. This means there is a golden opportunity to benefit from Russia’s disarray and accelerate Ukraine’s victory. We should take it because Ukraine successfully pushing Russia back behind its borders will make us safer too.