MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

What just happened in Russia?

Vladimir Putin with Aleksandr Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and Europe’s longest-ruling dictator

By Gwynne Dyer - Hundreds of analysts in a dozen countries are working on that mystery right now because Russia is still an important place and Putin’s power has clearly been damaged by this bizarre incident

Until late afternoon Moscow time on Saturday, June 24, Russia was in a state of acute crisis, with Yevgeny Prigozhin pulling his Wagner army of mercenary soldiers out of Ukraine and sending some of them racing up the highway toward Moscow instead.
Their task was to force Russia’s military leadership to quit for corruption and incompetence.

Why? There’s no good reason to believe the Wagner founder had tacit support from President Vladimir Putin or anybody else. Prigozhin is known for his emotional and reckless behavior and the regime certainly seemed to be taking his threats seriously.

 Machines were digging tank traps across the main roads in the outskirts of Moscow, protected by machine-gun emplacements, and the population was being told to stay home. Several Russian air force helicopters that tried to attack the Wagner convoy coming up the M4 were shot down in the course of the day.

Putin had already been on national television that morning denouncing the “traitors” in the strongest terms: “All those who consciously chose the path of betrayal ... will suffer an inevitable punishment,” he vowed.

But 12 hours later, he cut a deal that involved no punishment whatever.

Or rather, Aleksander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus and Europe’s longest-ruling dictator, announced he had cut a deal in which Prigozhin would order all the Wagner troops to return to their bases, then go into exile himself in Belarus. Both he and his 25,000-odd Wagner soldiers would get an amnesty and nobody would be punished.

The only explanation Prigozhin offered for his about-turn was that he didn’t want to shed “Russian blood.” That seemed unlikely, given he has already said 20,000 Wagner fighters were killed in the battle of Bakhmut and he knows the invasion of Ukraine was justified on entirely false pretences.

So, the prospect of a few more Russian deaths to rid the country of the two men he blames for provoking and bungling the war in Ukraine, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Defense Staff Valery Gerasimov, seems unlikely to have made him change his mind at the last moment.

Maybe there was some other calculation in play, but what was it?

At the very least, the lack of popular resistance to Prigozhin’s attempted coup (if that’s what it was) is deeply worrying for Putin. The populations of the Russian cities the Wagner troops occupied, Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh, were generally welcoming to them and even applauded and cheered as they pulled out again on Sunday.

Moreover, none of the Russian regular army units the Wagner troops encountered showed hostility to them or tried to impede their movements in any way, although they were obviously acting without official authorization. This should be deeply worrying for the Kremlin.

And why on Earth did Putin let the tinpot Belarusian dictator Lukashenko do his negotiating with Prigozhin for him? It makes Putin look even weaker, when the appearance of strength is a dictator’s most important asset.

I realize I am asking questions here and not providing answers, but it’s at least clear that there is a lot more going on within the Russian elite than is visible to outsiders. Loyalties and expectations are shifting and even the window of opportunity Ukrainian leaders have been hoping for may open soon.   

In the meantime, consider this: Prigozhin posted a spray of angry messages on the Telegram social media site during the crisis and one in particular will circulate and resonate among the younger Russians whose lives the war in Ukraine is blighting. Prigozhin’s people have been fighting in the Donbas since 2014 and he knows where the bodies are buried. 

This is Prigozhin’s post: “We were hitting [the Ukrainians], and they were hitting us. That's how it went on for those eight long years, from 2014 to 2022. Sometimes the number of skirmishes would increase, sometimes decrease. On 24 February [2022, the day of the invasion], there was nothing extraordinary happening in Ukraine. Now the Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public, deceive the president and tell a story that there was some crazy aggression by Ukraine; that — together with the whole NATO bloc — Ukraine was planning to attack us. The war was needed so that Shoigu could [get a promotion]. The war wasn't for ‘demilitarizing’ or ‘de-Nazifying’ Ukraine. It was needed for an extra star.”

One should add that it was also needed as Putin’s legacy project (reuniting at least the Slavic bits of the old Soviet Union), but you wouldn’t expect Prigozhin to get into that.