The next 24 hours are crucial for Putin. He will hardly have any more time to eliminate Prigozhin before he arrives in Moscow. It is a fight to the death and the Russian president has no choice if he wants to stay in the Kremlin.
The mutiny of Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, marks the most critical moment for Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attack that Boris Yeltsin, the country’s first president, ordered against Parliament in 1993. That day they died in Moscow about 200 people. It was the bloodiest day since the October revolution in 1917. Now it can be much worse. Violence can spread throughout the country. There is a serious risk of civil war.
Progozhin has known Putin for more than 30 years, that is, seven years before he seized power. If there can be friendship between two such cruel people, they are friends. Putin has relied on the Wagner group to put pressure on the army, that is, the Defense Minister, Shoigu, and the Chief of the General Staff, Gerasimov. The strategy has been a disaster, one more.
Wagner’s mercenaries occupied Bakhmut last May. The battle was bloody. More than ten months of struggle. Tens of thousands dead. A great PR exercise for the bloodthirsty Progozhin.
While his men fought in the Ukraine, Prigozhin grew in popularity. During the last six months he has traveled through half of Russia, has opened recruitment centers throughout the country, has cultivated alliances within the army itself, among commanders who do not see well the management of Shoigu and Gerasimov.
Prigozhin commands some 25,000 highly disciplined and combat-experienced mercenaries, not only in Ukraine, but also in Africa.
Carrying out coups in South Sudan and the Central African Republic is a good training ground, and for some reason Prigozhin thinks he will succeed in Russia as well.
He has been preparing for this moment for a long time, undoubtedly motivated by the conviction that Putin is incapable of winning Ukraine and “save” Russia. The president has been distant and cold, oblivious, to a large extent, to the ravages of the war.
The alleged attack by the Russian army against one of Wagner’s bases is a set-up by Prigozhin himself, his pretext for the uprising. If Shoigu and Gerasimov had wanted to take it out, they could have done it with an air strike or an Iskander rocket. They knew where he was.
This is precisely what they will attempt now. Eliminate it from the air. It does not seem possible that a unit of the Army would want to confront Wagner. The ease with which the group has taken over the headquarters of the southern military district, in Rostov-on-Don, is very indicative of the weakness of the command structure. The advance of the mutineers in Voronezh is being so easy that Putin is running out of room for manoeuvre. Just over 600 kilometers now separate the rebels from the Kremlin.
Putin has to trust the security forces of the FSB and the army. Only the generals and their former FSB colleagues can protect him from Prigozhin. Everything now depends on them.
The dissidence, crouched throughout the country, awaits its moment. There are municipal and regional leaders who do not support Putin. The jails are full of political prisoners, but this repression has not entirely suppressed the opposition. Leaders like Navalny and Kara-Murza are paying with prison terms for their courage to criticize the regime in public, but other leaders may now feel the time has come to rise up.
These leaders do not necessarily have to be reformists or liberal democrats. Among those pondering their next move are such evil people as Chechen leader Kadirov, who can’t stand Prigozhin.
Regional leaders, mistreated and bound by the Kremlin for years, can now ally with military units in their territories to claim natural resources or, simply, the management of public affairs that they lost years ago.
It is difficult for the Russian population, punished by inequality, condemned to a poverty that they believed to have been overcome, to do anything to save Putin or to prevent the mutiny of their rulers and military commanders.
Russia could therefore fall into a civil war with many open fronts, a cross-fight between small armies, independent of Moscow. It would be the final collapse of Putin, of Russia as we know it.
This is the chaos that the United States and its allies in the Atlantic Alliance fear most. Now it is convenient for them that Putin endures. The very Putin they want to destroy is their best hope for Russia not to implode. There is no example that better illustrates the senselessness of the war in Ukraine.
