How does a war end? George Kennan, the diplomat and historian who designed the cold war against the Soviet Union, prescribed, in an article published in 1947, a strategy of containment of Moscow’s expansion, the strengthening of democracies and, above all, much patience. The USSR would already fall. It collapsed forty years later. How do wars like the one in Ukraine end, in which neither side seems able to fully achieve their goals? According to all the experts, they always end up at a negotiating table after many, many deaths on both sides.
This was the script for the war that began on February 24, 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was hard to think a week ago that Russia had enough strength to achieve its goal in the neighboring country, nor that the Ukrainians would be able to reverse the invasion and achieve the expectations they had imposed on themselves (such as the recovery of Crimea).
In the early days of the war, and to the indignation of the countries of Central Europe, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, when France and Germany were still wondering whether they had any strategic autonomy vis-à-vis the United States, asked not to put Putin in a corner and leave him an honorable exit in case things don’t go well for him. But it was one thing to imagine the failure of the Ukrainian campaign and another, very different, to think of an implosion of Russia in the form of a civil war, which is what we have been witnessing since Friday night.
During the next few hours, conspiratorial versions will circulate about the involvement of the United States in the crisis in Russia. The war in Ukraine would, according to this version, be an instrument of the neocons to bring about regime change in Moscow. But frankly, it doesn’t look like Wagner is a Washington weapon. The truth is that very few analysts could have imagined such an outcome, a crisis that does not bode well. Because in the current circumstances, after Putin what comes is something much worse than Putin. More militaristic and much more dangerous for stability in Europe.
The trigger for this situation is Yevgeny Prigozhin, a man to whom the best-documented book on the Russian president, Putin’s Men, by Catherine Belton, only devotes a couple of paragraphs to him. Belton dispenses with his past as a chef and goes straight to his involvement and funding of an army of trolls who in 2016 interfered in the US election to get them to vote for Trump.
He does not mention Wagner, another State operation created in 2014 with the aim of creating a group of mercenaries capable of reaching where the Russian army could not.
One of the big problems that the Soviet Union bequeathed to the Russian governments of the nineties was the size of the army. It was an outdated, expensive and endemically corrupt structure, an institution that sucked up a significant part of the State budget. It needed to be reformed. But in the new Russia there was no money.
The 2000s were good for President Putin. Oil was expensive, the budget improved and by 2008 the government had already paid off the international credits that Russia owed. He commissioned Serguei Xoigú to modernize the army to make it smaller and more dynamic. But that mirage faded in 2022, when the column of tanks and armored vehicles advancing from Belarus to Kyiv was bogged down by obvious logistical and supply problems.
The inadequacies of the army in Ukraine opened the door for Wagner, who concentrated his forces in symbolic areas of the front, such as Bakhmut, where the men enlisted by Wagner were cannon fodder for a campaign that was very costly in lives. At the time, Prigozhin was already a giant with political ambitions, a man who insulted in his videos high-ranking military leaders like Xoigu, whom he accused of corruption.
This is the man Putin now fears. Fiona Hill, one of the best experts on Russia in the American administration, has explained that Putin has been one of the men who has best known how to use fear as a political weapon. He knows his worth and has not hesitated to use the fear of nuclear holocaust when his campaign in Ukraine has shown signs of failure. Now he is the one who is afraid of a man with medieval gestures whom he did not even dare to mention in his empty speech this Saturday morning.
This is the third time Russia has experienced it in the last thirty years. In the first, against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the old communist apparatus failed. In the second, propitiated by Boris Yeltsin in 1993, he got away with it. It is not at all clear what will happen in the next few hours.
