From Politico's Nightly newsletter:
CLINGING TO POWER — It wasn’t long ago that he was Vladimir the Invincible. Conquering Crimea, slaying the oligarchs back home and ruling Russia with an iron fist — it was impossible to imagine a world without Putin. Now, it seems his days may be numbered.
The rebellion, launched by his former ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, is just the latest sign something is going very wrong in Moscow. While the immediate danger is over, the threat is unlikely to go away quickly and the risk of a major rout in Ukraine is growing as a result.
On Saturday, the Kremlin was forced to deny that the country’s commander-in-chief had fled north to the second city of St. Petersburg as a mercenary army marched towards Moscow. State newswire TASS, better used to boasting of great victories on the battlefield, ran a front-page story insisting Russia’s government hadn’t been evacuated as workers dug up the highways to stop the advancing tanks.
The extraordinary Wagner mutiny sparked manic predictions that the man who has ruled the country for almost a quarter of a century could soon be ousted, or that the nation itself would descend into chaos and civil war. It didn’t — but, despite an eleventh-hour deal averting an outright catastrophe for the Kremlin, Russia is now on the brink.
In a late night speech on Monday, Putin said “almost all of Russian society was united” in the face of rebellion. Scenes from Rostov, the strategic southern city Wagner captured over the weekend, tell a different story though — as locals snapped selfies with mercenaries and took to the streets to cheer them on. Nobody, it seems, was prepared to man the barricades in defense of their dear leader.
For an already paranoid Russian president, there are a dizzying array of questions to ponder late at night. How was Prigozhin able to take so much territory virtually unopposed? And, if they’d made it to Moscow, who from his inner circle would have been first to stab him in the back?
Ordinary Russians, for whom security and stability have long been a key part of Putin’s appeal, can only wonder what the point of their militarized police state is when it seems unable to deal with a few thousand former prisoners with guns. The debacle shows just how thinly stretched their armed forces are as a result of the brutal invasion of Ukraine.
For a brief moment on Saturday, only one regional capital had been captured since the start of the war in Ukraine last February — and it was Rostov, in Russia. Putin bet the house on taking Ukraine, and after being pushed out of Kherson, and struggling to hold other key positions, he’s losing big.
While a long-awaited counteroffensive by Kyiv’s forces seems yet to produce any major results, Wagner’s rebellion can only help them. Tens of thousands of Russia’s most effective fighters are now chief suspects in a coup, told to lay down their arms and leave or sign up for a likely worse-paid role as regular soldiers. If and when Ukraine’s fightback begins in earnest, more major military setbacks could put the Kremlin in even hotter water.
The dramatic insurrection over the weekend may have failed to dislodge the president, but it was a premonition of what the war could lead to — chaos and defeat. But, more worryingly for Putin, it also gave Russians and the world a glimpse of how, when the time is right, he might run out of luck. |
