For about a New York
minute, I found it quite satisfying to see the rats at the top of the
autocratic, oligarchic food chain in Russia turning on one another. Yevgeny
Prigozhin’s short-lived revolt against a sector of Vladimir Putin’s government (not
even the chief of one of the most ruthless mercenary forces ever assembled
could muster the guts to oppose Putin himself) was a little like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s dog Toto
knocks over the screen and the wizard is exposed for what he is, an ordinary
man with no real power at all except for his ability to make people believe that
he is all-powerful.
But once that small
pleasure had waned, there were other more practical aspects to consider, as a
result of the weekend of utter chaos that Prigozhin visited on Putin’s Russia.
The most immediate take-away is that both Putin and Prigozhin came out of this incident
much weaker than before.
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| Putin and Prigozhin - end of the affair |
Prigozhin basically ended
up having to give up his brutal, tinpot, mercenary army in order to save his
own skin when he miscalculated the level of discontent in the Russian Armed
Forces in general and among Putin’s closest military commanders in particular.
It’s not hard to guess that in his delusions of grandeur, he imagined marching
on Moscow and picking up large detachments of the Russian military on the way.
That didn’t happen. And despite the fact that he made it clear he was rebelling
against the defense ministry and not against the chief of state, Putin,
nevertheless, declared him a traitor and vowed that he and his men would be
punished to the full measure of the law (which is often whatever Putin says it
is). But that didn’t happen either.
Putin, for his part, was
caught on his back foot and got waylaid. He seems to have been unaware until
the last minute that the rebellion was coming. And yet, as someone who was once
an officer in the KBG and who has, over the past twenty years, garnered an
enormous measure of autocratic power over the Russian Federation, he should
have known. At least some of his generals knew ahead of time but evidently
didn’t share that knowledge with the boss.
It seemed clear, at
least, to many Russia insiders in the West that Prigozhin was hardly likely to
stand still for Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s move to bring the oligarch and
his private army, known as the Wagner Group, under the control of the Russian
state. Shoigu had earlier issued an order for all Russian mercenaries to join
the regular Army by the first of July, which would basically have rendered moot
Prigozhin’s until-then enormous power.
It was Putin himself who
provided Prigozhin with the power he had come to wield. And ex-convict and
self-made man, Prigozhin had become Putin’s go-to guy whenever the president
didn’t want to get his own hands dirty. Prigozhin and the Wagner Group
repeatedly provided Putin with deniability in unofficial Russian military
actions in which crimes against humanity were consistently committed. Prigozhin
was also reportedly behind Russian interference in both the 2016 and 2018
elections in the US.
This is, of course, part
of the dictator playbook. When I was covering the bloody reign of a military
dictatorship in Argentina in the nineteen seventies and early eighties, paramilitary
hit squads, made up largely of retired police and military personnel, carried
out most of the torture, political abductions and assassinations in which tens
of thousands of people disappeared or were killed. The first junta head and
president, Jorge Rafael Videla, would consistently insist, in answer to
worldwide outrage, that when orders were given, he had no real control over how
they were carried out. A claim that was, of course, ludicrous, as have been all
of Putin’s own denials since he started using paramilitary mercenaries to invade
Ukrainian territory, clear back to the time when he first annexed Crimea in
early 2014.
Ever since it became
clear that practically any pyrrhic victory Putin could claim in Ukraine—where
his original claims that it would be a walk-over and that his troops would be
accepting the Ukrainians’ surrender in short order turned out to be a
miscalculated fantasy of epic proportions—has been largely thanks to Prigozhin
and his army of mercenary thugs, I started asking myself what the Russian
president was going to do when that pack of mad dogs turned on him. This past
weekend provided an at least partial answer. I say partial, because the
consequences of the rebellion have still not all been revealed.
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| Defense Minister Shoigu |
While Putin has tried to
keep up appearances, in his home-grown Ukraine War, in the face of withering
pushback from Ukraine’s Armed Forces and its stoic people in which the Russians
have suffered their worst losses since World War II—some forty thousand men
killed and another one hundred forty to one hundred sixty thousand
injured—Prigozhin’s drive toward Moscow demonstrated clearly that Putin has
nothing to spare in the way of military power. A mobilized detachment of the
men of the Wagner Group made it from Ukraine to within one hundred twenty-five
miles of the Russian capital and, according to Western reports, only
encountered armed resistance from the Russian Armed Forces at one point along
the way, where the Wagner Group quickly overpowered it. More telling still, when a deal was struck,
the mercenaries were allowed to turn around and go back to where they had come
from, and Prigozhin was permitted to slip away into exile.
What this also tended to
show was that while Putin’s military, by and large, didn’t turn against him,
neither did it make any great effort to defend him, which could be taken as a
wait-and-see attitude and/or previews of possible coming attractions. Or
perhaps it was just the Russian field military commanders demonstrating that
without them, Putin was powerless against overthrow. In the only images that
have come out of Prigozhin talking to military officers during his drive toward
Moscow, both he and the Russian officers seemed relaxed and
non-confrontational. Furthermore, despite all of Putin’s talk of holding the
Wagner Group and Prigozhin to account, in the end, he was forced to let
Prigozhin escape to exile and to strike a deal, telling the mercenaries that
all would be forgiven if they submitted to Russian military control.
He also was forced initially
to say that nothing would happen to Prigozhin. But then, nobody believes that,
and least of all, Prigozhin. While he agreed to Belarusian exile, he
immediately and wisely disappeared from view. From an undisclosed location he
would later issue a statement explaining that his idea was never to overthrow
Putin. All he was doing, he said, was protecting his men. Clearly, what he was
trying to protect was his own power, and without his private army, that power
has been considerably reduced. But it has not been wiped out, since, up to now,
Prigozhin has been a chief ally of Putin’s in the vast Russian mafia. He is a
kingpin, a guy who knows where the bodies are buried. And, without a doubt, he
and his Army have been crucial in Putin’s prosecution of his war of aggression against
Ukraine and in military action elsewhere.
Seeking to explain the
significance of the Russian Defense Ministry’s order for all of Prigozhin’s
battle-hardened frontline fighters to place themselves under Russia’s general
military command, former US Army in Europe commander, Lieutenant General Mark
Hertling, told a TV interviewer that it was rather as if members of Delta
Force, Navy SEALs or some other special forces unit were being told to place
themselves under the orders of a regular infantry command. But he hastened to
point out, however, that this was where the comparison ended, since the Wagner
Group wasn’t a highly trained, special forces unit, but rather, a mercenary
army made up of criminal thugs and convicts, led by a mafioso.
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| Prigozhin dressed in battlefield gear |
Indeed, for all of his
posturing in elaborate military garb and armed to the teeth, Vevgeny Prigozhin
is as much a self-style military commander as he is a self-made oligarch.
Sometimes known as “Putin’s Chef”, because, under Putin, his food industry
interests have catered to the Kremlin, the sixty-two-year-old Prigozhin
originated from fairly humble beginnings at the height of Soviet rule in
Russia. His Jewish father died while he was still a boy and his mother
struggled to support Vevgeny and his ailing grandmother with her work at a
hospital in what was then Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg).
Vevgeny’s mother
eventually remarried. His stepfather, who was also Jewish, was a cross-country
skiing instructor. Vevgeny, who was a teen by this time, took to the sport and
hoped to go pro. His stepfather managed to get him into a prestigious athletics
school to help him reach his goal, but Vevgeny’s plans didn’t work out in the
end.
Almost immediately,
Prigozhin turned to a life of crime. He was arrested for stealing at age
eighteen. The court went easy on him and gave him a two-year suspended
sentence. At twenty, he was arrested again for leading a criminal gang of
mostly juvenile delinquents, which burglarized high-end apartment buildings.
This time, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison for theft, fraud and
corruption of the minors whom he had involved in his crimes. He ended up
serving nine years of the sentence before being released in 1990.
On his release he joined
his mother and stepfather in a small business selling hotdogs out of stand in
an open-air market in Leningrad. In an interview years later, Prigozhin would
say that their hotdog business was so thriving that his mother didn’t know what
to do with all the money that came rolling in. But Vevgeny did. He embraced the
entrepreneurial spirit of the times following the fall of the Soviet Union and
invested in a wide variety of interests. From grocery stores and restaurants to
marketing research, construction and foreign trade, Prigozhin’s empire expanded
exponentially.
But it was apparently his
foreign trade interests that eventually led to areas of interest to the Putin
regime—notably gold and diamond mining in Central Africa. These interests seem
to have provided him with the perfect segue into arms and mercenary
recruitment. For some time, Prigozhin denied having anything to do with the
Wagner Group—a shadowy paramilitary arm of the Putin regime that was involved
in guerrilla warfare activities in several parts of Africa and which eventually
showed up in Syria, where Putin was propping up the cruel dictatorship of
Bashar Al-Assad in his devastatingly bloody war to put down a nationwide
democratic uprising. But he eventually admitted to being the group’s founder,
and in Ukraine has become its high-profile commander. His untrained, unschooled
and non-strategic approach to war to date has been simple: to throw huge
numbers of men and ordnance at the enemy in hopes of eventually overcoming
their resistance.
For this unsophisticated
and brutal strategy to work, Prigozhin requires either highly motivated or,
more often, otherwise hopeless men. That’s why much of his army in Ukraine has
been made up of convicted felons, desperados who joined him in order to get out
of prison. These are men who have had no problem following their commander’s
orders to lay non-military targets to waste and to murder civilians. And in
some of the heaviest fighting, Prigozhin himself admitted that he was losing an
average of a hundred men a day.
The US has leveled
numerous sanctions and criminal charges at Prigozhin in recent years. He is
also one of the Russian oligarchs under sanctions in the United Kingdom and in the
EU. Additionally, the FBI has offered a bounty of up to two-hundred-fifty
thousand dollars for information leading to Prigozhin’s arrest.
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| A relaxed Prigozhin meets with Russian military leaders |
The uncertainty in Russia
hasn’t been allayed, by any means, as a result of the deal reached between the
Putin regime and the Wagner Group. Just the fact that Putin put together a
flamboyant display honoring the Russian Armed Forces within a couple of days of
the mercenaries’ revolt is as telling as it is unusual. Until Prigozhin went
rogue, no one was questioning the power of Vladimir Putin. Dictatorships,
however, function very much like the Mafia. The capo is the capo…until he
isn’t. His power isn’t based on love and loyalty, but on ruthlessness and fear.
Power in autocracies in strictly vertical, and a dictator’s continuation in
power is subject to the fear of those beneath him. They must feel that the
price of betrayal is so certain and so lethal that their only choice is blind loyalty. Given Putin’s track record, while it’s
unlikely anyone is beating down Prigozhin’s door to sell him a life insurance
policy, the fact that he and his band of thugs got away, at least for now, with
nipping at Putin’s heels will almost certainly be taken as a sign of fear and
weakness on Putin’s part. All the more so because, instead of downplaying the
incident’s importance, Putin has cast Prigozhin as a dangerous traitor and has
thanked and honored the Armed Forces for “saving the country from civil war,”
when, in fact, all indications are that the military did precious little in
that regard.Calling the uprising an
attempt at civil war tends to show that a much more serious rebellion is a
possibility that might be keeping Putin up nights. An admirer of Czar Nicholas
and his empire, Putin can hardly help but recall that, in the end, the czar’s
failures in foreign wars and the poverty they engendered at home played into
the hands of the Bolsheviks so that a revolt by ragtag civilian militias ended
up being backed by large numbers of discontented professional soldiers. And
Czar Nicholas and his family ended up facing a firing squad.
