RUSSIAN EXPOSURE – SOME TAKE-AWAYS

 

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.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.