Nemesis follows... eventually

On Saturday, the unthinkable happened; although with 20-20 hindsight, not entirely surprising after all.  Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of the Wagner Group mercenary army, mounted the first serious challenge to Vladimir Putin's autocratic grip on power. 

Over the last several months Prigozhin had become increasingly and publicly critical of Putin, suggesting he was increasingly confident of his own power and his indispensability to Putin.

The Wagner group, in recruiting from Russia's prisons, turned out to be a more effective fighting force than Putin's regular army. As the war on Ukraine  bogged down, Putin begin to rely increasingly on the Wagner Group to backstop his regular army's failings and in so doing ceded power to Prigozhin.

As Prigozhin's confidence grew, along side his frustration with the Russian bureaucracy that seemed to be starving his mercenary army of military supplies, so did his impatience and his criticism of Putin. The feud between Prigozhin and Putin's Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff came to a head on Friday June 23rd when Russia’s Federal Security Service issued a warrant for Prigozhin’s arrest.  The following day, confident of his own invincibility, Prigozhin ordered his private army to advance on Moscow in what looks very much like an attempted coup. 

Things escalated quickly. Putin appeared on national television branding Prigozhin as a a traitor.  And then almost as quickly as it began it was seemingly over.  A deal brokered by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko allowed Prigozhin to take sanctuary in Belarus in return for Prigozhin ordering his army to return to barracks. 

      

But while the situation seems to have de-escalated, the political landscape in Russia is now very different  from what it was 72 hours ago.    

Although Prigozhin's immediate challenge to Putin has subsided, he has not disappeared. The incident exposes the fragility of Putin's power. It highlights the weakness of the Russian army and the lack of support for the war in Ukraine, particularly among Russia's regular soldiers. 

Politically that gives Putin another headache. The war was in part his way of bolstering public support as the economy faltered and democratic freedoms were eroded. As support for the war evaporates and the bold claims Putin made at its outset ring increasingly hollow, he must rely increasingly on the authoritarian control of a police state.  In making a deal with Prigozhin rather than capturing and trying him for treason, Russians can now see Putin's invincibility for the myth it has now become.   

All of which creates a volatile inflection point. While Russia is preoccupied with an internal struggle for power,  Ukraine may benefit in its effort to expel the invasion. At the same time, Putin may become increasingly desperate in an attempt to hold on to power, leading him to act with increasing unpredictability.  The invasion of Ukraine was seen by many as an act of irrational hubris; that does not auger well for what Putin may do next.