All About Prigozhin

Members of Wagner group sit atop of a tank in a street in the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on June 24, 2023. (Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)

Commentary

There’s no doubt that the brief, but significant armed mutiny by Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin damaged Vladimir Putin. Indeed the Moscow Times described Putin as being “seen as weakened.” Russia Today asked the question, “Was it a one-off or an ominous sign?” And the Russia Post headline identified “The Prigozhin Mutiny as a Moment of Truth for the Putin Regime.”

These three stories are just a small sample of the stories in Russian media highlighting the significance of the Prigozhin revolt and how poorly it reflects on Putin. Of course, as is the case in the West, what’s being proclaimed by Russia’s major media may not be reflective of what the average Russian citizen believes, but at a minimum, the mutiny punctured Putin’s air of invincibility. More generally, it highlighted the dangerous downside of employing semi-private, semi-autonomous military operations like the Wagner group to execute major military operations.

The whole mutiny was bizarre, with Prigozhin going out of his way to make it clear he wasn’t rebelling against Putin, but was instead aiming to remove the “corrupt” and “incompetent” military leadership that he had been vociferously criticizing over the last six-plus months.

As reported in The Guardian, Rob Lee, a U.S.-based expert on Russia, stated:

“I don’t think that this was an attempt to replace Putin. I think basically this was a factional dispute between two important Russian figures that became a challenge to Putin, which is the abnormal part of this.”

Prigozhin’s Rebellion Was All About Prigozhin

Many reasons have been suggested for Prigozhin’s actions, but the precipitating event is almost certainly the June 10 Russian Defense Ministry order requiring that all volunteer detachments sign military contracts with the regular Russian military by July 1. This official government action radically reduced Prigozhin’s personal power and influence, and he refused to have his troops sign it.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “‘Prigozhin was driven to this by his understanding he was being driven into a corner,’ said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a military think tank. ‘He simply didn’t want to sink into oblivion.’”

To put himself in a position to negotiate his way to maintaining relevancy, he slapped together a rebellion consisting of about 8,500 enlisted Wagner troops, with some observers claiming no Wagner group officers participated. Regardless of the level of officer participation, this is about a quarter to a fifth of the Wagner group’s total troops. Then he made some wild claims and statements and embarked on his rebellion.

Of course, the rebellion never stood a chance of achieving its stated claim of purging Russia’s senior military leadership. But the troops were heavily armed, including a few armored vehicles and tanks. And while Russia had more than enough reserve troops to defeat Prigozhin’s rebel force without pulling any troops from the Ukrainian fronts, actively engaging Prigozhin’s forces would have cost many lives, and from the Russian perspective, would have been a propaganda windfall for the West.

And depending on how it played out, it could have done serious damage to Putin’s popularity with the Russian people. Prigozhin understood this, and of course, President Vladimir Putin also understood this. Consequently, the rebellion did accomplish Prigozhin’s unstated goal of putting himself in a very strong negotiating position.

So, given that the rebellion was first and foremost about Prigozhin, it was successful, as it gave him the leverage he needed to extract himself from Russia without being arrested, all while being able to proclaim the rebellion, he’s now calling an “armed protest,” had some higher purpose than himself.

The long-term impact of this 22-hour rebellion by Prigozhin will have on Putin will not be known for some time. However, there was a silver lining for Putin and Russia that most of the Western media missed or has chosen to downplay—that being that once Prigozhin embarked on his adventure, he found himself immediately isolated. No Russian military or civilian leaders came out in support of the mutiny, and while there were predictably some crowds waving encouragement at the Wagner group troops, they were conspicuously small.

That no one rallied to Prigozhin and his Wagner group forces strongly suggests Putin’s high approval rating and the Russian people’s support for the war is real. And it throws cold water on the idea that victory over Russia via regime change is going to happen anytime in the foreseeable future.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.