Yevgeny Prigozhin rolled the dice mightily this past weekend and lost. But so did everybody else in Russia, where back-stabbing is just another name for Saturday.
Prigozhin’s Wagner Group soldiers and equipment rolled across the border from Ukraine into Russia and occupied the city of Rostov-On-Don, the command and control centre for all Russian operations in neighbouring Ukraine. One of its chief flaws, the Russian army is an extremely top-down organization where nobody makes a move without authority from much higher up the chain of command, lest they be disciplined, jailed, or even executed. This operational doctrine is brutal enough on the army to begin with, but with the command and control centre gone, Russian units in Ukraine have no idea as to what’s happening in their rear, let alone what’s happening right in front of them. For Russia, it was a crippling blow, inflicted by one of their own.
Prigozhin has been in an often titanic struggle with Russian military elites, particularly Defence Minister Sergei Shogun (who never served in the army) and Chief of the General Staff Valeri Gerasimov. Prigozhin accuses these two regularly of incompetence and also for failing to provide Wagner forces with enough ammunition and supplies to continue their fight at the front. Wagner troops have been the best of the Russian forces since the beginning of the invasion, and are credited with having taken the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the only successful military operation on the Russian side since the spring of 2022.
Prigozhin’s criticisms have been laced with profanity, sarcasm, and thinly-veiled references to Putin himself, the kind of thing that would get a regular Russian citizen thrown in the gulag for 15 years. Yet he was allowed to continue, much to the chagrin and embarrassment of Shogun and Gerasimov, not to mention Putin. But Putin uses the old Joe Stalin tactic of pitting his underlings against one another to see who rises to the top, or rather, to see who survives. So Putin did nothing while his two top military men fumed.
The pot boiled over this weekend when Prigozhin accused Shogun and Gerasimov of colluding to attack and destroy Wagner units recently disengaged from the front lines. The Wagner chief used this as a pretext to begin his “march of justice” which, to any other set of eyes, looked like a full-on invasion of Russian territory. To be clear, no 25,000 troops in the world are going to invade Russia and occupy any of it, but still, it exposed a huge Russian weakness behind its own front lines, as there was no organized force to stand in Wagner’s way on the road to Rostov-On-Don, and what forces there may have been melted away at the Wagner approach.
If that’s not bad enough, Wagner forces suddenly appeared and occupied the major Russian city of Voronezh, north of Rostov-On-Don and along the M4 highway to Moscow, again with no meaningful resistance. Remember that it was just a couple of weeks ago that renegade Russians equipped by Ukraine ran-amok on Russian territory easily casting aside any police units sent to stop them. For Russia, all of this is a military humiliation.
And then we hear that Wagner is less than 200 km from Moscow itself, with the Kremlin scrambling to do anything it can to blunt or slow the advance of the mercenaries upon the capital and seat of power. There was panic in Moscow, the likes not seen since the attempted coup back in 1991, and before that, Hitler’s approach back in 1941.
Suddenly, Wagner stopped. Then moved back, and away from Moscow, dispersing into their field camps back in Ukraine. Like, huh?
It appears that hapless Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko had brokered a deal whereby Prigozhin and Wagner would stand down, as if anyone would listen to Lukashenko, much less respect him, since he’s a lap dog of Putin himself. Prigozhin would go into presumable exile in Belarus (as if) and no criminal charges would be brought against him, mere hours after Putin called hm a back-stabber and a traitor. Quite a bit of climb-down for Vladdy The Great, as he would like to style himself, the child that he is. Nobody’s sure about the other side of the “deal,” like whether either or both of Shoigu or Gerasimov will be sacked. But if they were to be replaced, given their loyalty to Putin over the years, it would look really bad, and really weak of Putin to cashier two of his chief lieutenants as a result of the threat posed by Prigozhin’s march on Moscow. No matter what goes down, Putin has been exposed as being weak, which is the complete opposite of the image of a strongman that he’s been cultivating for the last couple of decades. In fact, it’s reported that Putin bugged out to St. Petersburg to get farther away from the Wagner advance, lest the renegades stormed the Kremlin and Red Square.
Again, no 25,000 troops with a handful of tanks, trucks, anti-aircraft systems, and APC’s is going to walk into a city of many millions and take over the seat of power and hold it. But Putin skedaddled anyways, just to be sure. Not a good look for everyday Russians to witness. And with all the Russian military tied down in Ukraine, there was nothing left in the cupboard to stop these guys in the first place, another blob of egg on the face for the Russian president in front of his people.
So, no doubt, Putin is a huge loser as a result of the events of this past weekend, adding to all the other loser moments he’s had to endure since he walked into Ukraine early in 2022 expecting a cake-walk and adoring crowds of Ukrainians welcoming him. What he got was an unmitigated Russian military disaster, the kind that has prompted revolutions in the past.
Prigozhin, for his part, miscalculated. He was probably thinking that he had the support of some of the military and of the elite silovicki, who with Putin at the top, run the whole shoddy heap that is Russia. But the support he was expecting never translated into a wave of army defections or popular uprisings, which left him hanging out to dry. He attempted the equivalent of Napoleon returning to France after exile on the island of Elba, marching on Paris with his ragtag followers, bolstered by the defection of the entire French army against their king. It worked for Napoleon, at least until Waterloo. It didn’t work for Yevgeny, though.
For its part, Ukraine had a great weekend, watching its mortal enemy disintegrate to a degree right in front of its eyes, Russian against Russian. I don’t know what the weekend weather was like in Ukraine, but it probably didn’t matter what with everyone glued to their televisions watching the Russians play keystone cops amongst themselves. As expert and learned military minds will tell you, when the enemy is beating up on itself, don’t interfere with it, just sit back and enjoy the show.
The Russians are in tatters. Putin’s reputation is badly damaged. Shoigu and Gerasimov have uncertain futures, and the knives in the Kremlin are no doubt being sharpened. Don’t be surprised if they’re all dead within a year.
Prigozhin, in exile in Belarus, is a bit of a stretch. Belarus is a s good as being a part of Russia anyway, so honestly, I don’t care what assurances Prigozhin nay have received for his personal safety, they’re not worth a bowl of flea-ridden cold borscht. Don’t be surprised if Yevgeny magically falls to his death from a fourth floor balcony, or suddenly falls grievously ill from ingesting polonium-riddled candies while smoking polonium-laced cigars. If I were him, which I’m extremely grateful I’m not, I would invest in a crackerjack personal security unit.
And even that may not be enough.
Russian soap operas are awesome. We sort of got tired of our own and gravitated to Coronation Street. Now we’ve got Red Square Blues. Television has never been better.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 