What Prigozhin means for Putin
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Major civil conflict has been avoided for now — the question is what it means for the longer term:
The armed insurrection launched Saturday by Russian businessman-turned-warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin has exposed the country’s deep cracks caused by a war—one the Kremlin had hoped would victoriously unite the country—and poses the gravest existential threat yet to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 23-year rule.
Fighters from the Wagner paramilitary group, led by Prigozhin, seized on Saturday two Russian cities and were rolling toward Moscow for a confrontation with the country’s military leadership when a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko between Prigozhin and Putin averted a potential bloodbath in the country’s capital.
The agreement and tentative truce staved off the possibility that anger over the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine, from its flawed planning to its first disastrous days to more recent failures, could spark civil war.
But the very sight of armed men in Russian cities calling for the removal of Moscow’s military command shows how a war that was meant to achieve regime change in Ukraine could threaten the regime in Russia by harnessing deep anger over the failures of the country’s political and military leadership.
However this turns out — in a story familiar to Americans — conflating either the national interest or even a leader’s self-interest with maximalist military belligerence does not actually have a great track record.