Ukraine Will Be the Big Winner of Prigozhin Turning On Putin
Views (91)
Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesOn Monday I sat with a senior White House official who said of the war in Ukraine—“Barring a major unexpected turn of events, there’s every reason to expect Putin will try to draw the war out until the U.S. 2024 elections to see if we have a change of leadership that works in his favor.”The major unexpected turn of events took place on Friday.When Yevgeny Prigozhin, once Vladimir Putin’s caterer the man whose Internet Research Agency
On Monday I sat with a senior White House official who said of the war in Ukraine—“Barring a major unexpected turn of events, there’s every reason to expect Putin will try to draw the war out until the U.S. 2024 elections to see if we have a change of leadership that works in his favor.”
The major unexpected turn of events took place on Friday.
Even if the insurrection was short-lived, as appears to be the case as of this writing, its impact will be felt for a long, long time.
In the first stages of this Russian crisis, we felt the high cost of television networks having gutted their foreign news operations over the past two decades. In search of breaking news from reliable sources, many turned once again to Twitter as an information source. But Twitter too had become less reliable and more difficult to use as a source of good information since Elon Musk took it over and stripped away the ability of users to determine who was a verified, reliable source and who was not.
In the twinkling of an eye, the Wagner Group mercenaries who had been the front line troops in Russia’s brutal if futile battle for Bakhmut had gone from being one of the principal targets of Ukraine’s much vaunted, somewhat delayed “Spring counteroffensive” to being, if only for a matter of hours, its de facto leaders.
Every gain they made in Russia in support of Prigozhin’s stated goals of bringing down the leaders of the Russian Ministry of Defense and its armed forces, was a blow to Putin’s credibility. Each kilometer down Russia’s M4 highway that Wagner forces traveled was an unintentional advance on behalf of Kyiv and the Western nations allied to support it.
This was clearly not Prigozhin’s goal, he hates the West as much as any Russian extremist, but he had clearly let his previously stated personal animus against Russia’s top defense officials and officers overtake any sense of patriotic duty to the motherland he may once have had.
Confirming that a deal was reached in negotiations with Lukashenko, Prigozhin issued a statement that made his motives clear. He felt Wagner has become a target of the Russian government. But what also became clear was that he lacked the appetite for the ultimate fight that he would have had were his troops to have entered Moscow as they threatened to do. In this respect, Prigozhin not only damaged Putin’s credibility but he undercut his own.
The text of Prigozhin’s statement tried to make him look like a patriot, but of course, given his actions, it came up short. He said, “They were going to dismantle PMC Wagner. We came out on 23 June to the March of Justice. In a day, we walked to nearly 200km away from Moscow. In this time, we did not spill a single drop of blood of our fighters. Now, the moment has come when blood may spill. That’s why, understanding the responsibility for spilling Russian blood on one of the sides, we are turning back our convoys and going back to field camps according to the plan.”
But much damage to Russia had already been done.
Russia’s high military command is under attack and it is, as of now, unclear what changes may take place and how those will be received within the armed forces and across Russia. The result seems likely to be a further downturn in morale among Russian troops whose mood had already been thought to have hit rock bottom.
The odds against Prigozhin unseating Putin via this insurrection were always long however swift his early gains may have been. Further, even if Putin survives this for now as it appears he has, the success Prigozhin has enjoyed to date has further punctured the illusion of Putin’s strength and preeminence within Russia. Already paranoid, he will have to sleep with one eye open every night from now on unsure from where the next attack on him might come. (Prigozhin will have to do so as well, obviously.) Those around him will no longer view him as invulnerable as they once did. The foundations of Putin’s rule have deep cracks in them. The end for Putin now appears much closer than many of his opponents had dared hope.
In the hours and days ahead the world will be watching to see whether the deal that was reportedly struck holds and what it entails. What will become of Russia’s military leadership? Will it change? How will it react to this harsh repudiation of its strategies and tactics in Ukraine? What will become of Prigozhin and Wagner? Close attention will be paid to whether other voices critical of Putin may emerge. Naturally, a special focus will be on whether these events lead to more heavy-handed tactics on the part of Putin. Constant watch will be directed to whether Russia’s nuclear arsenal remains secure. And, in Ukraine, expect military leaders to swiftly seek to test Russian resolve, how these unexpected events have weakened Russian positions, and then to move to take advantage of the opportunity delivered to them by Russia’s dysfunction.
0 Likes