SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON THE FAILED WAGNER MUTINY
Some details have come out about the deal that Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko brokered to end the crisis. Yevgeny Prigozhin will be exiled to Belarus and Wagner forces who participated in the mutiny will not be prosecuted but will not be contracted into the Russian military while those who did not participate will be allowed to sign contracts with the Russian military.
While this serious crisis was fortunately ended quickly through negotiation with little bloodshed, it was an embarrassment for the Kremlin. But, at this time, I think that comments from various quarters that this means the Putin government is especially weak are exaggerated.
First of all, no Russian officials or high military commanders went against the Putin government to support Progozhin’s escapade. As other analysts have pointed out, Turkey’s Erdogan faced a coup attempt in 2016 that involved some of his military leaders and Erdogan is still going pretty strong. This event didn’t even rise to that level.
Time will tell what kind of substantive damage this has done to the Putin government. I’m open to changing my opinion based on how things unfold.
Of course, many in the western chattering classes, true to form, didn’t waste any time in putting out bad takes while the crisis was ongoing, breathlessly hoping for the Putin government to be overthrown or at the very least for a civil war to erupt. Some of these folks were suddenly rooting for a guy they’d condemned five minutes before as a war criminal. This just goes to show — if you needed anymore evidence — that for these people it doesn’t have to make sense. Anything they perceive to be bad for Putin and/or Russia is cause for celebration and the long-term consequences of major instability in a nuclear-armed country aren’t to be seriously considered unless you want to be seen as a party-pooper fascist.
These same people, after they recover from their profound disappointment that there’s no civil war in Russia and Putin isn’t hanging from a lamp post, will go back to having their garbage posted at The Atlantic or The New Yorker as if they just got drunk one night and showed their rear end at a party and everyone tacitly agrees not to bring it up. After all, the educated professional class doesn’t like to be too judge-y about personal and professional foibles.
This whole fiasco with Wagner has brought to mind a point that Putin made several years back to the west at the UN. He scolded the west (rightly) for using terrorists to achieve their geopolitical goals against opponents and how it leads to unintended consequences because such forces cannot be controlled. Similarly, Putin used a loose cannon (Progozhin) to conduct certain operations with the short-term benefit of fewer casualties for the Russian army and it blew up in his face. Because he was a loose cannon, Prigozhin got full of himself, went off-leash and became a chaos agent. Putin should have known better.
