In repeated tirades against Russian military leaders over the past several months, Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has taken pains to stop short of putting President Vladimir Putin directly in the crosshairs.
When the crudely spoken former prison inmate known as "Putin's chef" for his catering work announced on June 23 that his forces would head away from the front in Ukraine and go on a "march of justice" in Russia, he seemed more careful than ever to claim that Putin was not his target.
The stunning action was "not a military coup," Prigozhin said. And he hewed to a long-established narrative known loosely as "good tsar, bad boyars," suggesting that if Putin had made unwise or disastrous choices -- such as the decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 -- it was because he was betrayed by power-hungry generals and self-interested tycoons in his circle.
But while the future is more clouded than ever now, few outcomes of Prigozhin's thrust bode well for Putin, and analysts say his own methods, moves, and style of rule are to blame.
"On Friday evening, Prigozhin raised an open mutiny," the media outlet The Bell wrote in a news bulletin on the morning of June 24. "Officially -- against the 'military leadership' headed by [Defense Minister] Sergei Shoigu, but de facto Prigozhin threw down a challenge to the very regime of Vladimir Putin."
After hours of silence overnight, Putin sought to sound firm in a Saturday morning address, vowing to take "decisive action" against the "armed mutiny" and ordering the "neutralization" of its organizers. But Prigozhin quickly and pointedly talked back, saying Putin was "deeply mistaken" to suggest he was a traitor and vowing his forces would not surrender.
Putin will have a hard time turning the potentially momentous twist in what he intended to be a short, victorious war against Ukraine into a positive for himself and his political future. Here's why.
Signs Of Weakness?
The very fact that Prigozhin has kept Putin out of the direct line of fire in his outbursts up until now puts the president in a questionable light, portraying him as a leader who is unable to maintain control over his top lieutenants and may be easily misled. In one of his earlier tirades, Prigozhin hinted that Putin was a "happy grandpa" and a clueless dupe who is fed lies by those around him and is unaware of the harsh reality of the war.
A more obvious indication that Putin is not in control comes from the unavoidable optics of what, in its first 24 hours, remains a deeply murky situation: Prigozhin and his forces crossed from Ukraine into Russia and entered Rostov-on-Don, a large city that is the hub for Moscow's operations in what is now a 16-month invasion of Ukraine, and claimed his forces controlled the military headquarters and other military sites in the city.
Putin said in a June 24 video address he will do "everything to protect" the country following Wagner's occupation of Rostov-on-Don.
For observers of Russia, a commonplace is that Putin's grip on power will seem solid until it isn't. And from almost any angle, Prigozhin's actions make that grip look less solid than it did just one day earlier.
Despite efforts of by the Kremlin and state TV to control the narrative, the chaotic situation may further undermine many Russians' confidence in Putin, whose image has been tarnished by setbacks and losses in the war on Ukraine. Prigozhin's brash retort to the address on June 24 won't help matters for Putin, who is rarely subjected to open criticism by anyone with any authority inside Russia.
Contrary to claims that Putin "was fully in control and not vulnerable to coups, his authority is now being directly challenged in a way that may have far-reaching implications for the regime as well as the course of the war," military analyst Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of War Studies at King's College London, wrote in a post on Substack on June 24.
A New Front
When Putin launched the large-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, he expected what he called the "special military operation" to achieve its goal -- the subjugation of Ukraine -- within weeks at most.
That did not happen. After a dramatic retreat from positions near Kyiv and back across the border that spring, Russian forces suffered further setbacks in the east and south and are now trying to face down a new Ukrainian counteroffensive on sections of the more than 1,000-kilometer front.
WATCH: Putin has calls for national unity after Russian mercenary forces headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin took control of a southwestern Russian city as part of a possible attempt to march on Moscow.
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Putin Calls Wagner Occupation Of Rostov-On-Don 'Armed Mutiny'
In addition, there have been attacks on Russia soil, ranging from incursions in Belgorod and other border regions to drone strikes in Moscow and, in one case, on the Kremlin itself.
The Wagner campaign opens up a new front of sorts, one that is also inside Russia, at a potentially crucial juncture of the war in Ukraine. Prigozhin's forces, which have played an important role in some of the fighting, are now an enemy within.
The Truth Will Out
In his address on June 24, Putin repeated what has become the Kremlin's main narrative about its war against Ukraine. He portrayed the forces led by Prigozhin as traitors who are undermining Russia at a crucial time, repeating his unfounded claim that the invasion was not an act of aggression but a necessary step to counter a bid by the West to use Ukraine to tear Russia apart or, at the very least, to achieve its "strategic defeat."
Russian officials at all levels have echoed that narrative, but Prigozhin, in remarks on June 23, sought to drill a big hole in it.
In past tirades, he has lambasted Shoigu and armed forces chief of staff Valery Gerasimov for the way they have conducted the war, asserting that they have starved his forces of ammunition.
This time, he not only accused the military of targeting his units with rockets and fire from helicopter gunships but also suggested the invasion itself was unjustified, contesting the claim that Russia faced a threat of attack from Ukraine and NATO.
"On February 24 [2022], there was nothing extraordinary happening," Prigozhin said. "Now the Defense Ministry is trying to deceive the public, deceive the president, and tell a story that there was some crazy aggression by Ukraine, that -- together with the whole NATO bloc -- Ukraine was planning to attack us."
"It is the question of the war's necessity that made Prigozhin's latest accusations so incendiary," military analyst Freedman wrote, because they challenged "not only the conduct of the war but the whole basis upon which it was launched. The shots might have been aimed at Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov…but Vladimir Putin was clearly in the firing line."
Method And Madness
Over nearly 24 years in power as president or prime minister, Putin has sought to maintain control in part by setting factions within Russia against each other, but analysts say his decision to launch the large-scale invasion of Ukraine has fouled that system.
"Putin's style of managing the elite has proven dangerously dysfunctional when transplanted to the battlefield," author and analyst Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia's military and security agencies, wrote in The Spectator on May 15.
Putin attends a meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Moscow on April 17.
"A culture of mutual suspicion, cannibalistic competition, and opportunistic self-interest has kept Putin in power for more than two decades. It has allowed him to play individuals and interests against each other and forced the members of his court constantly to seek his ear and favor," Galeotti wrote. "In war, though, the need is for unity, discipline, and mutual support -- something the Ukrainians are displaying and the Russians clearly lack."
Putin's first public comments following Prigozhin's big move showed he will seek to use what he called a treacherous "stab in the back" to forge unity among Russians and snatch some kind of victory from the jaws of possible defeat.
But for a president who has always been portrayed as a leader in firm control, that will be hard to do. And Prigozhin's campaign could lay bare fatal flaws in his method of rule.
The animosity between Prigozhin and Shoigu is in many ways "a classic competition for rents, the likes of which have dominated the Russian political and economic scene for decades, and thus the kind of thing for which Putin and the rest of the system should be well prepared, and thus which should not be terribly destabilizing," Sam Greene, a professor at the Russia Institute at King's College London, wrote in a newsletter on June 24.
But in two important ways, Greene wrote, it's "very different from anything we've seen in Russia before."
For one thing, the rivals "have a degree of firepower that would make the mafia bosses of the 1990s look like schoolboys with slingshots. Second, the struggle is over control of the process that has become the cornerstone of Putin's political rule: the war in Ukraine," he wrote. "None of the other sectors over which Russian elites have sparred in the past have been so critical to Putin's own political survival."
"Even if Wagner is defeated quickly, which I would not take for granted, then this is still a big shock to the regime and it will have been weakened," Freedman wrote. "If the confrontation goes in the other direction then all bets are off and panic may start to grip the Kremlin."