Hardwood timber What happened in Russia over the weekend? It began as a mutiny within the armed forces, continued as what looked like a mafia sit-down, seemed briefly to transform into a coup, then ended abruptly the way that a hostage-taking may end, with the terrorist given safe passage, immunity from prosecution, and a bunch of promises.
Stage 1: Mutiny. It had been brewing for months. All through the winter and spring, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose private army, the Wagner Group, was fighting the Ukrainian military for control of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, had been accusing the Russian Defense Ministry of sabotaging his actions and failing to supply enough armaments. Prigozhin and his men—many of them convicted felons conscripted from prison colonies, an approach he didn’t invent but was the first to apply during this war—alternated between being plaintive and menacing. They threatened to abandon Bakhmut. On social media, they hurled insults at military brass, including the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. In response, the Ministry of Defense, Russia’s official, taxpayer-funded Army, which has been fighting alongside Prigozhin’s private force, apparently moved to limit Prigozhin’s power. For months the Ministry of Defense has reportedly been drafting from prison colonies, appropriating Prigozhin’s know-how and presumably cutting off his supply of able-bodied men with nothing to lose. In mid-June, the state military tried to put its house in order by requiring all fighters to sign identical contracts with the Ministry of Defense. It wasn’t clear if the measure applied to the Wagner Group—if it did, Prigozhin could effectively lose control of his army. On June 23rd, Prigozhin accused the Ministry of Defense of striking his bases and, in a series of statements, declared an armed rebellion. “The evil being wrought by the military leadership of this country must be stopped,” he said. “Justice in the ranks of the military will be restored—and then justice for all of Russia.” His men crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia. He claimed that they numbered twenty-five thousand. “This is not a military coup,” he said. “This is a march for justice.”
Prigozhin was not challenging Putin. In fact, he was acting in accordance with the power structure and the mythology constructed by Putin, whereby Putin alone makes all the decisions and, if those decisions are bad, then it’s someone else’s fault—it means that he was misinformed. In a video released on June 23rd, Prigozhin said that war in Ukraine had been unleashed under false pretenses—because, he said, the Ministry of Defense had lied to Putin, making him think that Ukraine and NATO were about to attack Russia. Prigozhin was apparently marching to the capital not to depose Putin but to enlighten him.
Stage 2: The Sit-Down. Prigozhin’s men and their tanks entered Rostov-on-Don, a city of more than a million people and the seat of Russia’s Southern Military District. There Prigozhin talked, over what appeared to be tea, in what appeared to be the courtyard of a military building, with the Deputy Minister of Defense, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, and a deputy chief of the general staff, Vladimir Alekseyev. The genesis of the meeting was unclear. Had the two generals flown in to speak with Prigozhin? If so, this was a negotiation. Were they in Rostov when Prigozhin’s men occupied the city? That would make them more like hostages and less like negotiators. Prigozhin sat, manspreading, on a narrow bench, his Kalashnikov dangling against his right knee as he used both hands to gesticulate. “We want the chief of the general staff and Shoigu,” he said. “Until they are handed over to us, we will stay here and blockade the city.”
“Take them,” Alekseyev said, smiling and spreading his arms wide, as though waving Shoigu and Gerasimov away. He seemed to have as little regard for Shoigu as did Prigozhin. This is not surprising. Shoigu did not come up through the ranks of the military. In the Soviet Union, he was a Party functionary. In post-Soviet Russia, he became the Minister of Emergency Situations. What primarily qualified him for the job of Minister of Defense, which he has occupied since 2012, was a sort of adventurous friendship with Putin: the two camped together and hiked together and ran the Russian Geographic Society together, Shoigu as president and Putin as chairman of the board.
Stage 3: The Coup. Prigozhin’s men began their march toward Moscow. Along the way—perhaps even before entering Rostov—the Wagner Group shot down some number of Russian military aircraft. Now Prigozhin’s mutiny was looking like a coup—not because Prigozhin was challenging Putin directly but because he was fighting Putin’s actual Army. In the morning on the second day of Prigozhin’s insurgency, Putin addressed the nation. He compared the “armed rebellion,” as he called it, to the revolutions of 1917, which, he claimed, cost Russia its victory in the First World War and caused it to lose vast territories. He did not name Prigozhin, referring, rather, to “organizers of the armed rebellion,” whom he called traitors. He vowed to punish them, and to defend Russia.
Several Russian regions declared states of emergency or introduced various restrictions. The mayor of Moscow gave the city a day off on Monday. (It was still only Saturday at this point.) The Russian capital prepared for battle. Putin’s plane left Moscow and disappeared from the radar. Prigozhin had to face that, rather than speak to Putin, he would likely die when he attempted to enter Moscow—because, whatever he had intended, he had ended up attempting a coup.
Stage 4: It Ends the Way a Hostage-Taking Might. On Saturday evening, about thirty-six hours after the mutiny began, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka’s press service announced that he had negotiated an end to the crisis. Prigozhin’s people would reverse course. Prigozhin would go to Belarus. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said that all criminal cases against Prigozhin had been closed. Lukashenka’s press statement said that the agreement was mutually beneficial.
Rumors swirled that Lukashenka, empowered by Putin, had promised Prigozhin Shoigu’s head on a platter. There is no way to know if this is true, or if Putin had any intention to keep whatever promises Lukashenka doled out, but one of several impossible dilemmas that Putin is facing now is, indeed, what to do with Shoigu. He can hardly afford to keep a Defense Minister who allowed all of this to happen—the public spats, the mutiny, the siege of what is arguably the country’s most important military city, the apparent failure to stop Prigozhin’s armored column, and, most of all, the disrespect evident during Prigozhin’s sit-down with the military brass. On June 26th, Prigozhin issued a ten-minute audio statement on the mutiny. He stressed that his troops were able to incapacitate all Defense Ministry troops along the route of the “march for justice.” He added that, in twenty-four hours, the Wagner Group covered the equivalent of the distance from Ukraine’s eastern border to its western one, saying, “If the Special Military Operation had been undertaken by troops as well trained and disciplined, it could have lasted a day.”