Vladimir Putin expected the Western camp to crack in the face of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is his today that shows signs of cracking. It is difficult to know exactly what is happening in Russia, as political life there is opaque and the media obedient. But that Yevgeny Prigozhin openly challenges Putin is in itself extraordinary. Hot, an analysis of Foreign Policy claimed on Saturday that the mutiny “certainly” opened the final chapter of Putin’s reign. To have. In the immediate future, this express rebellion and the fact that the Russian president is passing on the sponge by accepting that the leader of the group Wagner’s “exiles” apparently in neighboring Belarus are in any case symptomatic of a certain vulnerability of the regime and of the internal tensions caused by the failures of the Russian offensive. Since when does Putin let such vehement critics run wild? Or will Prigojine end up, like others before him, simply poisoned?
Still, if opinions are divided, the despicable war that Putin is waging against the Ukrainians objectively presents obstacles that make it difficult for him to do without Wagner’s mercenaries. If therefore Kiev, engaged in a counter-offensive, necessarily sees opportunities in the battering against Putin, it cannot, at the same time, not be alarmed by the announced presence of Prigojine right next to her home. , in this Belarus vassalized by Moscow.
Is Vladimir wavering for all that? In power for 23 years, he can still rely on public opinion anesthetized by his propaganda and proceed by increased repression and authoritarian appeals, taking the example of the Turkish model of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he who knew so well how to exploit for his own ends the coup attempt of 2016. Nevertheless, beyond the din of speculation, the gestures and remarks made by this big mouth of Prigojine, who for months accused the Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and the leader General Staff Valeri Guerassimov of being incompetent and of having sent tens of thousands of soldiers to sacrifice in a useless war shed light on the dysfunctions of the Russian state apparatus and the power struggles in Moscow.
To take Rostov-on-Don, where the Russian army had its headquarters on the Ukrainian border, and march smoothly on Moscow before changing his mind, the warlord was looking above all, he says, to protect her baby against Putin’s plan to clip her wings by subjugating her to the hated Ministry of Defence. It will have, by extension, highlighted the dilapidation of the military and security machine. Quite a slap in the face for Putin, stuck in his fantasy of restoring the empire. Speaking is the fact that Wagner’s mutineers received support from several army brigades and units. And no less indicative, on the ideological level, is the fact that Prigojine attacked the very justifications for the war put forward by Putin (Nazism, the genocide of the Russians in Donbass, etc.), estimating as a confused populist that she had first and foremost to “defend the interests of the elite”. His words may not reach the ears of ordinary Russians, but those of the clans that make up the government, the army and, above all, the intelligence services, suggests Mikhail Zygar, author of several books on the backstage of the Kremlin, now a refugee in Europe. The Prigojine mutiny, which has its entrances in these circles, scratches the image of a vertical, homogeneous Putinian regime, guaranteeing stability and the stranglehold of the oligarchs on the economy. “The growing feeling among some factions, Zygar claims, is that the time has come to prepare for the post-Putin period. » View of the mind?
Prigojine first built his fortune in the restaurant business, on the ashes of the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s. Hence his nickname “Putin’s cook”. A cook, he became one in more ways than one by financing the creation of the paramilitary group Wagner in 2014 in collaboration with a former officer of the GRU, the military intelligence directorate. Group conceived as an outgrowth of the army, Putin wanted to make it a Russian version of Blackwater, the private American army which became known during the Iraq war. Even if his dirty mercenaries were today weakened by 11 months of fighting in Bakhmout, the noisy Prigojine has become a thorn in the side of his mafia godfather.
Striking is the gulf that now separates the clemency granted to Prigozhin and the relentlessness with which Putin crushes the slightest stammering democratic claim. Putin not running for president next spring would be a remarkable turnaround. But let its useful life come to an end and what will come after will probably take less from democratic openness than from a palace revolution orchestrated by a no less illiberal and authoritarian clique.