As Napoleon would say, advancing towards Moscow at full speed with his troops without shedding a drop of blood, that’s the easy part.
It’s after that it bites.
What exactly was Yevgeny Prigojine’s mutiny plan? Overthrow the Russian general staff to take control of the army? Make a coup or a publicity stunt?
After crossing Russia from south to north saying he was ready to die for justice, the leader of Wagner stops short 200 km from the capital. To “avoid a bloodbath”… at the request of the Belarusian president, puppet of Vladimir Putin.
“Okay, everyone, we stop here and go back to the barracks! »
That’s all ?
There are some who have been defenestrated for less than that.
Mr. Prigojine, he inherits a safe-conduct for Belarus.
It’s hard to understand that after being called a “traitor” by Putin, Prigojine survived this operation that was altogether humiliating for the allegedly all-powerful Russian army.
That’s not the only hard thing to understand, I agree. Starting off, the concept of a private army of 25,000 to 50,000 volunteer mercenaries and common criminals released from prison to fight is not self-evident. After having acted for various torture regimes in Africa and Syria by committing various massacres, she fought in Ukraine for Russia. Alongside the Russian army, but while being its rival.
It is not yesterday that Prigojine violently denounces the incompetence of senior officers of the Russian army. He spent the spring posting videos on Telegram calling them dangerous idiots.
Thousands of people are imprisoned in Russia for peacefully demonstrating against the war. But Prigozhin seems to have special permission, due to his friendship with Putin.
Before being a warlord, by the way, Prigojine was a robber in the 1980s in the USSR, then a restaurant owner in Saint Petersburg. And it was as a Kremlin caterer that he first made his fortune – before being granted mining operations, etc.
His military experience is more that of a guerrilla for hire having learned on the job than of a general. He still ended up becoming the Russian face of the war in Ukraine, the one who had the right to say everything that nobody can say in Russia, the only one apparently to claim victories.
His criticisms—lack of ammunition, food, preparation—were so vocal this spring that I wondered if it was a diversion. Or an order from Putin himself to shake up his military.
In Russia, a good conspiracy theory is often the best possible explanation, after all.
But this time, the staging has been pushed to the point of absurdity, if that is one. Driving with a convoy on the highway to get to… to get to where, exactly? Take control of the Kremlin and state television? Create a mass movement in the army? Die gloriously after having publicly denounced the very reason for the war in Ukraine?
Then turn around after a phone call from a phoney president?
Everything is nonsense in this story.
It’s all nonsense, but even if it’s staged, I don’t see what’s good for Putin in that. After declaring Prigozhin a “traitor”, he could no longer let him fight for Russia without losing face. But to exonerate him without any other form of trial with internal exile as the only penalty?
In exchange, Prigojine hands over his band of war criminals to the Russian army. In itself, this is an admission of military weakness.
Already this “special operation” was to last just a few days, in February 2022. After nearly 500 days, the Russian army has shown signs of incompetence and demoralization. That didn’t stop her from devastating entire parts of Ukraine. But without great progress, and at the cost of tens of thousands of deaths.
That doesn’t mean the war is over, unfortunately. Nor that Putin is about to be overthrown.
But it does mean that the support of NATO countries for Ukraine has had effects that we would not have thought possible at the start of the Russian invasion. These violent dissensions, real or staged, between Wagner and the Russian army are the fruit of the pressure of the Ukrainian defense. They show even more brilliantly, even theatrically, the failure of Putin’s operation.
It is indeed a stab in the back. Friendly fire at Pride.
That, even from the Russians, is becoming difficult to hide.