The attempted coup weakens Putin’s grip

US intelligence sources suggest that Wagner’s rebellion was sparked as they would have had to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defence, potentially seeing this as Vladamir Putin (right) siding with general Sergei Shoigu (left) (Picture: Kremlin.ru)

Two and a half years ago the far right seized the Capitol of the United States, the world’s first nuclear power. Now there has been an attempted coup in the second. 

There’s a great deal we don’t know about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive “March for Justice” on Moscow. But some things are clear. Above all, the repressive apparatuses at the core of the Russian state are now badly fractured.

Prigozhin’s past—a St Petersburg hot dog salesman and petty criminal who used his role as Putin’s caterer to become a player—underlines the personalised nature of the Russian regime. But his mercenary Wagner Group became an important instrument of state power. It was formed under the supervision of the GRU, Russian military intelligence. It has acted as a means of power protection that was “deniable” because it is a private company.

First active during the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, Wagner was also used by Vladimir Putin in his intervention in the Syrian Civil War. It earned a reputation for extreme brutality. More recently Wagner has been at the heart of Moscow’s neocolonial expansion in Africa, propping up weak governments and seizing resources. 

This has been especially effective in north and west Africa. According to the Financial Times newspaper, “anti-French sentiment has reached boiling point in several former French colonies, where its military interventions have backfired and where its diplomats and businesses are accused of neo-colonial meddling.”

This process has gone furthest in the Central African Republic. One of its own army officers said, “For the Russians, this country is El Dorado. There is no state. There are no borders. There are no controls.” When Sudanese officials inspected a Russia-bound plane in Khartoum they found gold in boxes labelled as cookies.

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought Wagner back home. After the failure of the initial drive on Kyiv, Putin allowed Prigozhin to raise a new army from Russia’s vast convict population. This was an alternative to conscripting too many young working-class men. Other state organs have created their own militias—for example, the energy company Gazprom.

Wagner proved itself in combat, ultimately taking the much-contested Ukrainian town of Bakhmut. Prigozhin claims in an interview that it lost more than 10,000 soldiers in the battle, and the Ukrainians three times as many. He denounced the top generals Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov for incompetence and for starving Wagner of resources.

US intelligence sources have suggested that what sparked Prigozhin’s rebellion was a recent decision that “volunteers” such as the Wagner fighters had to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defence. He would have seen this as Putin siding with Shoigu and Gerasimov.

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What is striking about Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion is how successful it was. It seems to have been popular in Rostov-on-Don, where it began. 

There were some efforts by the armed forces to stop the Wagner column—the French newspaper, Le Monde, reports 15 Russian soldiers were killed in fighting at Voronezh. 

But there doesn’t seem to have been a serious attempt, for example, to take Wagner out using air power. Maybe Putin feared that this might cause the mutiny to spread.

There has been speculation that Prigozhin stopped and agreed to go into exile in Belarus because he couldn’t get any big political players on side. Nevertheless, the liberal writer Ben Judah says in the Telegraph newspaper, “The coup marks the definitive turn of a page in Russian history: from an era of oligarchs… to the era of warlords with private armies.”

This is an overstatement. According to Sam Greene of King’s College London, “The war has created enough opportunity for enrichment to keep the Russian elite excited about their future and invested in Putin’s success.”

Putin is undoubtedly badly weakened. He has somehow to deal with Wagner, which is no longer a reliable instrument. He can’t rely on his own troops’ loyalty. He will likely react by doubling down on his perilous gamble in Ukraine.