Well. That was an amusing and instructive four-and-twenty hours. And the lessons appointed for the feast of Saint John Baptist were remarkably apt to it.
This is going to be a very quick and no-frills commentary. Let us rehearse what happened. Gruppa Vagnera pulled out of the line, and, led by its proprietor, Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, embarked upon a Mussolini-style black-shirt march on the capital. The excuse, a very traditionally Russian one, was that they intended to rescue the tsar from his evil counsellors: for, if only the Little Father knew what things were being done and mismanaged in his name… The actual occasion of the march, call it mutiny or call it insurrection, was the prospect that the Wagner employees were to be folded into and come under the command, such as it is, of the regular forces of the Russian Federation. Which meant military discipline, military pay, and being commanded by that prize pair of idiots, Sergei Kuzhugetovich Shoigu and Valery Vasilyevich Gerasimov.
Extraordinary scenes followed. The march was effectively unopposed. Rostov-na-Donu—the site of the Southern Military District headquarters, and a major transport hub—fell readily into Yevgeny Viktorovich’ hands. Deputy Defense Minister of the Russian Federation Yunus-bek Bamatgireyevich Yevkurov and staff officers attempted to treat with Prigozhin and were simply berated, by him, for their pains.
Live.
On Russian social media.
Priggy and the lads marched on, to Voronezh, seizing, apparently, its military facilities; and then onwards, into the Lipetsk and Ryazan oblasts. Moscow panicked. It’s not only that people fled. It’s not only that barricades were erected. It’s that Russian authorities destroyed their own transport infrastructure leading into Moscow in order to stop the March.
A showdown between ChVK Wagner and the old Chekist in the Kremlin seemed inevitable.
Then, suddenly, a deal was announced. Purportedly, a deal, brokered between Yevgeny Viktorovich and the Belarussian dictator Alyaksandr Ryhoravich Lukashenka, and allegedly signed off on and made at the instance of Vladimir Vladimirovich, provided that all charges against Yevgeny Viktorovich should be dropped and all Wagner fighters not materially implicated in the march should be given the opportunity to sign contracts with the regular forces, contingent upon Priggy’s going into exile in Belarus; and Sergei Kuzhugetovich and Valery Vasilyevich should be removed from post.
This immediately raises Aretha Franklin’s memorable if ungrammatical question, who’s zoomin’ who. Well, we shall see. But we can see some things already.
Authorizing and accepting this deal is not precisely indicative of a strong position for Vladimir Vladimirovich. It is diagnostic of weakness. Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin and Gruppa Vagnera are Putin’s creatures. So also is Alyaksandr Ryhoravich. The mere existence of PMCs, which are theoretically prohibited under the law of the Russian Federation, was an admission of weakness. And Gruppa Vagnera is at best scotched, not killed. A Stalin should never have left Prigozhin and Wagner alive. Little Volodya may have thought himself clever in treating with Yevgeny Viktorovich through a proxy; but all he has done is to elevate Alyaksandr Ryhoravich and to give him more power than the meagre and scant scraps he had previously had as a puppet. This is precisely what he had done with Prigozhin and Wagner, and it is precisely as likely to come back and bite him in the hindquarters.
Diplomatically, Putin has not shot himself in the foot so much as he has inflicted upon himself a wound likely eventually to prove fatal. At Tilbury, during Armada year, my first cousin fifteen times removed, Elizabeth I, said scornfully, of the Duke of Parma and the King of Spain, let tyrants fear—as she should not. Well, tyrants always do fear. And so they damned well ought. Tyrants do not have the only legitimacy which my ninth cousin seven times removed Thomas Jefferson believed in: that is, democratic legitimacy: the consent of the governed. Uncrowned tyrants do not have the mystic legitimacy conferred upon them in many eyes by their being anointed kings. Vladimir Vladimirovich and others of his kidney are doomed the minute they flinch and show weakness.
No one thinks that Prigozhin truly believed the Ukraine war to be unjust. Nevertheless, he said, and social media in Russia broadcast his claim, that there was no ground, no casus belli, for launching it. That can neither be ignored nor taken back.
Unit cohesion, such as it was to begin with, if any, in the regular forces of the Russian Federation, is now a dead letter. They are not competent. There shall inevitably be friendly fire incidents, if only from sheer cack-handedness. The very next time one of these occurs, and particularly if any former Wagner Group fighters are integrated anywhere in the regular forces, there shall be panicked cries of treason, a flurry of accusation and counteraccusation, witch-hunts. And eventually the whole thing shall devolve into infighting.
Moreover, the pirates of Wagner were the most effective troops Russia had in Ukraine. If they are integrated into the regulars, they shall necessarily either gain ascendancy over the conscripts and bypass the chain of command, or be promoted over the conscripts, or be a running ulcer in the regular forces. (If they are not sent into the fight, the regulars shall collapse all the faster.) The regular forces were already war criminals; this is going to be a lot worse, not only for the victims of this invasion but for the Russian regular forces as well. Nor can any commander of regular forces feel a great deal of confidence in commanding troops who were either conscripts with effectively no training or the sweepings of every jail and prison in Russia. Wellington might have managed them. There is nobody in Russia who can. Once again, morale and unit cohesion are shot to rag dolls.
Russia has systemic societal issues with drug and alcohol abuse, not least among the conscripts in its regular forces. Leaven those forces with violent drug offenders brought over from the Wagner Group, and it’s Afghanistan 1979 all over again.
Of course, the Russian regular armed forces can try to substitute Chechen fighters for Wagner fighters, on the presumption that these mujahedeen are likely to live puritanically. This creates a small propaganda problem. A holy war for Holy Mother Russia, in the dog-whistle interest of ethnic Russian, blood-and-soil unification, to the greater glory of Orthodoxy, is a little hard to sell when your crack troops are Chechen Muslims and the commanders you have hitherto relied on and bigged up in the state-controlled press are a Tuvan, an Ingush, and a Tatar. And Priggy and the Wagnerites, ranging from blood-and-soil ethno-fascists to Rodnovers, can be relied upon to point that out loudly at every opportunity.
Then there is power projection, from Syria to the Central African Republic. The regular forces of the Russian Federation cannot project power in their own backyard. Russian power projection under the Putin regime has relied primarily upon PMC Wagner. Well, you can kiss that goodbye. If, which God forbid, I were Assad, I’d be very, very nervous right now. The Mediterranean is about to become Lake NATO again.
Vladimir Vladimirovich thinks he’s dodged a bullet for now. But he has shown weakness, which can have no other end than his rather messy removal. Once a tyrant has shown signs of panic, and has been forced, even at arm’s length, to treat with his challengers, it’s all over. The next time there is so much as a whiff of unrest, for example, Winnie-the-Xi and the de facto government currently exercising power in Beijing, whose protestations of unlimited friendship come always at a very steep price, shall almost certainly, protesting Xi’s loyalty to and support of Putin and the Putin regime, show his solidarity therewith by putting troops in the Russian Far East … ‘to preserve order.’ And there they shall stay, until dislodged … by someone other than the Russians. Obviously, no one who’s not a complete fool could trust any promise of Putin’s. Lukashenka and Prigozhin alike now necessarily suspect themselves to be in that man’s crosshairs: it is ill to be one to whom a tyrant feels humiliatingly indebted. No one wishes either of them to live: they’re both complete bastards who ought to be hanged. But there is now a great deal of question as to whether it is within Putin’s power to be the one who disposes of them; and there is now every reason for the two of them to unite against Putin. Belarus is probably the last place on earth to which Vladimir Vladimirovich ought to have exiled Yevgeny Viktorovich.
And in the numbering of Putin’s days, it is worth noting that the Russian border is clearly permeable; that the regular troops are disinclined to fight for him; that people turned out to take selfies with Wagner fighters in Rostov and Voronezh; and that no one in Putin’s position who can trust in or place any reliance upon his personal praetorian guard gives the orders to barricade his capital, blow bridges, and dig up highways: an expression of lack of confidence which those praetorians, Rosgvardiya, must have noticed and are unlikely to forget or forgive.
That is what we think we know so far. But, to quote one of the whining whinge-pop standards of the ’80s which added a new horror to an already despicable genre, hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over.
Yesterday was an amusing and instructive twenty-four hours. It is only the beginning.
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 