Mutiny on the Moscow road

Over the weekend Vladimir Putin’s hold on power experienced its most serious challenge yet. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder and leader of the Wagner Group of mercenaries, directed his forces to seize Rostov-on-Don, the Russian city that is a key staging and supply point for Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, and then march aggressively toward Moscow. For a time on Saturday it seemed that Russia teetered at the precipice of a civil war.

Civil war appears to have been averted, at least for now. Victor Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus and close Putin ally, brokered a deal with Prigozhin to halt the Wagner march and for Prigozhin to depart Russia for Belarus. Prigozhin’s fate remains uncertain. It bears noting that few of Putin’s adversaries have been safe even in Western countries. Witness the gruesome poisonings of Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripol in the United Kingdom. Belarus will offer Prigozhin little protection.

The Wagner Group is a mercenary cabal, a paramilitary organization, and a death cult. For the past decade, it has been one of Putin’s favored instruments for projecting Russian power, whether fighting in Syria to preserve Bashar al-Assad’s regime, controlling the Central African Republic, or capturing and holding territory in Ukraine. As long as Prigozhin remained loyal to Putin, the Russian president could wield the Wagner Group as an extension of the Russian state.

That is no more. In recent months Prigozhin has become increasingly critical of the Kremlin’s mishandling of the Ukraine war, all while thousands of Wagner Group fighters perished due in part to the Russian military’s refusal to provide the needed ammunition and supplies. Prigozhin even spoke the obvious but forbidden truth that the invasion of Ukraine was needless.

Prigozhin, it must be said, is no hero. He is a wicked gangster whose callous disregard for human life exceeds even Putin’s brutality. Among his many misdeeds, Prigozhin oversaw at Putin’s behest the Russian campaign of interference in the 2016 American presidential election.

Now Prigozhin has turned on his erstwhile patron. With this past weekend’s bizarre events—a combination of mutiny, insurrection, and stillborn coup attempt—Prigozhin has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, even if he and his forces did not cross the actual Moskva River to take the capital city. Prigozhin made two decisions that are unforgivable to Putin: He publicly criticized Putin, and he made Putin look weak by seizing control of Rostov-on-Don. Notably, as the national security columnist David Ignatius points out, no Russian military units intervened to stop the Wagner Group seizure of Rostov-on-Don or advance toward Moscow. The Russian military’s loyalty to Putin appears diminished, and Putin in turn seems vulnerable, his grasp on power no longer sure.

Russian history bears abundant evidence of how costly setbacks in foreign wars can trigger regime change at home. Russia’s defeat in World War I led directly to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that toppled czarist rule and birthed the Soviet Union. In 1989, the Soviet Army’s defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later.

Putin is very mindful of this history, and even bewailed the 1917 precedent in his Saturday statement denouncing the coup attempt. Though he has consolidated power in the Kremlin to a degree unseen since Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who died in 1953, it comes at a cost. Putin has no Politburo to check his worst impulses, and no inner circle of peers willing to tell him hard truths about his folly.

The Russian war effort in Ukraine might suffer the most aftershocks from this weekend’s tumult. Because Wagner mercenaries generally feel more loyalty to Prigozhin than to the Russian state, it is unlikely Wagner forces will play a meaningful role in Ukraine any more. Their absence will diminish Russia’s available combat power. The Russian military itself, already demoralized from its catastrophic losses and poor battlefield performance in Ukraine, may become even more demoralized. The Economist quotes a British defense attaché who recently served in Moscow: “Who would want to fight on for a Russian regime which has shown such weakness, declaring a mutiny and then rowing back within the day?”

As for Russia itself, one strains to see much hope for a better future. Putin’s dictatorship flouts the biblical mandates for government to preserve order and rule justly; he is a vile menace to the world and to his own people. Yet should he be deposed in a coup or should Russia otherwise descend into civil war, much worse could ensue, beginning with the possibility of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal of 6,000 warheads falling into hostile hands.

In the face of no good earthly options, we are reminded to be fervent in prayer—for the people of Russia and the people of Ukraine, and for wisdom for Western leaders. And for Putin himself that he would repent of his wickedness, and pursue the path of peace.