by Neil MacFarquhar for The New York Times
Neither Vladimir V. Putin nor the leader of the Wagner mercenary group made public appearances on Sunday, a day after an armed rebellion shook the nation.
Confusion and uncertainty pervaded Russia on Sunday, with neither President Vladimir V. Putin nor Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of a mutinous mercenary group, appearing anywhere in public a day after the most profound government crisis in three decades — an open military rebellion — appeared defused.
Even as state television tried to trumpet the fact that Russian unity and “maturity” had prevailed, independent commentators assessing the damage concluded that Mr. Putin’s aura of infallibility and invincibility had been punctured. And some wondered aloud why much of Russia’s leadership was being neither seen nor heard.
Aside from Mr. Putin, neither Sergei K. Shoigu, the minister of defense, nor Valery V. Gerasimov, the military chief of staff, had put in a public appearance since the uprising started on Friday night. Many heads of the country’s security services also proved invisible.
“Where was the leadership of the Ministry of Defense during the approach of the armed unit to Moscow?” wrote Yuri Kotenok, one of a small tribe of influential military bloggers who have emerged as a supportive if critical voice regarding the war in Ukraine. Could a foreign enemy, he asked, march with equal ease on the capital?
World leaders also chimed in. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Sunday that Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion had revealed cracks in Mr. Putin’s hold on power. “It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority,” Mr. Blinken said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.’’
In the end, Mr. Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary force known as Wagner, called off his men after staging an armed uprising against the military’s leadership for nearly 24 hours this weekend. But the damage had been done, not least because his blistering criticism of the military leaders as incompetent included questioning the Kremlin’s justifications for invading its neighbor in the first place.
Russians — and the world — had watched with alarm as his columns of armored vehicles inched ever closer to Moscow with little armed opposition, posing a threat to Mr. Putin and raising the specter of a civil war in the nuclear-armed state.
“Putin and the state have been dealt a severe blow,” wrote Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik. She predicted it would have significant repercussions for the regime.
Ms. Stanovaya noted that Mr. Prigozhin had reversed course only after Mr. Putin, a longtime ally, expressed fury at what the president described as a “stab in the back.” Mr. Prigozhin, she wrote, “found himself unprepared to assume the role of a revolutionary.”
“He also wasn’t prepared for the fact that Wagner was about to reach Moscow, where his only option remained — to ‘take the Kremlin’ — an action that would inevitably result in him and his fighters being eradicated,” Ms. Stanovaya wrote.
A new analysis by a FilterLabs.AI, a firm that tracks public sentiment in Russia by monitoring social media and internet forums, found that Mr. Prigozhin was also subjected to a Kremlin propaganda assault. And access to Telegram channels that were controlled by Mr. Prigozhin or supportive of him became more difficult, with users reporting slowdowns.Public support for Mr. Prigozhin and Wagner fell sharply, FilterLabs found.
“For Prigozhin’s campaign to have worked, he would have needed to see high support in Moscow,” the FilterLabs analysis said. “This did not materialize, despite his own base of support and media campaigns.”
Instead a deal was reached.
The Wagner forces would turn around, and Mr. Prigozhin could go to neighboring Belarus and avoid criminal charges. The Wagner fighters, too, would be absolved.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said the agreement had been struck to “avoid bloodshed, to avoid an internal confrontation, to avoid clashes with unpredictable consequences.” He did not indicate that the uprising would lead to any changes in the Russian military leadership, as Mr. Prigozhin had demanded, and said that Russia’s military operations in Ukraine would continue unchanged.
The deal that defused the hostilities was credited to Belarus’s leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a Putin ally. Had Mr. Putin fallen, of course, Mr. Lukashenko would also have been vulnerable, so in aiding his patron, he was also aiding himself.
“Putin lost because he showed how weak his system is, that he can be challenged so easily,” said Pavel Slunkin, a former Belarusian diplomat and analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Prigozhin challenged, he attacked, he was so bold and then he retreated, looking like a loser. Only Lukashenko won points.”
The rebellion, even if aborted, may now affect Russia’s global standing as partners like China reassess the strength of Mr. Putin’s authority.
Mr. Prigozhin proved uncharacteristically quiet on Sunday, a day after he was seen driving away from the military headquarters in the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don that his forces had seized during the uprising. An independent Russian broadcaster who asked Mr. Prigozhin’s spokesman for comment was told that he was unavailable, but that he would soon start responding to the press.
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Reporting was contributed by Julian E. Barnes, Valerie Hopkins, Ivan Nechepurenko, Anton Troianovski, Matthew Mpoke Bigg, John Ismay, Alina Lobzina and Milana Mazaeva.
Neil MacFarquhar is a national correspondent. Previously, as Moscow bureau chief, he was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. He spent more than 15 years reporting from around the Mideast, including five as Cairo bureau chief, and wrote two books about the region.
Attacks continued. Russian shelling hit a five-story apartment building before dawn in Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson, killing a 44-year-old man and trapping a woman under the rubble, local officials said.
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