The overriding issue that has brought the current chaos in Russia is, of course, the failing special military operation in Ukraine says General Lord Richard Dannatt.
Yesterday morning, an unusually solemn President Putin warned state television viewers that Russia was facing an armed mutiny. However, he revealed the depth of his anxiety that this could be more than just an armed mutiny by invoking history in his referral to a millennial challenge.
In less febrile circumstances, an armed mutiny might be seen off by the deployment of loyal troops, but Putin would seem to fear now that this is potentially more than an armed mutiny, possibly the opening moves of a determined coup to remove him from power. On whom can he count today to maintain himself in power? He may be running out of options. Events over the next few hours and days will decide whether this is a little local difficulty or an existential threat to the Putin regime.
On any analysis it can be concluded that there are three principal power groups in Russia today – Vladimir Putin and his elite group of self-interested supporters, Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenary group, and the Russian army under Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
The overriding issue that has brought the current chaos in Russia is, of course, the failing special military operation in Ukraine. Only days into the illegal attack on Ukraine it was quite clear that Putin had fallen victim to his own hubris – the FSB had failed to undermine the Kyiv regime and the Russian army proved to too incompetent to topple it. From there his problems have escalated.
While initially he might have been grateful for the Wagner group’s support, as he had been in Africa and Syria, that support began to turn sour when Prigozhin’s boast last September to capture Bakhmut, which the Russian army had failed to do, descended into seven months of bloody attritional fighting and a bitter argument over the supply of ammunition.
Prigozhin was at expletive-ridden daggers drawn with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Gerasimov, laying the deaths of thousands of his troops at their feet. Given Prigozhin’s attempt to humiliate the regular Russian army this bitter argument over ammunition supply should not have been a great surprise. Hitherto, Prigozhin has been careful not attack Putin directly, but the Rubicon was crossed in the last twenty-four hours and Prigozhin’s march on Moscow looks now much more like a coup than a mutiny.
There is another sub plot. Over the last fifteen months the group of Russian leaders most disenchanted with the special military operation was probably the generals themselves, led by Gerasimov. They have watched their army being disastrously mishandled by Putin in Ukraine and the reputation that they had sought to restore after the humiliation of the Cold War, destroyed. It was therefore not beyond the bounds of possibility towards the end of last year that it could have been Gerasimov, supported by the army, which could have moved against Putin.
Was it therefore a surprise when Putin sent Gerasimov out of Moscow to take command of the operation in Ukraine? Objectively to most military minds this looked like a most unusual thing to do, but pragmatically for Putin it might have been an act of self-survival.
Today, it is not Gerasimov in the Kremlin wielding the Brutus knife in Putin’s Julius Caesar moment but his once most loyal Yevgeny Prigozhin whose troops are advancing on Moscow. The Russian army could oppose Prigozhin, or it could choose, at Gerasimov’s direction, not to do so. FSB and interior ministry troops, loyal to former KGB Colonel Putin, could oppose Prigozhin but the outcome is uncertain.
With most of the Wagner soldiers being liberated convicts, they have little to lose on a personal basis. Their loyalty to Prigozhin may prove stronger than their loyalty to Putin and the Russian state that imprisoned them. Having crossed that Rubicon, Prigozhin may have left himself no room for negotiations. For him, it may well be do or die.
And what of the war in Ukraine? If the operations to probe the Russian defensive lines have found weaknesses, this would be the ideal time for the Ukrainians to commit their well trained and equipped attack brigades. To create a rout amongst the Russian troops like events around Kharkiv and Izium last autumn might be the final catalyst to sweep Putin out of power.
This would open the way for Gerasimov, Prigozhin, Lavrov or one of several others to seize the presidency. And there could be successive coups in the volatility of the Kremlin. Whatever happens, there will be many twists and turns before peace and security returns to Ukraine and Europe and an inevitable huge loss of self-esteem in Russia. That, in itself, could pose severe future threats to the West.
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Credit: Gavriil Grigorov/Pool Sputnik Kremlin.
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