Don’t Put Too Much Stock in the Prigozhin Conspiracy Theories

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 26, 2023

 

The circumstances that produced the most audacious armed rebellion inside Russia since Soviet sailors protesting Bolshevik policies captured the Kronstadt naval fortress in March 1921 practically beg for conspiracy theorists willing to fill in the gaps. That Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny ended as swiftly as it began, without many observable consequences for the mutineers, is a tough pill to swallow. There must be more than the official story, and there almost certainly is. But those doing the speculating often assume the spectacular and ideological when venal and mundane explanations for this otherwise inexplicable circus likely suffice.

 

Hypotheses about what really went down in Russia over the weekend and why Prigozhin’s forces stopped just 200 kilometers outside Moscow and abruptly gave up their “march for justice” abound. All of them are unsatisfying.

 

Some speculate that the whole point of the Wagner rebellion was for it to end in the bewildering way it did, with Prigozhin’s soldiers returning to their camps and Prigozhin accepting the terms negotiated by Belarussian despot Alexander Lukashenko and going into something akin to exile in Belarus. From there, this theory goes, Prigozhin can mount another attempted assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv under more advantageous circumstances.

 

If the threat Prigozhin posed to Moscow was superficial, the Russians put on a good show of it by blowing up roads and dismantling bridges ahead of the Wagner column’s advance. Moreover, a Wagner-led effort to reopen the front Ukrainian resistance closed not long after the February 2022 invasion would suffer the same logistical and political encumbrances that led the initial assault to fail.

 

For those who are attracted to a chauvinist reading of geopolitics, which assigns the origins of all events overseas to machinations behind closed doors in the United States, the CIA is probably to blame for the crisis in Russia. In the early hours of Prigozhin’s mutiny, former defense-intelligence analyst Rebekah Koffler posited what she admitted was a low-confidence theory that Prigozhin was working with the U.S. and NATO. She said the whole affair could have been a “staged operation,” either to justify the mobilization of Russian society or to destabilize it. Her confidence in that theory increased after Prigozhin withdrew the gun he held to the head of Putin’s regime. “No, this is all staged,” Koffler insisted.

 

If Putin’s goal was to expose the hollowness of his regime, mission accomplished. Prigozhin demonstrated that Moscow’s proscriptions on dissent against its policies in Ukraine only apply to those unable to raise an insurrectionary private army. He showed that Russian cities can be sacked without firing a shot, and that a seditious militia can kill Russian guardsmen and down aircraft on Russian soil without consequence. His rebellion has inspired rare criticism of Putin in the Russian press, some of which has complained of the state’s “vulnerability” to hostile forces.

 

If you squint, you can see why the United States would welcome the narrative that Russia is a paper tiger, but Washington needs there to be someone in unambiguous control in the Kremlin. And as for Putin, why would he voluntarily expose cracks in Russian society and establish the predicate for observers to envision the contours of a post-Putin Russia?

 

A somewhat more unhinged version of this theory comes to us via the pro-Trump MAGA right, the loudest of whom we are unfortunately obliged to pay attention to by virtue of the influence they wield over the former president’s inner circle. The American deep state, this contingent’s members allege, is so committed to distracting us from revelations surrounding “Biden family corruption” that it applied its omnipotence to engineering “a coup in Russia to remove Putin.” Little needs to be said of this bone-headed theory save that its value is in creating a permission structure for those who do not understand domestic political affairs in Russia to go on not understanding them without the fear of missing out on any key details.

 

These grand theories about the activity in Russia over the last 48 hours are more satisfying than the version of events that can be pieced together from Western news reports. Conspiracy theorists insist there are shadowy forces at work guiding and shaping the course of history. But the story that is being told about the Prigozhin mutiny in the Western press is far more believable, even though it is also far grubbier and more banal.

 

Prigozhin claims that the impetus for his march on Moscow was a strike on Wagner positions behind the front lines in Ukraine by Russian forces — an assertion that also happens to bolster the legitimacy of his long-running gripes with the Russian Ministry of Defense over its conduct of the war. But examinations of the site of that alleged attack haven’t proven Prigozhin’s claims. According to the Washington Post’s reporting, the real “trigger” for Prigozhin’s mutiny was a Defense Ministry effort to fold all of Russia’s paramilitary forces into the military, depriving Prigozhin of command of his lucrative private army. For his part, Prigozhin now concedes that the ministry’s order justified his “march” to some extent.

 

Why did Prigozhin fold when he did? Well, the U.K.-based Telegraph reports that Russian intelligence services “threatened to harm the families of Wagner leaders” if Prigozhin didn’t call off his advance. Some have speculated that the same conditions that allowed the Wagner group to capture so much Russian territory unmolested — the lack of Russian military personnel on the ground, the defections of whom Prigozhin was likely counting on — also convinced him to give up the ghost. Some U.S. intelligence sources told ABC News that “concessions were made” concerning the future of one of Prigozhin’s archenemies, Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu. Maybe. The deal worked out by Lukashenko does, however, allow Prigozhin to preserve his control over much of the Wagner forces and their lucrative pillaging in Africa and the Middle East.

 

If this was an autogolpe, Putin wasn’t well served by it. His regime suffered the most serious challenge to its authority in decades, and its brittleness was put on full display. If the challenge to Putin’s legitimacy goes unanswered, more challengers will arise — possibly with the vocal support Russia’s Putinist elite denied Prigozhin. The mutiny occasioned images of Russian citizens in Rostov celebrating their “liberation” at the hands of a mass-murdering militia and hurling insults at the symbols of Kremlin authority.

 

Putin cannot now grant Prigozhin his desire to see some Russian military brass defenestrated, lest he invite future gun-backed challenges to his policy and personnel preferences. He can’t afford to demonstrate to the military that there are few consequences for bloody insurrection. That realization possibly explains why Russian television networks now indicate that the briefly suspended warrant for Prigozhin’s arrest is once again active. All this behavior suggests at a minimum that Putin was operating under duress when he diminished his own authority by outsourcing management of the crisis to his satrap in Minsk.

 

The simplest explanation for events in Russia this weekend may be that Prigozhin was just trying to save his own skin and enrich himself in the process, and Putin was backed into an unanticipated corner. That doesn’t satisfy those who thought they were witnessing a Tom Clancy novel unfold in real time, but history — and Russian history, in particular — doesn’t always read like a thriller. Sometimes, it unfolds as a farce.