A Kremlin in Disarray

By David Satter

Thursday, July 13, 2023

 

The dramatic but short-lived mutiny by the Wagner mercenary group, on June 23–24, has left Russia in disarray. In recent months, Russian leaders have been preparing for a long war, confident that they can “outsuffer” Ukraine and exhaust the commitment of the West. Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s security council and the country’s former president, during a visit to Vietnam in May said: “This conflict will last a very long time, decades for sure. This is a new reality.”

 

The Wagner revolt, however, suggests that Russia’s internal situation is not as stable as it seemed and that the time at its disposal is not unlimited. This actually heightens the dangers of a wider conflict. If a war of attrition against the Ukrainians threatens to spark an internal revolt capable of threatening the regime and dooming the war effort, Russia may decide that the only alternative to defeat is to use its nuclear arms.

 

On June 23, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, announced on the group’s Telegram channel that his men had been shelled and he was going to “settle” with the Ministry of Defense. His forces entered Rostov-on-Don, Russia’s ninth-largest city, and captured the Russian Southern Military Headquarters without firing a single shot. He then dispatched thousands of Wagner fighters north to Moscow to seize Sergei Shoigu, the minister of defense, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, whom he blamed for actions costing “tens of thousands of lives.”

 

After the convoy had covered 470 miles in one day, Prigozhin suddenly agreed to halt his forces and return them to their bases. They were 120 miles from Moscow. The Kremlin announced that Prigozhin would not be prosecuted and that he could leave for Belarus. Prigozhin later said he had given a “master class” in how to conduct an invasion.

 

The unexpected end to the mutiny avoided bloodshed and restored the Russian political status quo ante at least temporarily. But in several important respects, Russia has been seriously weakened.

 

In the first place, the Kremlin can no longer sustain the impression of massive support for the government. The mutiny created an opening for the venting of long-suppressed anti-government feelings. In areas the Wagner forces passed, the population appeared to support the insurgents. In Rostov-on-Don, the majority of the people who gathered in the city center cheered the mutineers and took selfies with them and their equipment even though Putin, in a televised address, had called them traitors. According to Prigozhin, in cities along the M4 highway to Moscow, people welcomed his forces with Russian and Wagner Group flags. Military units offered no resistance and expressed their support.

 

The only direct conflict took place when the Wagner columns were attacked from the air by the Russian air force near Voronezh. Wagner shot down six helicopters and one Ilyushin Il-18 airborne command center, killing as many as 30 Russian airmen. The Il-18 is used to transmit commands to airplanes and helicopters operating at ultra-low altitudes. Russia has only twelve of these planes, and the loss of even one could undermine its ability to coordinate its forces during high-tempo operations.

 

Even in this operation, however, the only reason the pilots fired (again, according to Prigozhin) was that they were told that the Wagner column was a Ukrainian army unit that had broken through and was on its way to attack the Kremlin. A military observer in Moscow said he believes that the Wagner forces would not have met resistance if they had tried to enter Moscow.

 

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The Wagner Group has since shown the ability to set its own rules. According to the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Prigozhin met with Putin in the Kremlin on June 29, five days after the mutiny collapsed, and assured him of Wagner’s unconditional support. Prigozhin has had belongings that were seized in a search of his residence, including $150 million in cash, gold bars, and an arsenal of rifles and pistols, returned to him. A week after the rebellion, Wagner was continuing to recruit fighters to join the war against Ukraine, and, according to journalists who called its recruitment hotlines, new members sign contracts with the Wagner Group itself and not with the Russian Defense Ministry.

 

In Moscow, there are many, including “patriotic” war bloggers, who find Putin’s treatment of Prigozhin almost fantastical. They point out that making anti-war remarks in a social-media post can result in a prison sentence for “discreditation of the armed forces,” yet Prigozhin is not being punished for armed mutiny and the destruction of vital military aircraft.

 

The danger inherent in mercenaries’ being able to dictate terms to the government is aggravated by the fact that the Wagner Group is not Russia’s only autonomous militia. The Kadyrovtsy, the praetorian guard of the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, are a militia of 12,000 members, and they were supposedly on their way from their base in Donetsk to engage the Wagner Group on behalf of the regime when the mutiny was called off. In any serious crisis, however, their loyalty is to Kadyrov, not the Kremlin authorities.

 

Additionally, Gazprom, the giant Russian gas-and-energy conglomerate, has five private armies. They function, for the most part, to guard oil installations, but they can serve other functions. Potok, the Gazprom military company, was seen in April fighting alongside the Wagner Group in Bakhmut. Several oligarchs have their own well-paid and well-armed security forces, and even Shoigu, the defense minister, has a mercenary group, Patriot, fighting in Ukraine. All of these groups, under the right circumstances, are capable of becoming a law unto themselves.

 

Finally, as a result of the mutiny, the ban on official discussion of the reasons for Russia’s war against Ukraine was violated. The Kremlin over many years had directed an enormous media effort toward convincing Russians that Ukrainians were a threat to Russia and had to be “denazified.” But Prigozhin, who is a celebrity in Russia, said publicly that the official justification for the Russian invasion was nothing but a lie. In a June 23 video released by his press service, Prigozhin said that the Defense Ministry deceived both Putin and Russian society when it claimed, in February 2022, that the country faced an imminent threat from Ukraine. Ukraine was in fact not a threat, he said, and had no plans to join NATO in an attack on Russia.

 

“The war was only necessary,” he said, “so that a bunch of lowlifes could rebel and promote themselves.” He said the war was important for oligarchs “who are actually controlling Russia right now.” These remarks will inevitably be passed on by civilian relatives to soldiers at the front.

 

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For Russia, the military situation was unfavorable even before the mutiny. But the Kremlin leaders must now weigh actions in the field against the possibility of further destabilization of the regime.

 

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated in April that Russia had suffered 200,000 casualties, including 40,000 dead, in Ukraine. This toll is partly a consequence of human-wave attacks intended to overwhelm a defending force. In an interview with Current Time, the U.S.-supported Russian-language television network, a Ukrainian soldier on the front lines in Bakhmut described the horror of Russia’s frontal assaults. “The Russian soldiers face certain death in these attacks,” he said, “but they are not retreating. You can shoot a soldier’s head off but his comrade will keep coming. Their own commanders will kill them if they don’t attack.”

 

The use of human waves allows the Russian military to hold its more experienced soldiers in reserve, sending them into battle to exploit weak spots in the Ukrainian defenses as they emerge. The soldiers used in human waves are usually convicts or recently mobilized troops and have little leverage with their commanders. Signs of resistance, however, are beginning to appear. Starting in late January, a steady stream of videos on social media showed groups of recently mobilized soldiers protesting against suicidal tactics and heavy casualties and asking to be redeployed to rear areas. Russian troops have also produced videos saying that, after their units suffered huge losses, they were prevented from withdrawing by blocking units tasked with shooting anyone who tried to retreat.

 

The Russian media outlet Verstka reported that, since early February, Russian soldiers from at least 16 regions of the country have recorded video messages in which they criticize their commanders for using them as cannon fodder. There are videos of soldiers — for the most part, newly mobilized and sent into battle with minimal training — refusing to follow orders. According to NATO estimates, in the battle of Bakhmut, in which Russia gained territory with frontal assaults, Russia lost five men for every Ukrainian killed.

 

There is now concern over how the Prigozhin mutiny will affect the Russian ability to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive. On Russian Telegram channels, military bloggers have urged Russian soldiers to stay focused on the war. “Brothers! Everyone who holds a weapon at the line of contact, remember that your enemy is across from you,” read one message.

 

The disarray in Russia has boosted the morale of the Ukrainians. A video of a well-known Ukrainian drone commander, known as “Magyar,” watching the revolt while eating large amounts of popcorn went viral. At the same time, however, a weakened Russia is dangerous because it could easily be pushed closer to the use of weapons of mass destruction.

 

According to a report in the Financial Times, Chinese president Xi Jinping warned Putin during their March summit meeting in Moscow against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, a sign that he takes the possibility seriously. At the same time, Russia’s nuclear threats have increased. In his statement predicting a long war, Medvedev also threatened Ukraine with a preemptive nuclear strike. On June 13, Sergey Karaganov, a Putin security adviser, called for using nuclear weapons against Ukraine’s Western supporters.

 

The Russians also have other means short of using nuclear weapons to inflict catastrophic damage on Ukraine. On June 6, an explosion tore a hole in the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, which spans the Dnipro River in Russian-held territory, leading to a massive water surge that forced the evacuation of thousands of people on both sides of the river. The flooding destroyed an irrigation system vital for maintaining much of Ukraine’s fertile land along the Dnipro that now might be transformed into a desert.

 

The Kakhovka dam was built to withstand almost any type of attack from the outside, leading independent experts to conclude that the explosion was carried out by the Russians, likely by mining the dam’s generating room. The Russians had access to records of the dam’s engineering characteristics, kept in Moscow from Soviet days. As a result of the explosion, the Ukrainian army lost positions on the Dnipro’s many islands, which would have served as a base for a future landing operation, thus all but eliminating the possibility of an offensive in the Kherson region.

 

The mining of the Kakhovka dam may, in turn, be followed by other war crimes. Russia has controlled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear-power plant, the largest in Europe, since March 4, 2022. In June, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the Russian military had placed “objects resembling explosives” at the plant with the possible intention of blowing it up and blaming the disaster on Ukraine. Renat Karchaa, an adviser to Russia’s state nuclear-power company, said in a statement to the Russian news agency TASS that Ukraine’s armed forces were preparing to attack the plant.

 

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In the wake of the Prigozhin mutiny, Putin thanked Russia’s forces of law and order for having “stopped a civil war” that was about to plunge the country into “chaos,” saying, “You have defended the motherland and the lives, liberty, and security of our citizens.” The Kremlin also issued a set of guidelines for how the mutiny was to be described in the state media. A copy was obtained by the Russian news site Meduza.

 

According to the guidelines, mercenaries who took part in the insurrection were to be called “false patriots,” “rebels,” and “traitors.” Although Russia’s security forces and law enforcement took no action during the insurrection, they were to be described as “Russia’s real defenders.” It was recommended to emphasize that the “warriors” of Russia’s armed forces consider Putin to be their “true leader,” while he, in turn, sees them as a “reliable backbone of the state.”

 

It remains to be seen how effective this propaganda treatment will be in light of the fact that millions learned of the mutiny and witnessed its astonishing progress firsthand. A Moscow journalist said that people were in a state of total shock when they realized that the Wagner columns were advancing on Moscow and no one was trying to stop them. “Half of Moscow was in horror, but others waited with joy in the hope that something would finally change.”

 

The Putin regime is good at propaganda and manipulation, but Russians were never before confronted with such a graphic demonstration of the regime’s impotence. There are serious dangers ahead, but there are also some grounds for hope that the Putin machine, created in 1999 with the bombings of Russian apartment buildings and exemplified in the forcible human-wave attacks in Ukraine, may finally be nearing its end.