On June 13, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with war correspondents and military bloggers for a question and answer session at the Kremlin. One war correspondent asked Putin “a question about the notorious red lines.” Addressing Putin, he said, “Clearly…we are at war not just with the Kiev regime, but with the so-called collective West as well. NATO countries are constantly moving and crossing our red lines. We express our concern and keep saying that this is unacceptable, but never come up with actual answers. Are we going to keep moving our red lines?”
That is a question top officials in the Biden administration have been asking as well. Less than two weeks earlier, The Washington Post reported that the risk calculation has begun to factor in that Putin “has not followed through on promises to punish the West for providing weapons to Ukraine.” The White House has concluded that Putin is “bluffing.”
A senior State Department official says, “Russia’s reluctance to retaliate has influenced the risk calculus of Secretary of State Antony Blinken,” who has pushed the Biden administration “to do more to support Ukraine.” A White House official told the Post that “national security adviser Jake Sullivan also has viewed the benefits of supplying more lethal weaponry to Ukraine as outweighing the risks of escalation,” leading him to work “extensively with European allies on providing F-16s to Ukraine.”
But the United States may be misinterpreting Russian military decisions and not recognizing them as escalatory responses to the crossing of redlines.
Those who know Putin’s thinking best say he does not bluff. In his biography, Putin, Philip Short says that a formative lesson of Putin’s childhood was never bluff. Short says that the lesson Putin learned in the KGB had already been learned on the streets. In the KGB, Putin was taught not to “reach for a weapon unless you are prepared to use it.” As a child, Putin says, he had learned that “It was the same on the street. [There] relations were clarified with fists. You didn’t get involved unless you were prepared to see it through.”
“NATO countries are constantly…crossing our redlines,” the war correspondent said. “We express our concern and keep saying that this is unacceptable, but never come up with actual answers. Are we going to keep moving our red lines?” he asked.
We have responded to them crossing our redlines, Putin answered. He specifically identified three responses to the crossing of Russian redlines.
The “first and the most important,” Putin said was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the first place.
“[T]he brightest of all redlines” for Russia, as then-ambassador to Russia and now director of the CIA William Burns called it, has always been “Ukrainian entry into NATO.” On December 17, 2021, Russia, once again, highlighted that redline for Washington. The key demands of the proposals on security guarantees were no NATO expansion into Ukraine and no deployment of weapons or troops to Ukraine. On December 26, the U.S. rejected Russia’s essential demand for a written guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO. Putin noted “that fundamental Russian concerns were ignored,” and, on February 17, the official Russian response said that the United States and NATO offered “no constructive answer” to Russia’s key demands. It then added that if the U.S. and NATO continued to refuse to provide Russia with “legally binding guarantees” regarding its security concerns, Russia would respond with “military-technical means.”
That was not a bluff. Russia drew the redline. The U.S. crossed the redline. Putin said Russia would respond with military means. One week later, they invaded Ukraine. “Is the special military operation itself not a response to them crossing these lines?” Putin responded to the war correspondent. “Is this not the answer to their crossing the red lines?”
The second Russian response to the West’s crossing of Russian redlines was the striking of Ukraine’s energy system. In the early days of the war, Russia seems not to have deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure. A senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency leaked to Newsweek that, in the first month of the war, “almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.”
In September, 2022, Russia witnessed “U.S. military personnel” being “directly involved…in critical line functions” in the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive. On September 10, The New York Times reported that the United States was “provid[ing] better and more relevant information about Russian weaknesses” and that they had “stepped up feeds of intelligence about the position of Russian forces, highlighting weaknesses in the Russian lines.” CNN reported that the U.S. was now engage in “war-gaming” with Ukraine.
Russia interpreted this escalated involvement in the war as indicating that the United States was now “directly participating in the military actions against our country.” And that crossed the second redline. The Russian response was the first massive air strikes on electrical systems.
That the Ukrainian offensive “directly involved U.S. military personnel in critical line functions…crossed what certainly may be seen by the Russian leadership as a red line announced at the very outset of the Russian action in Ukraine,” Asia Times reported on September 12.
“Are strikes on Ukraine’s energy system not an answer to them crossing the red lines?” Putin asked the war correspondent.
The third Russian response came after a series of Ukrainian drone strikes inside Russian territory, highlighted especially by the drones that Russia was forced to explode over the Kremlin, and a blunt admission of “plans to assassinate President Putin.” Russia responded with missile strikes that destroyed Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate just outside Kiev.
“And the destruction of the headquarters of the main intelligence directorate of the armed forces of Ukraine outside Kiev, almost within Kiev’s city limits, is it not the answer? It is,” Putin said to the question of answering the crossing of redlines.
You never know you have crossed a redline until you have already crossed it. That makes the choice of escalation over diplomacy very dangerous. But you also never know a country has answered the crossing of a redline unless you recognize their escalations as answers to the crossing of redlines. Putin publicly identified three Russian escalations as responses to the West crossing Russian redlines. He also suggested there may have been more escalations that might not have happened but for the crossing of redlines: “not everything may be covered by the media.”
The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine—appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality: “Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. . . . It shows real cracks.”
Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be—why else would he appear on the show?—went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke. “To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at—sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”
At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?
We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule.
Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.
So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:
“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by ultra-nationalist extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible. Most importantly, they control logistics. special forces see themselves as the premier offensive asset. When the overall strategy is offensive, big army tolerates their hubris and public chest thumping because SF are willing to take high risk and pay a high price. Successful offense requires a large expenditure of men and equipment. Successful defense, on the other hand, requires husbanding these assets.
“Wagner members were the spearhead of the original Russian Ukraine offensive. They were the ‘little green men’. When the offensive grew into an all-out attack by the regular army, Wagner continued to assist but reluctantly had to take a back seat in the period of instability and readjustment that followed. Prigo, no shy violet, took the initiative to grow his forces and stabilize his sector.
“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.
“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.
“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy. All without raising a sweat militarily or causing Putin to face a political standoff with the fundamentalists, who were ardent Prigo admirers. Pretty shrewd.”
There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.
The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive. I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country. of Russian occupation.
The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.
Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia—that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin. He could simply stop where he is, and see if the military reality will be accepted by the White House and whether a ceasefire will be sought, with formal end-of-war talks initiated. There will be a presidential election next April in Ukraine, and the Russian leader may stay put and wait for that—if it takes place. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said there will be no elections while the country is under martial law.
Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute—and obvious. On June 20 the Washington Post published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump—but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.
The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive. Democratic support for the war is another example of the party’s growing disengagement from the working class. It’s their children who have been fighting the wars of the recent past and may be fighting in any future war. These voters have turned away in increasing numbers as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes.
If there is any doubt about the continuing seismic shift in current politics, I recommend a good dose of Thomas Frank, the acclaimed author of the 2004 best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that explained why the voters of that state turned away from the Democratic party and voted against their economic interests. Frank did it again in 2016 in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? In an afterword to the paperback edition he depicted how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party repeated—make that amplified—the mistakes made in Kansas en route to losing a sure-thing election to Donald Trump.
It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America—and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment.
For close to 15 months, the bodies of fallen soldiers have steadily filled up a hillside military cemetery in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Now, the old, unmarked graves of those killed in past wars are being exhumed to make way for the seemingly endless stream of dead since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On Monday afternoon, half a dozen gravediggers took a break in the shade, waiting for the latest coffin to inter at the cemetery, called Lychakiv. Smoking cigarettes and shielding themselves from the sun, they lamented the devastation that Russia had wrought. And they said they were bracing for more deaths as the fighting grew more intense during Ukraine’s counteroffensive…
…The magnitude of the losses is being felt in communities like the one in Lviv, starkly visible in the growing number of military graves in cemeteries large and small around the country.
On Monday, two men who died hundreds of miles apart were buried next to each other. Bohdan Didukh, 34, was killed by a mine last week in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, where the first stages of Ukraine’s counteroffensive began. Three days later, Oleh Didukh, 52, died of a heart attack while serving in an air-defense unit in the country’s west.
The men, who shared a last name but never knew each other in life, were united in death. They were honored side by side in a joint funeral in Lviv. Their families were overcome with grief as gravediggers shoveled soil on top of their coffins.
At the funeral service in a Greek Catholic church in central Lviv, incense filled the air. The priest said he had assumed the two were father and son because of their names and ages. Their families were joined by their pain, he said.
After the church ceremony, the coffins were loaded into vans and driven to the central square, where a single trumpeter played. Then the cortege made its way to the graveyard.
Along the route, residents paused to pay their respects. A young girl stood next to her father, a small brown shopping bag in her hand, staring straight ahead as the coffins passed by. Some bystanders fell to their knees.
At the cemetery, Olena Didukh, Bohdan Didukh’s wife, fainted, overwhelmed by grief and the afternoon sun. Her sister steadied her, wrapping her arm around her back. Steps away, Oleh Didukh’s family arranged yellow and blue flowers, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, on his grave.
It has been difficult to pinpoint exact figures of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers since the start of Russia’s invasion in part because of a desire by authorities to keep those figures undisclosed…
The events of the past weekend (June 23 – 25, 2023) were so surreal and phantasmagorical that they militate against narration and defy description. On Friday, the infamous Wagner Group launched what appeared to be a genuine armed insurrection against the Russian state. They occupied portions of Rostov on Don – a city of over 1 million people, regional capital, and headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District – before setting off in an armed column towards Moscow. This column – replete with heavy military equipment including air defense systems – came within a few hundred miles of the capital – virtually unmolested by Russian state forces – before abruptly stopping, announcing that a deal had been brokered with the aid of Belorussian President Aleksandr “Uncle Sasha” Lukashenko, turning around, and heading back to Wagner bases in the Ukrainian theater.
Needless to say, the spectacle of a Russian mercenary group making an armed march on Moscow, and of Wagner tanks and infantry cordoning off Ministry of Defense buildings in Rostov, sparked widespread confidence among the western commentariat that the Russian state was about to be toppled and the Russian war effort in Ukraine would evaporate. There were confident and outlandish predictions pushed out in a matter of hours, including claims that Russia’s global footprint would disintegrate as the Kremlin recalled troops to defend Moscow and that Russia was about to enter a state of Civil War. We also saw the Ukrainian propaganda machine kick into overdrive, with characters like Anton Gerashchenko and Igor Sushko absolutely bombarding social media with fake stories about Russian army units mutinying and regional governors “defecting” to Prigozhin.
There’s something to be said here about the analytic model that prevails in our time – there’s a machine that instantly springs to life, taking in rumors and partial information in an environment of extreme uncertainty and spitting out formulaic results that match ideological presuppositions. Information is not evaluated neutrally, but forced through a cognitive filter that assigns it meaning in light of predetermined conclusions. Russia is *supposed* to collapse and undergo regime change (Fukuyama said so) – therefore, Prigozhin’s actions had to be framed in reference to this assumed endgame.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we saw some similar measure of aggressive model-fitting from “Trust the Plan” Russia supporters, who were confident that the Wagner uprising was just an act – an elaborate ruse concocted in concert by Prigozhin and Putin to fool Russia’s enemies and advance the plan. The analytic error here is the same – information is parsed only for the purpose of buttressing and advancing a pre-concluded endgame; except it is Russian omnicompetence which is assumed instead of Russian state collapse.
I took something of a middle view. I found the idea that Russia faced civil war or state collapse to be bizarre in the extreme and completely unfounded, but I also did not think (and I feel that events have vindicated this view) that Prigozhin was acting in collaboration with the Russian state to create a charade. If indeed the Wagner uprising was a Psyop (Psychological Operation) to trick NATO, it was an extremely elaborate and convoluted one which hasn’t yet shown any clear benefits (more on this in a moment).
My broad belief is that Prigozhin was acting of his own volition in an extremely risky way (which risked both his own life and a destabilizing effect on Russia). This presented the Russian state with a genuine crisis (albeit one which was not sufficiently severe to threaten the state’s existence) which I think they handled quite well on the whole. The Wagner uprising was quite clearly bad for Russia, but not existentially so, and the state did a good job containing and mitigating it.
Let’s get into it, starting with a short look at the timeline of events.
Anatomy of a Mutiny
The amount of disinformation (particularly propagated by the Ukrainians and by Russian liberals residing in the west) that flew around throughout the weekend was extreme, so it might be prudent to review the progression of events as they actually happened.
The first sign that something was amiss came with a few explosive statements by Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin on the 23rd (Friday). In a rather long and erratic interview, he made the shocking claim that Russia’s pretext for the war in Ukraine was an outright lie and that the war had been fraught with corruption and the murder of civilians. Things then got even crazier when Wagner claimed that the Russian army had struck their camp with a missile. This was extremely weird – the video which was released (purporting to show the aftermath of this “missile strike”) did not show an impact crater, debris, or any wounded or killed Wagner personnel. The “damage” from the missile consisted of two campfires burning in a trench – apparently Russia has missiles that can start small controlled fires without destroying the surrounding plant life?
The video obviously did not show the aftermath of a missile attack, but Prigozhin’s rhetoric escalated after this and he soon announced that Wagner would begin a “march for justice” to gain redress for his various grievances. It was not clear exactly what he wanted, but it seemed to center on personal grudges against Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
Shortly thereafter, a few videos came from the Russian authorities (including one featuring General Surovikin) apparently pleading with Wagner to “stop the movement of their columns” and return to their posts, to prevent bloodshed and destabilization. This validated some of the rumors that Wagner was leaving the theater in force. News that Russian National Guard had been activated in Moscow and elsewhere seemed to vindicate the fear that an armed clash in Russia was imminent.
By the end of Friday, armed Wagner convoys were in Rostov (bearing the red Z mark) and had taken control of several military offices in what amounted to a bloodless coup of the city. The scenes were a bit outlandish – tanks on the city streets and security cordons around key facilities, but seeming indifference from the population. People mingled among the Wagner troopers, street sweepers went about their work, Wagner bought cheeseburgers, and people took pictures with the tanks.
That evening, Prigozhin had a tense but civil face to face meeting with two high level MOD officials – Yanus Evkurov (Deputy Defense Minister) and Vladimir Alekseev (Deputy Head of the military intelligence directorate).
Things really got heated the next day (Saturday the 24th) with the news that two substantial armed bodies were on the move within the prewar Russian borders. One was a column of Wagner personnel and weapons who left Rostov for Moscow, and other was a Chechen force dispatched by the state to Rostov. Amid the news that Russian state forces were establishing roadblocks and defensive positions outside of Moscow, it looked like two separate battles might have been imminent – one by the Wagner column fighting state forces outside Moscow, and another fought between the Chechens and the Wagner remnants for control of Rostov.
It was at this point that Ukrainian disinformation really began to run wild, with claims flying around that Russian military units and regional administrations were defecting to Prigozhin – in effect positing that this was not just an uprising by Wagner against the state, but a wholesale revolt of the Russian system against Putin’s government. In fact (and this is a key point to which I will return later) there were no defections in any regular Russian military units or regional governments and there was no civil unrest. The mutiny was confined to the Wagner Group, and even so not all of Wagner participated.
Be that as it may, by the early evening hours on Saturday there were real reasons to worry that shooting might start outside Moscow or in Rostov. Putin issued a statement denouncing treason and promising an appropriate response. The Russian Ministry of Justice opened a criminal file on Prigozhin for treason. Two Russian MoD aircraft were shot down (an Mi-8 helicopter and an IL-22) by the Wagner column. The global atmosphere became notably more humid from the volume of salivation flowing from Washington.
Then, the Wagner column stopped. The government of Belarus announced that a settlement had been negotiated with Prigozhin and Putin. Lukahsenko’s office claimed “they came to agreements on the inadmissibility of unleashing a bloody massacre on the territory of Russia.” The column turned aside from the road to Moscow and returned to Wagner’s field camps around Ukraine, and the Wagner forces left in Rostov packed up and left. Aside from the crews of the two downed aircraft, nobody was killed.
Of course, speculation immediately turned to the terms of the deal between Prigozhin and the state. Some speculated that Putin had agreed to remove Shoigu, Gerasimov, or both from their posts (perhaps this was the point all along?). In fact, the terms were relatively lame and anticlimactic:
1. The treason case against Prigozhin was dropped and he was to go to Belarus
2. Wagner fighters who participated in the uprising would not be charged and would return to operations in Ukraine
3. Wagner fighters that did not participate in the uprising would sign contracts with the Russian military (essentially exiting Wagner and become regular contract troops)
4. A vague reference to “security guarantees” for Wagner fighters
So, this is all very weird. A genuine armed insurrection with tanks and heavy weapons (not a man in a buffalo headdress) with a takeover of military facilities brought to a sudden resolution by Lukashenko, and all that Prigozhin seems to have gotten out of it was… free passage to Belarus? Odd indeed.
So let’s try to parse through what happened here using an analytical framework that is not pre-deterministic – that is, let us assume that neither Russian omnicompetence nor Russian regime change and neoliberal cuddliness are guaranteed.
I’d like to start by addressing precisely these two ideologically predetermined theories. On one side we had those claiming that Russia was about to be plunged into civil conflict and regime change, and on the other those who think the whole thing was a pre-planned psyop by the Russian government. The former have already been discredited by virtue of the fact that all their dramatic predictions collapsed in 24 hours – Prigozhin did not, in fact, lead a metastasizing mutiny, overthrow Putin, and declare himself Tsar Eugene I. The other extreme theory – the psyop – remains viable, but I think extremely unlikely, for reasons I will enumerate now.
Psyop Scenarios
It’s relatively easy to simply say “the mutiny was a psyop” without elaborating. It’s trivially obvious that the Wagner uprising “fooled” western analysis – but this isn’t ipso facto evidence that the uprising was staged for the purpose of fooling the west. We have to ask for something more specific – to what end might the uprising have been scripted?
I’ve identified what I think are four discreet theories that at least merit examination – let’s take a look at them and talk about why I think they all ultimately fail to explain the uprising to satisfaction.
Option 1: Live Bait
One potential explanation – which I have seen suggested quite frequently – is the idea that Prigozhin and Putin staged the uprising for the purpose of drawing out theoretical networks of seditionists, foreign agents, and disloyal elements. I suppose the thinking was that Prigozhin would create a controlled, but cosmetically realistic sense of crisis for the Russian state, making Putin’s government appear vulnerable and coercing treacherous and enemy parties across Russia into revealing themselves.
Conceptually, this amounts to little more than Putin’s government pretending to be a wounded animal for the purpose of drawing out the scavengers so they can be killed.
I think this theory has appeal to people because it posits Putin as an extremely crafty, Machiavellian, and paranoid leader. This is also why I think it’s wrong. Putin has derived a great deal of legitimacy from his ability to fight the war without disrupting day to day life in Russia – there’s no rationing, no conscriptions, no restrictions on movement, etc. In fact, one of the biggest criticisms of Putin has been from the war party, who allege that he’s fighting the war too timidly for fear and is too preoccupied with maintaining normalcy in Russia.
It seems incongruous, then, that a leader who has taken great care to avoid putting Russian society on a war footing would then do something as destabilizing as staging a fake uprising. Furthermore, if indeed the Wagner revolt was a charade to smoke out other treacherous and terroristic elements, it failed badly – there were no defections, no civil unrest, and no denunciations of Putin. So for several reasons, the live bait theory does not pass the sniff test.
Option 2: Masking Deployments
A second theory is the idea that the Wagner uprising was essentially a giant smokescreen to enable the movement of military forces around Russia. I suppose the thinking here is that if armed columns are seemingly flying around wildly, people might not notice if Russian forces moved into position to, say, attack Sumy or Kharkov. This take was cosmetically bolstered by the news that Prigozhin would be going to Belarus. Was this entire thing a ruse to mask the redeployment of Wagner for an operation in Western Ukraine?
The problem with this line of thinking is three fold. First, it misunderstands the complexity of staging a force for operations. It’s not just about driving a line of trucks and tanks into position – there are enormous logistical needs. Ammo, fuel, rear area infrastructure all need to be staged. This can’t be done in 24 hours under the temporary cover of a fake mutiny.
Secondly, the “distraction” effect is mostly directed at media and the commentariat, not at military intelligence. Put another way – CNN and the New York Times were definitely fixated on the Wagner uprising, but American satellites continue to pass over the battlespace and western ISR is still functioning. Prigozhin’s antics would not stop them from observing staging to attack a new front.
Third and finally, it doesn’t appear that much of Wagner will be accompanying Prigozhin to Belarus – his journey to Lukashenko Land looks more like an exile than a redeployment of the Wagner Group.
Option 3: Engineered Radicalization
This is the usual “false flag” sort of theory that circulates any time anything bad happens anywhere. It’s become rather blasé and trite: “Putin staged the uprising so he could escalate the war, increase mobilization, etc.”
This doesn’t make any sense and is pretty easy to dismiss. There have been real Ukrainian attacks inside Russia (including a drone attack on the Kremlin and cross-border forays by Ukrainian forces). If Putin wanted to intensify the war, he could have used any of these opportunities. The idea that he would choose to orchestrate an internal uprising – running the risk of widespread destabilization – rather than focusing on Ukraine is ridiculous.
Option 4: Consolidation of Power
Of all the psyop theories, this is the one that probably has the most merit. There were two different strains to this, which we’ll treat in turn.
At the beginning, some speculated that Putin was using Prigozhin to create a pretext to force out Shoigu and Gerasimov. I thought this was unlikely for a few reasons.
First, I don’t think there is a valid case to be made that these men deserve to be fired. There were uneven elements of Russia’s war in the beginning, but there is a clear arc of improvement in the armaments industry with key systems like the Lancet and Geran becoming available in ever increasing quantities, and right now the Russian armed forces are making mulch out of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Secondly, if Putin wanted to remove either Shoigu or Gerasimov, doing so in response to a faux-uprising is the worst way to do it, because this would give the appearance of Putin bowing to the demands of a terrorist. Keep in mind, Putin has not publicly criticized either Shoigu or Gerasimov for their handling of the war. Publicly, they appear to have his full backing. Could the president really remove them in response to Prigozhin’s demands without appearing incredibly weak? Far better if Putin simply fired them of his own volition – making himself, and not Prigozhin, the kingmaker.
Sure enough, it does not appear at this point that either Shoigu or Gerasimov will lose their posts. This led the “power consolidation” theory to pivot to a second line of thinking, that Putin wanted to use Prigozhin to essentially stress-test the Russian political system by seeing how regional administration and army leadership would respond.
This treats the uprising like a fire drill – turn on the alarm, and see how everyone responds, and take notes on who followed instructions. To be sure, Russian political figures came crawling out of the woodwork to affirm their support for Putin and denounce Wagner – complete with some trademark Russian flair, like the Governor of Tver calling on Prigozhin to commit suicide. This perhaps lends credibility to the idea that Putin wanted to test his subordinates.
Again, however, I think this theory misses a few key points. First off, Russia appeared to be internally very stable. Putin was facing no opposition or pushback, no civil unrest, no mutinies in the army, no criticism from high profile political figures – it’s not clear why he would feel the need to rock the country just to test the loyalty of the political apparatus. Perhaps you think he’s a hyper-paranoid Stalin figure who feels driven to play mind games with the country, but this really does not square with his operating pattern. Secondly, the trajectory of the war is overwhelmingly in Russia’s favor at the moment, with victory at Bakhmut fresh in the public memory and Ukraine’s counteroffensive looking more and more like a world historical military bust. It makes little sense why at this time in particular, when things are going very well for Russia, Putin would want to drop a grenade just to test reaction times.
Ultimately, I think that all of these “Psyop” theories are very weak when evaluated in good faith in their own terms. Their errors share a common thread. Things have been going very well for Russia, with the army performing excellently in the ongoing defeat of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, no internal disorder or unrest, and a growing economy. The psyop line of thought presumes that, in a time where things are going well, Putin would take an enormous risk by staging a fake mutiny for negligible gains, risking not only civil unrest and bloodshed but also marring Russia’s image of stability and dependability abroad.
The presumption is that the Putin team is omnicompetent and is able to game out a highly complex deception scheme. I don’t think the Russian government is omnicompetent. I think they are simply a normal level of competent – too competent to pull a high risk, low reward stunt like this.
What Prigozhin Wants
I sometimes like to think of western “end of history” predeterminism (in which all of history is an inexorable march towards global neoliberal performative democracy and the final liberation and happiness of all mankind is announced when the victorious pride flag flies in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang) as being essentially a geopolitical corollary to Jurassic Park – a poignant story of hubris and ruin (and one of my favorite movies).
The analytic model of Jurassic Park’s creators presumed that the dinosaurs – creatures about whom they knew practically nothing – would over time submit to control routines like zoo animals. Blinded by the illusion of control and the theoretical stability of their systems (presumed to be stable because it was designed to be stable), there was no appreciation for the fact that the Tyrannosaurus had an intelligence and a will of its own.
I think that Yevgeny Prigozhin is a bit like the Tyrannosaurus in Jurassic Park. Both the western neoliberal apparatus and the Russian four dimensional plan-trusters seem to think of Prigozhin as a cog that exists to execute the function of their world model. Whether that model is the long march of history towards democracy and the last man or a brilliant and nuanced master plan by Putin to destroy the unipolar Atlantic world, it does not matter much – both tend to negate Prigozhin’s agency and turn him into a slave of the model. But perhaps he is a Tyranosaurus, with an intelligence and will that has an internally generated direction indifferent to our world models. Perhaps he tore down the fence for reasons of his own.
We have to return to who Prigozhin is, and what Wagner is.
To Prigozhin, Wagner is first and foremost a business which has made him a huge amount of money, particularly in Africa. Wagner’s value (in the most fundamental sense) comes from its high degree of combat effectiveness and its unique status as an independent entity from the Russian armed forces. Any threat to either of these factors represents a financial and status catastrophe for Prigozhin.
Recently, developments in the war have evinced an existential threat to the Wagner group as a viable PMC. These are, namely:
1. A concerted push by the Russian government to force Wagner fighters to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense. In effect, this threatens to liquidate Wagner as an independent organization and subsume it wholesale into the regular Russian military.
2. Wagner is losing the manpower surge from last year’s conscriptions (including convicts). These conscripts provided an enormous manpower buffer that allowed Wagner to shoulder the large-scale fighting in Bakhmut, but many have completed their tours of duty.
This means that Wagner faces potential destruction from two fronts. Institutionally, the Russian government wants to essentially neutralize Wagner’s independence by folding it into the MoD. From Prigozhin’s point of view, this essentially means the nationalization of his business.
Furthermore, a slimmed down Wagner (having shed much of the conscripts that fleshed it out to Army Corps size) is not something that Prigozhin wants to send into combat in Ukraine. Once Wagner is stripped down to its core of experienced wet work operators, casualties in Ukraine will begin eating directly into Wagner’s viability.
In other words, Prigozhin and the authorities were at an impasse. What Prigozhin probably wanted most of all, to put it bluntly, was to use the fame won in Bakhmut to take Wagner back to Africa and start making lots of money again. What he did not want was to have his PMC absorbed into the Russian military, or to have his core of lethal professionals attrited in another major battle in Ukraine. The MoD, on the other hand, very much wants to absorb Wagner fighters into the regular army and use them to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield.
So, we have a clear conflict of interests.
But what can Prigozhin do about it? He has absolutely no institutional power, and Wagner is dependent on the Ministry of Defense for equipment, supplies, ISR, and so much more. Furthermore, Prigozhin’s personal wealth and his family are under the jurisdiction of the Russian state. He has very limited leverage. There are really only a few things he can do. He can record videos to embarrass, harass, and degrade the Ministry of Defense. Of course, it’s probably unwise to directly attack Putin in these rants, and it might not play well to insult ordinary Russian soldiers, so these attacks have to be properly targeted at precisely the sort of bureaucratic higher ups that the Russian public is predisposed to dislike – men like Shoigu and Gerasimov.
Apart from these video tantrums, Prigozhin really had only one other play to stop the institutional absorption of Wagner – stage an armed protest. Get as many men as he could to join him, make a move, and see if the state could be rocked enough to give him the deal he wanted.
It sounds weird, of course. You’ve heard of gunboat diplomacy – now we get to see tank-based contract negotiations. Yet it is clear that the dispute over Wagner’s independence and status vis a vis Russian military institutions was at the heart of this. Earlier this month, Prigozhin announced his intention to disobey a presidential order that required his fighters to sign MoD contracts by July 1.
Prigozhin’s statement this morning (Monday, June 26), however, was extremely instructive. It focused almost exclusively on his central grievance: Wagner was going to be absorbed into the institutional military. He doesn’t take this to its conclusion and note that this would nationalize his highly profitable business, but his comments leave no doubt as to his motivation. Here are a few key points that he makes:
– Wagner did not want to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense
– Absorption into the MoD would mean the end of Wagner: “This unit was supposed to cease its existence on July 1.”
– “The goal of our campaign was to prevent the destruction of Wagner Group.”
But what did Prigozhin think would happen? What was his optimistic scenario? Likely, he hoped that general anti-bureaucratic and anti-corruption sentiments, combined with Wagner’s popularity and fame, would lead to an upswell of support for the group which would put the government in a position to acquiesce to Wagner’s independence.
It was a bold decision. Facing institutional absorption, Prigozhin gambled on a measured destabilization campaign that would rock the country just enough to spook Putin into cutting him a deal. Prigozhin might have convinced himself that this was a clever and decisive roll of the dice that could turn things in his favor. I rather think that they were not playing dice at all. They were playing cards, and Prigozhin had nothing in his hand.
Russia’s Crisis Management
This is the part of the article that I suspect will ruffle feathers and earn me accusations of “coping” – so be it. Let’s just get this out in the open:
Russia handled the Wagner uprising extremely well, and its management of the crisis points to a high degree of state stability.
Now, what I am not saying is that the uprising was good for Russia. It was clearly a net-negative in several ways. Russian aircraft were shot down by Wagner and Russian pilots were killed. Prigozhin was then allowed to walk away after causing these deaths – a stain on the government. There was widespread confusion which does nothing good for morale, and operations in the Southern Military District were disrupted by Wagner’s occupation of Rostov.
On the whole, this was not a good weekend for Russia. It was a crisis, but it was a crisis that the state handled quite well overall and mitigated the downsides – perhaps even making a glass or two of lemonade out of Prigozhin’s lemons. It’s a bit fitting, perhaps, that Shoigu used to be Minister of Emergency Situations (essentially disaster relief). Disasters are never good, but it’s always better to handle them well when they happen.
The state response was actually pretty straightforward: call Prigozhin’s bluff.
Prigozhin drove toward Moscow with his column – but what was he going to do if he got there? Russian national guard was preparing to block them from entering the city. Would Wagner attack Moscow? Would they shoot national guardsmen? Would they assault the Kremlin or shell Saint Basil’s? Doing so would lead to the inevitable death of every man involved. Wagner, with no supply or procurement of its own, cannot fight the Russian armed forces successfully and probably could not supply itself for more than a day or two.
The problem with Prigozhin’s approach is that pantomiming a coup doesn’t work if you aren’t willing to actually attempt a coup – and a coup only works if institutional authorities side with you. It’s not as if Prigozhin could drive a tank up to Lenin’s mausoleum and begin issuing orders to the federal ministries and armed forces. Coups require control over institutional levers of power – regional governorships, government ministries, and the officer corps of the armed forces.
Prigozhin not only lacked all of these things, but in fact the entire apparatus of power denounced him, scorned him, and branded him a traitor. Having mutinied his way into a dead end, his only choices were to either start a firefight outside Moscow and guarantee that he would die and be known to history as a traitorous terrorist, or to surrender. It is probable that the Wagner column shooting down Russian aircraft (which Prigozhin later claimed was a “mistake”) spooked him and confirmed that he was going too far and did not have a good way out. When your opponent calls and you have nothing in your hand, there is nothing to do except fold.
Consider then, for a moment, the actual scene in Russia. An armored column was driving towards the capital. What was the response from the Russian state and people? Authorities at all levels publicly denounced the uprising and stated support for the president. There were no defections, either from military units or civilian administration. There was no civil unrest, no looting, no loss of even basic government control in the country. Compare the scenes in Russia during an armed rebellion to the United States in the summer of 2020. Which country is more stable, again?
In the end, the government managed to dissipate a crisis situation, which could easily have spiraled into substantial bloodshed, without any loss of life apart from the crews of the two downed aircraft (deaths that we should not minimize, and must be remembered as victims of Prigozhin’s ambition). Furthermore, the terms of the “settlement” amount to little more than surrender by Prigozhin. He himself seems to be bound for a sort of semi-exile in Belarus (potentially awaiting a Trotsky ice-pick moment) and it seems that the majority of Wagner will sign contracts and be absorbed into the Russia institutional military. Based on the speech that Putin gave this evening (fifteen minutes ago as of this writing), Wagner fighters have only three options: sign MOD contracts, disband and go home, or join Prigozhin in Belarusian exile (presumably without their gear). As it relates to the institutional status of Wagner, Prigozhin lost and the state won. Wagner as an independent fighting body is finished.
We must be honest, of course, about the damages of the uprising.
Prigozhin killed Russian servicemembers when his column downed those aircraft, and then had his treason charge dropped. One can say, of course, that bringing a peaceful resolution prevented further bloodshed, but this doesn’t change the fact that he killed Russian soldiers and gets to walk away. This is a failure with both a moral and an institutional legitimacy dimension.
Additionally, this entire episode ought to serve as a poignant lesson about the inherent instability of relying on mercenary groups who operate outside of formal military institutions. There are many such groups in Russia, not just Wagner, and it will be malpractice if the government does not move decisively to liquidate their independence. Otherwise, they are simply waiting for something like this to happen again – potentially with a far more explosive outcome.
On the whole, however, it seems rather undeniable that the government handled an extreme crisis rather competently. Contrary to the new western spin that the Wagner revolt revealed the weakness of Putin’s government, the unity of the state, the calmness of the people, and the coolheaded strategy of de-escalation suggest that the Russian state is stable.
Conclusion: 1917
One of humanity’s most universal and beloved pastimes is making bad historical analogies, and that process was certainly in high gear this past weekend. The most popular comparison, naturally, was to compare Prigozhin’s uprising to the fall of the Tsar in 1917.
The problem is that this analogy is a perfect inversion of the truth.
The Tsar fell in 1917 because he was at army headquarters far away from the capital. In his absence, a garrison mutiny in Petrograd (Petersburg) led to a collapse of government authority, which was then picked up by a new cabinet formed from the state Duma. Coups are not achieved through mindless bloodshed. What matters most is the basic question of bureaucratic authority, for this is what it means to rule. When you pick up a phone and give an order to shut down a rail line; when you summon a military unit to readiness; when you issue a purchasing order for food or shells or medicine – are these instructions respected?
It was trivially obvious that Prigozhin lacked either the force, the institutional support, or any real desire to usurp authority, and the idea that he was attempting a genuine coup was absurd. Imagine, for a moment, that Wagner managed to bash its way through the Russian National Guard into Moscow. Prigozhin storms the ministry of defense – he arrests Shoigu and sits in his chair. Do we really believe that the army in the field would suddenly follow his orders? It’s not a magic chair. Power only comes up for grabs in the event of total state collapse, and what we saw in Russia was the opposite – we saw the state closing ranks.
So in the end, both the neoliberal commentariat and the Russian plan trusters are left with an unsatisfactory view of events. Prigozhin is neither the harbinger of regime change nor a piece in Putin’s four dimensional chess game. He’s simply a mercurial and wildly irresponsible man who saw that his Private Military Corporation was going to be taken away from him and decided to go to extreme and criminal lengths to prevent this. He was a card player with nothing in his hand who decided to bluff his way out of a corner – until his bluff was called.
A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in Western writing about the war in Ukraine. This is the extension of hatred for the Putin regime and its crimes to the entire Russian people, the Russian national tradition, and Russian culture. This tendency is of course bitterly familiar from the history of hostile propaganda, but precisely for that reason we should have learned to shun it.
The banning of Russian cultural events and calls for the “decolonization” of Russian literature and Russian studies recall the propaganda of all sides during the First World War, which did so much to embitter that war and make its peaceful resolution all but impossible.
The latest manifestation of this has been the successful pressure on American author Elizabeth Gilbert to cancel the publication of her latest book, not because it is in any way pro-Putin or pro-war, but merely because it is set in Russia. In another recent case, Masha Gessen, the U.S.-based Russian political émigré, fierce Putin critic and strong opponent of the Russian invasion, felt obliged to resign from the board of PEN America, created as a union of writers to defend free expression, after it barred two Russian writers — themselves emigres who had denounced the war. The Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British parliament, Tom Tugendhat, has called for the expulsion of all Russian citizens from Britain, irrespective of their legal residency. The Czech president has referenced approvingly the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Demonization of this sort is morally wrong in itself; it is generally intellectually wrong in its details; it is incompatible with liberal internationalism; it betrays pluralist democracy in Ukraine; it is disastrous for the future peace of Europe; it fuels the paranoia and violent self-righteous extremism that has done so much damage to U.S. policy over the years; and, by helping to block moves towards a reasonable settlement of the conflict, it increases the dangers to the United States, Europe, the world, and Ukraine itself that stem from a continuation of the war. Perhaps craziest of all, while the people who express such feelings about Russia claim to be opposing the Putin regime, their actions and writings in fact provide better domestic propaganda for Putin than he himself could ever have devised.
A particularly egregious example of this sort of chauvinism was written last week by Peter Pomerantsev, whose Russian-speaking family emigrated from Soviet Ukraine when he was a baby, and who now lives in Britain. This article is worth paying attention to both for the wider tendency that it represents, and for where it appeared — in the British liberal newspaper The Guardian. It is fair to say that The Guardian would never have published this kind of hate-filled attack on an entire people if it were directed at any other people but the Russians, and, if it had appeared elsewhere, The Guardian would have (correctly) denounced it as racism.
Pomerantsev takes his cue from the destruction of the Khakovka Dam, which he automatically blames on Russia — despite the fact that, as Kelley Vlahos pointed out in Responsible Statecraft, it remains completely unproven who blew up the dam, and the results could chiefly benefit either the Ukrainian or the Russian side. Adding a whole litany of exaggerated or wholly invented Russian atrocities, he uses this to declare that:
“Beneath the veneer of Russian military ‘tactics,’ you see the stupid leer of destruction for the sake of it…In Russia’s wars the very senselessness seems to be the sense…To Russian genocide add ecocide.”
He references Ukrainian literary critic Tetiana Ogarkova:
“In her rewording of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Russian classic novel Crime and Punishment, a novel about a murderer who kills simply because he can, Ogarkova calls Russia a culture where you have ‘crime without punishment, and punishment without crime.’ The powerful murder with impunity; the victims are punished for no reason.”
Does “literary critic” Ogarkova really think that Dostoyevsky approved of Raskolnikov’s crime, and did not show him being justly punished for it? Or is she relying on a belief that her Western audience will be willing to hate Russian authors without having read them?
Pomerantsev follows this up with an almost unbelievable passage:
“Ogarkova and Yermolenko note the difference between Hitler and Stalin: while Nazis had some rules about who they punished (non-Aryans; communists) in Stalin’s terror anyone could be a victim at any moment. Random violence runs through Russian history.”
This is the same old nauseating hypocrisy. They are nationalists; we are patriots. Their bombing of civilians reflects a blind urge to destruction rooted in their national character, ours is either purely accidental or an unfortunate part of a just struggle. Their torture of suspected enemies is due to their innate collective savagery. Ours is “not who we are.”
This is a classic example of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error” — the tendency to rationalize our own transgressions as the product of difficult circumstances, while explaining the sins of others as the result of their malevolent nature.
In attributing Russian atrocities in Ukraine to permanent, quasi-racial aspects of the Russian national character, these writers seek to present Russia as uniquely mad and evil; whereas in fact the crimes committed by Russia during the Ukraine War have also been committed by several Western states in modern wars, the United States among them. Some were indeed wholly gratuitous. Others, as General Sherman reminded us, are innate to war itself. Pomerantsev and his like do not need to be professional historians to know that. They could simply watch the film “The Battle of Algiers,” or any good film about the Vietnam War.
Those who have attributed this to unique features of American and European traditional culture and called for the whole of that culture to be junked as a result, have been rightly rejected by majority opinion in these countries. Would anyone with an atom of decency or common sense suggest that we should not read Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne because the U.S. military bombed civilians in Vietnam and illegally invaded Iraq?
It might be noted by the way that at the height of the Cold War, Hollywood produced films of “War and Peace” and “Dr. Zhivago,” and Soviet cinema produced fine versions of “Hamlet” and “King Lear.”
Eruptions like Pomerantsev’s in The Guardian can be attributed to blind but understandable anger at Russia’s invasion and the destruction it has caused. However, they also have very practical and disastrous results. They not merely discourage the search for a compromise peace today, but by presenting Russia as permanently evil, they suggest that any future peaceful co-existence with any future Russian state will be morally wrong, and therefore should be permanently impossible.
In his great work “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (La Trahison des Clercs), written in the aftermath of the First World War, Julien Benda denounced the willingness of too many liberal intellectuals to succumb — whether from emotion or opportunism — to political and especially national hatred; and he warned, all too presciently, that this fostering of hatred could lead to still greater disasters in the years to come. He predicted that the 20th Century “will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred.”
We should take care that our descendants, if there are any, do not say that of the present century.
