Post-mutiny Moscow descends into factional murk

TWO DECADES ago Yevgeny Prigozhin, the violent ex-convict and restaurateur who heads Wagner, a Russian mercenary group, published an illustrated fairy tale that he had written with his two children. The story concerns a band of friends who rescue an uncontrollably shrinking king by blowing a magic flute. At first he grows too fast, smashing a hole in the palace ceiling, before they bring him back down to size. “It is a very dangerous toy,” says the king, who takes away the flute.

Mr Prigozhin, a crony of Vladimir Putin, long helped inflate the Russian president, for example by running pro-Kremlin troll farms. Now he has cut him down to size. Last month his soldiers seized a military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and drove towards Moscow, downing several helicopters and a plane along the way. Mr Prigozhin said his “march of justice” was meant to remove Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the head of the army, or to reverse their decision to integrate Wagner into Russia’s regular forces. But he added populist anti-corruption slogans borrowed from Alexei Navalny, Russia’s main opposition leader, pledging to purge Russia of its thieving elite. The failure of security services to attack the Wagner troops and Mr Putin’s bewildered performance during a television appearance have gravely undermined the Kremlin’s authority.

Under Russian law Mr Prigozhin should face prison terms of between 12 years and life for mutiny, recruiting mercenaries, illegal arms trading and homicide as part of an organised group. According to the unwritten rules of Mr Putin’s mafia state he should probably be dead. Instead, on June 29th, five days after Mr Putin vowed on TV to crush the revolt, he met Mr Prigozhin and his top commanders in the Kremlin. He regretted that they had got mixed up in a mutiny and offered to let them keep serving under a new commander. The aim was to show that he still had complete control over the situation.

Nobody has been charged with the deaths of some 13 pilots downed by Wagner. Mr Putin recently denied the group existed (having admitted two weeks earlier that it had been financed by the state). Mr Prigozhin’s whereabouts are unknown. State television bashes him, but while some websites linked to him have been censored, many of his Telegram channels continue to operate. Senior military officials close to Mr Prigozhin, including General Sergei Surovikin (once in charge of the invasion of Ukraine), are reported to have been detained and questioned. Television shows Wagner arms being taken over by the army and its fighters moving to Belarus. But as Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper, writes, it is too early to write off the “chef”.

Whatever happens to Mr Prigozhin, his mutiny has revealed the erosion of the state and the flimsiness of Mr Putin’s support base. His dictatorship has so far relied less on mass purges than a consensus between power groups. His political opponents have ended up in jail (like Mr Navalny) or exile. Meanwhile he has sowed rivalries between his loyalists, making himself their arbiter. To forestall a palace coup he prevented consolidation in the army and security services and created parallel structures such as Wagner.

This worked in peacetime but faltered under the stress of war. Mr Prigozhin’s mutiny was not an under-the-carpet factional squabble but a public split within Mr Putin’s “pro-war” constituency. On one side stands the conformist elite, trying to keep up a pretence of normal life. On the other is a group of angry military patriots, most prominently Mr Prigozhin. Most worryingly for Mr Putin, the army itself seems split.

The public is watching: the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, found that 92% of Russians followed the coup to some extent. Almost half sympathised with Mr Prigozhin’s criticisms of corruption, military incompetence and lies about the war, though only 22% trusted the Wagner boss himself. In the absence of other critical voices, Mr Prigozhin attracted attention beyond his target audience of military patriots. Many of the sympathisers did not support either side, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist at Levada, but “stocked up on popcorn” for the fight between “a toad and a viper” .

The mutiny also showed that Telegram, and Mr Prigozhin’s network of trolls and bloggers on it, have eroded the Kremlin’s monopoly over information, particularly among young people. While television propagandists awaited instructions from the Kremlin, the mutiny unfolded online. Less than a quarter of young Russians trust TV. Mr Putin staged a parade of uniformed men in the Kremlin, praising them merely for not joining the mutiny, and flew to Dagestan, a Muslim region in the Caucasus, for a show of adoration from his subjects there. An eight-year-old who supposedly cried because she did not get to see the president was flown to the Kremlin and presented with 5bn roubles ($55m) for Dagestan’s needs.

“While it might look like Putin has successfully dealt with the uprising’s fallout… the strain on the system remains,” wrote Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Centre, a think-tank in Berlin. The absence of public retribution against high-ranking military officers who sided with Mr Prigozhin, and the praise showered on security services, which failed to prevent it, suggests that Mr Putin is too worried that purges could create rifts in the army to protect his strongman image.

New cracks appeared on July 13th. Major-General Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th combined-arms army, one of the country’s largest and most capable units, went public after being fired for telling his superiors what was happening at the front: huge losses, inadequate rotation and inferior counter-artillery capabilities. “The forces of Ukraine could not break through our army from the front, but our senior commander hit us from the rear,” Mr Popov said in an audio message that was posted online. Mr Popov’s insubordination made a big impression on pro-war bloggers. Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a former intelligence officer who led Russia’s incursion in Donbas in 2014, wrote that an uncontrolled disintegration of the army was “just a stone’s throw away”.

What happens next depends on the battlefield. The bombing of the Kerch road bridge that connects Russia to Crimea, which Russia attributed to Ukrainian naval drones, was another blow. Mr Putin maintains that Ukraine has failed to achieve any progress in its counter-offensive. Russian commanders have defended against Ukraine’s counter-offensive well ahead of prepared fortifications, instead of falling back to defensive positions established by Mr Surovikin—at a significant cost to the Russian forces. This slows the Ukrainians’ progress, but if they manage to break through, it could have a greater effect on the Kremlin’s political power. As one foreign military official put it: “It is like hitting a brick wall with a sledgehammer. If it crumbles, there may not be much behind it.”■