Russian Rebellion?
The “Russian Coup” that Wasn’t
The “Russian Coup” that Wasn’t
by Paul Craig Roberts
Yesterday I posted a video discussion that Larry Sparano and I had about the alleged “Russian coup.” https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/06/24/the-russian-coup-that-wasnt/
Looking back at our discussion, I am satisfied that we did a good job given the unresolved situation about which there was not much information. I am addressing the “coup” again because there is a great deal to be learned from it that is not being learned.
It is discouraging to see that the Russian media is as capable of creating false narratives and setting them in stone as Western presstitutes. The Russian media has set in stone the narrative that Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner Group which has done most of the fighting in the liberation of Donbass, launched an “armed rebellion” against Putin despite the fact that there is no evidence of an armed rebellion.
The so-called “coup” has many curious aspects and raises many neglected questions.
I acknowledge that Prigozhin had become increasingly displeased with the Russian military command. The Kremlin had not addressed the feud between Prigozhin and the Russian military brass. The Kremlin’s failure to resolve the differences is the most likely cause of events mischaracterized as a coup. For Prigozhin, the final straw was his belief that an encampment of his troops was hit by a missile from the rear, that is, from Russia, not from Ukraine. Perhaps Prigozhin was given false information for the purpose of worsening the relations between the main fighting force and the Russian high command during a Ukrainian “counter offensive.” Perhaps a missile strike occurred, but has a different explanation.
The situation exploded when the Russian Ministry of Defense denied Prigozhin’s accusation when the proper response would have been to send an investigatory team to establish the fact and if a missile strike did occur to determine the source.
In addition to tensions between the Wagner Group and the Russian military bureaucracy stemming from, for example, inadequate ammunition supplies at critical stages of the fighting, the Russian military bureaucracy was determined to exercise command over the Wagner Group, a demand or desire that Prigozhin would not accept. Getting rid of Prigozhin became a priority for the Russian military bureaucracy. As I illustrated in the discussion with Sparano, conspiracies against military commanders during war are commonplace, so an attack on Wagner forces designed to set Prigozhin off is a possible scenario. This possibility gains credibility from the immediate denial instead of investigation and from the instant official narrative of an “armed rebellion.” As there was no investigation, all that Putin knows is what the generals tell him, and that will be their side of the story.
What the “armed rebellion” amounted to was Prigozhin starting out to Moscow with a convoy of his troops to, in Prigozhin’s words, “confront corrupt generals.” Prigozhin announced in advance that he intended no coup.
But let’s assume he intended a coup and let’s accept the exaggerated claim by presstitutes of a convoy of 25,000 troops traveling with him on the roads to Moscow. How is a convoy of troops going to get to Moscow without being decimated by air attacks, and, should they arrive, how are 25,000 troops going to overcome the Russian Army, occupy Moscow, and establish a government?
The question that immediately jumped to my mind is: Why did Putin rush to embarrass Russia by announcing an “armed rebellion” unless he had no army with which to defend Moscow?
The question of the whereabouts of the Russian Army has been growing on my mind. Why, as I have repeatedly asked, has Putin, instead of using sufficient force to end the conflict, permitted it to ever-widen with increasingly provocative participation on the part of Washington and NATO? This makes no sense. It serves no Russian purpose. Why is Putin fighting a dangerous conflict not merely with Ukraine but with the West with a small private military group and Donbass militias? Where is the Russian Army? Is there one?
Or has Putin been warned by his central bank and the neoliberal Russian economists not to risk the ruble and the budget deficit by spending money on the military? Surely Russia has its own David Stockman. Has Putin been convinced that the economic threat is greater than the military threat? Has Putin decided that with his vast superiority of nuclear forces over ours he doesn’t need an army? Why do Russian leaders keep warning of nuclear war if they have sufficient conventional forces?
Perhaps Putin doesn’t use sufficient conventional force to end the conflict in Ukraine because he doesn’t have the troops.
If this is the case, then the prospect for nuclear war is more likely than I have thought, and I already thought such a possibility was extremely high. If Western provocations finally cross a line that Putin cannot ignore and his only possible response is nuclear, Armageddon is upon us.
The unfortunate effect of the Russian government and media joining those of the West in proclaiming an “armed rebellion” and setting the narrative in stone is that it serves the West’s purpose of discrediting Putin and serves the neoconservatives’ propaganda that “we can win” if we fully commit to the task. Clearly, no one in the Kremlin or Russian media was thinking when they joined the propaganda against themselves by endorsing the portrait of dissent in the Russian military that threatens the regime. The picture created of internal dissent plays into the hands of the West.
The danger is that now with more confidence, the West pushes harder against Russia. This is the unfortunate result of the failure of the Russian military brass to placate Prigozhin.
In the West the misunderstanding of last Saturday’s event is total. Even normal level-headed analysts, such as Scott Ritter and Moon-of-Alabama, have contributed to the gross misunderstanding of the event. Ritter described Prigozhin as being in “Victoria Nuland’s pocket” and working with Ukrainian intelligence cells inside Russia. Moon-of-Alabama blames the event on Putin’s use of an independent military force in Ukraine.
Perhaps the most absurd of all is the self-serving claim by unidentified “sources” of “US intelligence agencies” that they had advanced knowledge of Prigozhin’s “coup.” How could they unless they were responsible for the missile strike, knowing that it would light Prigozhin’s fuse? (Even the Russian media reported this absurd claim: https://sputnikglobe.com/20230625/american-media-claim-us-intelligence-learned-about-prigozhins-plans-for-mutiny-in-mid-june-1111453277.html ).
I will end this essay, which I hope provokes thought and awareness of how much more dangerous the situation is now, with a final observation. If there was actually a coup attempt and Prigozhin and his Wagner Group troops constituted a danger to the Russian state as Russian leaders declared, why was the situation resolved by permitting Prigozhin refuge in Belarus and the Wagner troops to be enrolled in the Russian Army? Does this indicate that the Kremlin knows there was no coup? Or does it mean that the Kremlin lacked an army with which to confront the coup and had to come to terms with Prigozhin?
Is this the appropriate conclusion of a dangerous threat to Russian national existence?:
“Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Saturday evening that the criminal case against Prigozhin had been dropped and that he would leave for Belarus under guarantees given by Putin. The spokesman added that the members of the Wagner PMC involved in Saturday’s events would not be prosecuted given their distinguished service during Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.”
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Having been told for months that Putin was fully in control and not vulnerable to coups, his authority is now being directly challenged in a way that may have far-reaching implications for the regime as well as the course of the war. The confidence there would be no coup was due to there being nobody obvious to lead one, given a serious candidate would need to be backed by credible military capabilities.
Now we have a candidate. This coup is being led by the boss of the Wagner mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin. At first the smart money was on his failure because the full weight of the Russian state is against him. Before he made his moves, he was declared a traitor, his offices were raided, and his bases shelled. But the Russian state is inept and decrepit. If the aim was to catch Prigozhin unawares and shut him up it failed, because he appears to have had some notice of what was being prepared for him and so took his own initiatives. If you are going to move against your opponents you need to be decisive. Prigozhin got away (like Zelensky in February 2022).
Instead a column of his men crossed from the Donbas into Russia, without hindrance, moving towards Rostov-on-Don. This is a vital command centre and logistic hub for the war. As he did so his people reportedly hacked into local TV and radio, broadcasting appeals for support, claiming that those who support Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu are the real traitors and supporters of Ukraine.
Putin now appreciates the danger that he should have realised weeks ago. In his Saturday morning address he denounced those stabbing Russia in the back at a time of war, insisted that they would be punished, confirmed that a ‘counter-terrorism’ regime was now in place in Moscow, and promised his people that everything was under control. He managed to do this without actually uttering Prigozhin’s name. The Wagner boss has become Voldemort.
There are many uncertainties about developments on the ground. These are situations when rumours are fertilised and grow rapidly, so it is unwise to talk yet with great confidence about what is happening let alone how events will unfold. But at times like this speculation is unavoidable.
How did we get here?
We are on reasonably sure ground when charting the development of this crisis for the Russian state. The tension has been evident for months, gaining attention with Prigozhin’s frequent complaints that he was being starved of ammunition during the long battle for the city of Bakhmut. At one point he threatened to walk away from the battle unless his needs were met, agreed to carry on when told that he would get his supplies, and then still grumbled that it was not enough. Once Bakhmut was taken, after months of gruelling urban combat, there were further complaints that weaknesses among Russian regular forces had allowed the Ukrainians to take back territory on the flanks, thus rendering the efforts of his men useless.
This led to a wider critique of the quality of Russia’s senior command for being out of touch with the harsh realities of the war, playing down casualties, and talking as if all was well when clearly it wasn’t. Then Shoigu made a push to have the Wagner group and other private military companies put under his direct control. Prigozhin made a big show of rejecting Shoigu’s orders. He was already in mutinous mood.
Through this it was assumed that Prigozhin was sufficiently close to Putin to have some latitude when it came to making a noise. Perhaps it suited Putin for a friendly critic to keep his main military advisors on their toes. Yet was he so friendly? The sharper the criticisms the closer they got to Putin. The accusation that the President was being kept wilfully uninformed by his underlings was hardly a ringing endorsement of his leadership. He was either gullible or complicit.
Nor did Putin make any effort to distance himself from Shoigu. Whenever he speaks about military operations, which he has been doing recently more often than at any point since the Ukrainian counter-offensive began, he takes the Shoigu line that all is well, that the Ukrainians are taking a beating, that NATO equipment is nothing special, and that his forces are being prepared for a long haul should this be necessary. One continuity in his pronouncements is that he remains far surer about why the war had to be fought than how it can be won. On this he remains remarkable vague.
Boiling over
It is the question of the war’s necessity that made Prigozhin’s latest accusations so incendiary. Those made on Friday were quite different in nature and direction to anything that had gone before, challenging not only the conduct of the war but the whole basis upon which it was launched. The shots might have been aimed at Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov, the commander-in-chief, but Vladimir Putin was clearly in the firing line.
Remember that the pretext for this war was that Ukraine was mounting a ‘genocide’ against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbas, egged on by NATO. That made the invasion urgent, both to safeguard the potential victims and to remove the hateful neo-Nazi regime that was engaging in such terrible acts. The whole sequence of events leading to the 24 February 2022 invasion was orchestrated in line with this theory, starting with the Security Council meeting on the morning of 21 February which was asked whether the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics (DNR/LNR) be recognised.
Putin immediately decided that they should be, confirmed the next day that this covered the classical boundaries of these oblasts rather than the DNR/LNR enclaves, and gained authority from the Duma to do whatever was necessary to defend them. This was followed by a staged incident in Luhansk, a request for help to meet Kyiv’s aggression, and then the full-scale invasion.
In his Friday morning video Prigozhin took down this whole contrivance. He explained that there was no extraordinary threat to the Donbas prior to the invasion, that artillery exchanges were no more than usual, and that the whole business was a put-up affair by Shoigu and other corrupt officers, backed by oligarchs making money out of the military build-up. So damning was the charge that the FSB, the security agency, opened a criminal investigation against Prigozhin. Later Prigozhin was on air again, showing images of the aftermath of an attack by Russian missiles and helicopters on a Wagner camp. He moved even further onto the rhetorical offensive. ‘The evil carried by the country’s military leadership must be stopped.’ The official Russian media denied the attacks, insisting sniffily, that they remained preoccupied with the fight against Ukrainian forces.
What is going on?
Maybe this was an elite fight that got out of hand, a consequence of a military system that failed to achieve unity of command and allowed a number of these private military companies, not just Wagner, to operate independently and according to their own agendas. Since he moved out of the shadows during the course of this war Prigozhin has shown an interest in an eventual political career. He has his own propaganda machine and significant name-recognition among the population. Most importantly he commands a substantial body of men – as many as 25,000 engaged in his current manoeuvres.
The language we have to describe these events often fails to grasp their singular nature. When we talk of coups we imagine armed men rushing into the Kremlin to arrest or kill Putin and installing a new leader, with the main media outlets seized to ensure that everyone knows who is now in charge. In that sense it is not a coup and Prigozhin has insisted that he is not mounting one. His aim is solely to remove Shoigu and Gerasimov and replace the ‘meat-grinding’ strategies they have followed in the war. At any rate following Putin’s speech whether or not this was his intention, Prigozhin is in a direct confrontation with the Russian President. One of them will be a loser.
Prigozhin will have some supporters among the civil and military elite, for his arguments if not for his character, and he is after all not short of funds when it comes to buying favours and intelligence. And while most will take it for granted that their careers and wellbeing depend on Putin’s survival, few can have many illusions left about the mismanagement of this war and the costs it is imposing on Russian society and economy. Most for now will be keeping their heads down, but if this goes much further then there will be demands for loyalty that will carry their own risks.
There has been some fighting, sufficiently serious for Wagner to claim to have shot down three helicopters, but it has not yet got close to a civil war, which would mean that the armed forces were completely divided against each other as if they were confronting an external enemy. On the ground Wagner does not appear to have faced much resistance, even as he walked into the Russian army’s main command centre.
Nor is it an insurrection. Prigozhin has urged people to go out on to the streets to get rid of their ‘weak government’, (‘we will find weapons’). To the extent that they know what is going on the Russian people are likely to be alarmed and perplexed but they are not going to rush out onto the streets and start building barricades. It is certainly not a drive to make peace. At Rostov Prigozhin has taken care to show that he is not interfering with the business of Southern Command as it tries to manage the war, although one must assume that the officers involved must be a tad distracted at the moment. He wants to appear patriotic and claims that he has a better way to fight the war.
It is, however, a mutiny. As such everything for Prigozhin depends on whether his accusations ring true to other troops and prompt them to join his ranks, or at least refuse to start fighting his men. By and large Wagner has shown more discipline and elan than many other Russian forces and it would not be surprising if they gained the upper hand in any fighting. This could soon have a knock-on effect on the cohesion of the loyalist military response.
Prigozhin is clearly not alone in his disdain for the higher command of this war. There are many military bloggers, often extremely nationalistic and pro-war, who are candid about the failings of Russian forces and also blame corruption and complacency at the top. What distinguishes him from others is that he has a large and apparently loyal force at his disposal. Unlike other generals he also has actual victories to his credit, albeit pyrrhic in nature. His men were to the fore in the capture of Soledar and Bakhmut. Elsewhere during the recent Russian offensive there were only costly failures.
Furthermore we know that for many in the front lines, especially those that have been fighting in the Donbas, conditions have been miserable, casualties extremely high, and commanders absent. The Wagner group has claimed that contracted Russian troops would rather be with them than under Gerasimov’s chain of command. Those in the Donbas have supposedly served as part of the LNR and DNR militias, but these have been hollowed out, as their troops kept on getting killed, and now seem to be run as rackets by the remaining local warlords. One of the many tragedies of this war is how those supposedly being protected from mythical Ukrainian atrocities have suffered harsh treatment at the hands of their protectors. Vital cities have been reduced to ruin. Since the first moves in the Donbas to challenge the Ukrainian authorities in the spring of 2014 this region has been impoverished.
What Next?
It is telling that Moscow’s instinctive response is to insist that the mutiny is already failing and that Wagner fighters are seeing the error of their ways and returning to join their true comrades. There is a hope, present in Putin’s speech, that the Wagner troops can be divided from their leader. Denying bad news is the default position of this regime but there is no evidence for now that the mutiny is faltering.
The big question is how the rest of the armed forces will respond. One of the most remarkable videos to emerge so far shows Prigozhin talking in Rostov with Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseev, the deputy chief of Russia's military intelligence service, who were both presumably on duty at the command HQ, and now appear to be effectively hostages. Alekeev had not long before issued his own video urging Prigozhin to abandon his adventure. Intriguingly from the same room Prigozhin’s main ally in the high command, General Sergei Surovikin (incidentally a participant in the 1991 coup against Gorbachev), had issued a similar appeal, delivered more in sadness than in anger. So where is Surovikin now? He is potentially a key player.
Shoigu and Gerasimov, who Prigozhin also claimed to be in Rostov, do not appear to be there now. As they still have Putin’s backing it will be up to them to organise the counter-mutiny. Prigozhin now has to decide whether to continue with his march on Moscow as he has promised knowing that preparations are being made to receive him. The UK MOD claims that his men have already reached a half-way point at Voronezh What happens now depends on the loyalty of troops. There are reports – rumours – of some from mainstream forces going over to Wagner. Many more may be passive spectators. If he can’t mobilise substantial loyalist units then Putin is in trouble. If he can then Prigozhin will be isolated and potentially crushed. One factor in all of this is where the loyal troops come from given that so much of the army is bogged down in Ukraine.
Even if Wagner is defeated quickly, which I would not take for granted, then this is still a big shock to the regime and it will have been weakened. If the confrontation goes in the other direction then all bets are off and panic may start to grip the Kremlin. The problem for autocrats like Putin is that they don’t really know what is going on among their people, and that tends to add to the panic. Moreover once the high command looks vulnerable what will the junior commanders do in their battles with Ukrainian forces? How keen will they be to die for a cause that seems lost? For now those watching events with the greatest enthusiasm will be the Ukrainian high command. There are opportunities opening up for offensive operations that they never expected.
To be effective, opposition has to be organised. That is why riots always fail and government always wins. They just create more animosity, chaos and division. The social history of the 19th and 20th Centuries provides all the lessons needed. Protests against factories, the Corn Laws, the suffrage and political corruption, did not get fully addressed until the opposition became properly organised and ultimately with the emergence of the Liberal then Labour parties, both of which lost their way in the latter half of the 20th Century. There is much dissatisfaction with the socio/economic/political milleu at the moment which is likely to get worse when inflation, particularly in the areas of food and housing, inceasingly affect the working middle classes. It has been assuaged by government handouts but this cannot last, without further bankrupting the country following the Covid debacle. The mass of the population is in fact pretty apathetic and docile. Individuals appear quite happy with their lives and are in no mood for revolt or riot. Only the dispossed and unattached see it as attractive and cathartic but of course this could quickly change if economic circumstances nose-dive.
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