Russia, Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin: Core of Vladimir Putin leadership crisis explained

The cracks in President Vladimir Putin’s personal empire have been growing for months. And a secretly recorded 35-minute rant between two of his oligarchs reveals how deep they’ve grown.

“How will we clean all this up later? Fascism will be here, a military dictatorship. You’ll see. That’s how it’s going to end,” says one of the voices – believed to be former senator and billionaire Farkhed Akhmedov.

“They f***** us, our children, their future, their f***ing fates, you know?”

But Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) Olga Lautman says this isn’t the revival of a democratic movement amid Russia’s disgruntled powerbrokers.

“They are self-interested individuals who have become rich through manoeuvres in the shadows of Putin’s klepto-state,” she writes.

“It’s fair to conclude that had Putin’s great gamble paid off, had Ukraine been captured Ukraine in three days or even a few months, these same men would have been discussing the division of the spoils in Ukraine.”

And that’s the core of the crisis Putin must now contend with.

He promised big things. He’s delivered costly failures. Now his carefully selected mobster network is having doubts.

“It is an open secret in Moscow that many members of the Russian elite harbour deep misgivings about the war,” says Harvard University Russian Studies Professor Timothy Colton.

“This time, once it was clear which way the wind was blowing, they lined up with their absentee boss. How they will make future choices may be another matter.”

“It gets worse for Putin,” adds ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre fellow Matthew Sussex.

“Prigozhin has set a precedent by openly criticising the president, moving against him and forcing him to blink. That will not go unnoticed by Russia’s elites, whom Putin has bound closely to him through alternating cycles of fear and reward. Once an autocrat is unable to deliver on threats of punishments for malfeasance, the risk in taking action diminishes markedly.”

When myths strike reality

The day before launching his failed mutiny, Prigozhin unleashed his frustrations in a series of lengthy videos. He called the Ukraine war a mistake. He dismissed Putin’s justifications of “de-nazifying” and de-NATOing Ukraine as “fake”. Instead, he said, it was all about the self-interests of Defence Minister Shoigu and his circle of oligarch friends.

“Our holy war has turned into a racket,” he said.

It’s that failure that has put Putin at odds with his own ultranationalist cheer squad.

“Putin’s constant refrain is that any opposition to his rule – whether it be from the Kyiv government or from protesters at home – is part of a Western plot to weaken Russia,” says Professor Peter Rutland.

“It is hard to imagine that his propagandists will be able to argue that Prigozhin is also a tool of the West.”

Putin has long worked hard to “crush any liberal opposition”, he says.

“At the same time, radical ultranationalists – not only Prigozhin but also the military bloggers and correspondents reporting from the war zone – have been given a relatively free hand.”

But they have become increasingly vocal in questioning Putin’s war performance.

In April, a group of high-profile bloggers formed the “Club of Angry Patriots”.

“The Prigozhin-Akhmedov leak may simply be a Russian intelligence operation to warn the elite to button their lips. The Tatarsky assassination may likewise have been designed to tell noisy milbloggers that their days of free expression are over,” says Lautman.

But Putin’s extreme right-wing supporters aren’t used to being silenced.

“As Wagner soldiers marched toward Moscow on June 24, the club issued a statement of indirect support for Prigozhin,” says Professor Rutland.

“Putin’s messaging will now need to perform new feats of rhetorical gymnastics,” adds Sussex. “It is already hard enough to spin his climb-down from “looming civil war” to “everything is fine. It will be even harder to explain why Prigozhin – who had been lauded as a hero close to Putin – could claim with impunity that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was based on an untruthful pretext.”

Feet of clay

“Strong leaders are not usually the targets of coup attempts,” says CEPA senior advisor Edward Lucas.

“The theory that the Russian authorities decided to let Yevgeny Prigozhin launch his march on Moscow in order to flush out traitors within the regime smacks of desperation. If Putin were firmly in charge, such traitors would not exist.”

And the reaction of the general population of Rostov-on-Don, which was seized by Wagner forces at the weekend, also does not match the image of a nation enraptured by their leader.

“They apparently regarded the prospect of a murderous, short-tempered ex-gangster coming to power on the shoulders of his private army as no worse than business as usual under their current rulers,” says Lucas.

“Putin is the author of his own misfortune here. Kremlin propaganda has for years created a fake world in which Russia is wonderful and the outside world a decadent menace. The constant diet of lies spawned an atmosphere of cynicism and apathy.”

During the 24-hour crisis, few Russian oligarchs stepped forward in Putin’s defence.

“Many regime insiders and other bigwigs seem to have thought that the coup had a chance of succeeding, and waited to see what would happen,” says Lucas.

And Putin will have noticed this.

“Although a bloodbath has been averted, the wreckage left behind by the affair cannot easily be cleared away,” says Colton. “Putin’s instinct will be to tighten the political screws further than ever.”

That’s likely to backfire, adds Sussex. “Having for years encouraged the Kremlin’s powerful elites to compete for his favour, he’s now given them a powerful reason to unite against him.”

And the coming confrontation won’t be a people’s revolution, warns Lucas. “This one is between gangsters: feuding clans eager to hold on to their own wealth and perhaps gain assets from their rivals.”

Putin’s death knell

“With every quashed insurrection comes a search for the guilty – and the inevitability of purges,” Sussex argues. “That’s likely to be a lengthy and comprehensive process involving the Russian military and its intelligence agencies.”

Wagner’s mercenaries were recruited from among the hardened criminals desperate to escape Russia’s harshest prisoners. These must now be “pardoned” a second time and distributed among conventional military units.

And that’s only likely to worsen morale and distrust among the troops.

“It is well known Prigozhin enjoyed significant support from middle-ranking Russian officers, and these individuals are likely to be the target of the regime’s ire,” says Sussex. “Paradoxically, they are often the more competent and battle-seasoned soldiers, as well. Morale, already low, will be even more badly damaged.”

Questions abound about how Prigozhin could quickly secure the entire Russian Army’s Southern Military District without a fight – even after he announced he was coming.

And how his armoured column could advance so far towards Moscow without serious opposition.

“And how did Russia’s intelligence services apparently fail to spot Prigozhin’s move, which he had been openly telegraphing for some time?” asks Sussex.

In essence, Putin has carefully crafted myth of invulnerability has been dispelled.

“If everything is good and well in Putinland, why do senior figures have to be warned, and potentially arrested, and hardliners killed?” asks Lautman.

“The affair is a humiliation for Putin, no doubt about it,” adds Colton, “and it raises the question of how many more missteps of this magnitude he can get away with.”

“The outlook for Russia is now grim,” concludes Lucas. “Prigozhin’s march on Moscow may have failed, but the conditions that fostered it remain. Others will be mulling their chances. Indeed … Russia’s next civil war has already started.”