Putin’s Armor Has Been Pierced

 Putin’s Armor Has Been Pierced/ Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld 

Foreign Policy, 26/Jun/2023

Ralph Waldo Emerson is regularly credited as having said, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him”. But even if reports are accurate that Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko has negotiated a truce between Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin’s revolt has already revealed Putin’s domestic control to be slipping, and we are just in the first innings of a new era. With Putin no longer able to control the rival armed gangs of his own creation, his armor has been pierced, and his formidable aura is dissipating.

Having a 25,000-strong force of armed mercenaries seize Russia’s operational command center for the Ukraine war and advance toward Moscow was the biggest existential threat Putin has faced in his more than 20-year rule. Alexander Vindman, the former director for European affairs in the U.S. National Security Council, pronounced this uprising as having “grown into a full-fledged coup”. “The biggest beneficiary of this distraction is Ukraine, with Russian losing its war in Ukraine and opening up a second front on its own territories”, Vindman said.

Of course, Prigozhin himself is hardly a sympathetic character. He should not be confused with such charismatic Putin critics as the imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny or the assassinated politician Boris Nemtsov. Prigozhin is a murderous thug who has personally ordered the execution—via sledgehammer—of those he felt had betrayed him. A longtime Putin crony who started as the Russian leader’s personal chef and turned his friendship with Putin into a lucrative business empire, Prigozhin’s Wagner Group is Russia’s most infamous private mercenary organization and has some of Russia’s most battle-tested fighters. Prigozhin has also been under U.S. sanctions for years due in part to his financing of “troll farms” to interfere in U.S. elections.

Regardless of Prigozhin’s unsavory background, his revolt has already—even after just one day—accomplished what many political experts said could not be done: a major challenge to Putin’s rule from within Russia. Remarkably, according to Prigozhin and apparently verified by Putin, Prigozhin’s Wagner contingent seized control of the major city of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, a crucial artery in Russia’s resupply lines into Ukraine, without any major resistance from Kremlin troops. For the first time since Putin took power, portions of Russian territory were substantively controlled by armed forces explicitly seeking to overthrow him.

But even more damaging for Putin is the fact that despite his declaration of massive force and strength to the stop the uprising at all costs, the image being projected across Russia and across the world is one of weakness, not strength, since Putin has effectively lost control of the Frankenstein’s monsters of his own creation.

A classic divide-and-conquer leader, Putin long nurtured Wagner as a counterbalance to the formal Russian military structure, personally granting Prigozhin increased paramilitary authority. And when Putin cannot build his own counterbalancing factions, he co-opts existing power centers—from the Kadyrov clan in Chechnya, to oligarchs who subtly oppose Putin’s follies in Ukraine, to the many local mafias that exert effective control of some of Russia’s hinterlands—to get his way through fear and bullying rather than genuine loyalty.

But such divide-and-conquer tactics only work when the leader has the unquestioned power, standing, and capacity to play rival factions off each other so no one power center becomes too independent. The fact that these rival power centers are now turning on him is a testament to how Putin’s power has already slipped. Where these armed gangs with guns once feared Putin, now they smell weakness and opportunity to pounce. No longer the puppet master, Putin is now increasingly the hunted as the once-sycophantic opportunists he cultivated smell blood.

That weakness is surely also not lost on Putin’s head of state counterparts—whether in Belarus, China, or elsewhere—many of whom who have been on the receiving end of Putin’s bullying tactics themselves for many years. For a leader who has long held his supposedly airtight authoritarian control over Russia as a model to emulate for other countries—and who trumpets his own role in helping suppress domestic uprisings across the former Soviet sphere, from the color revolutions to Belarus to Kazakhstan—one can hardly imagine a more humiliating or potent challenge to his authority than from rival factions of his own creation. Putin’s international counterparts have no reason to take him so seriously when even Putin’s own sycophants no longer do, especially with Putin backtracking and compromising with Prigozhin merely hours after declaring the Wagner boss a “traitor”.

This is not even considering the potential opportunities for Ukraine to further press its advantage and weaken Putin in the days ahead, with both Russian military and Wagner troops presumably diverted from the Ukrainian front lines. Putin himself alluded to this threat in his emergency speech today, bizarrely comparing the situation to 1917—when, in his telling, Russia was on the verge of victory in World War I before Russia’s internal divisions and the subsequent collapse of tsarist Russia at the hands of Vladimir Lenin clutched defeat from the jaws of victory. Implicitly casting himself as the modern equivalent of the hapless and ill-fated Tsar Nicholas II seems hardly an inspiring example for the Russian people he meant to rally.

The question now is what this aborted revolt means for the loyalty of Russia’s ill-trained and demoralized regular forces, as well as for the notoriously complacent Russian population, the rattled oligarchs, and already disenchanted national leaders from China to Chechnya. The specter of “loose nukes” is another unspeakable implication of a Russian civil war with unclear control of strategic weapons.

Across all of these ample domestic and international pressure points, one cannot rule out the possibility that Putin’s house of cards, built on nothing more than the fading illusion of authority and control, could come crashing down more rapidly in the days ahead than many imagine. But even if Putin survives, his authority will never be what it once was as the emperor is revealed to be increasingly naked.

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown professor in management practice and a senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management; Jon M. Huntsman Jr. was the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2017 to 2019 and William F. Browder is the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and author of Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.