Putin, Prigozhin, and the coup

The immediate crisis for Vladimir Putin’s Russian regime is over. A deal was reached with the Wagner coup leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. He turned his Moscow-bound troop convoy around, late on Saturday 24 June, and sent his fighters back towards their bases in southern Russia and occupied Ukraine. As we go to press on 27 June, there are hints the deal may not hold, but we don’t know.

The Wagner troops had killed a dozen Russian helicopter crew, shot down after attacking the Wagner insurgency.

Wagner fighters, who had overrun the Russian cities of Rostov and Voronezh, evacuated their positions and stood back. Prigozhin was last seen leaving the southern army HQ in Rostov, which his forces had occupied. Apparently the deal he had brokered with Putin, via the Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko, will see Prigozhin go into exile in Belarus. It is not clear where Prigozhin is now, 27 June.

Prigozhin is a loud-mouth and a thug, who spent the 1980s in jail for street crime. By the late 1990s he had met Putin and was busy making himself useful — and very rich. Prigozhin poses as an outsider, but he is a billionaire. He is an advocate of an even more brutal war on Ukraine.

Demoralising

Nevertheless, some of Prigozhin’s rhetoric is true and undermines Putin’s war narrative, and so damages the Russian war effort, demoralises Russia’s troops, and weakens Putin himself.

Prigozhin states loudly and repeatedly that many more Russian troops have died in Ukraine than the state admits to, He says Ukraine posed no threat to Russia before the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022. He complains about corruption and the soft life led by the kleptocratic oligarchs who gather around Putin and the state.

These strange events, and the fact Putin had to make a deal with Prigozhin, rather than crush the rebellion militarily, leaves Putin diminished and vulnerable.

The Russian army’s structure is peculiar and dysfunctional. In an average modern bourgeois state, and many not so modern, there is a single army command structure, which is centralised, generally speaks with one voice, and is subordinate to the government.

In Russia Putin has allowed various contending and competing military organisations to develop alongside the state’s armed forces. Wagner is only the largest, and Prigozhin only the loudest of the leaders of these private military companies.

In addition to armed groups outside the formal army structures Putin also accepted that an ultra-nationalist, right-wing, pro-Ukraine-war blogosphere could function, while simultaneously clamping down hard on left-wing and anti-war Russians. These military bloggers and private army leaders have been allowed considerable leeway to comment on the Ukraine conflict, and have often been extremely critical of the official armed forces leadership, especially Putin’s ally and friend, the Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of the army, Valery Gerasimov.

Why has Putin allowed Wagner and an unofficial commentariat to operate in this way? He has found it useful. Partly it allows him to leverage pressure on the army which is corrupt, bureaucratic and incompetent.

Putin finds it useful to encourage competition between subordinates, who are expected to compete for his favour. Those under Putin are kept divided.

Wagner has been allowed to recruit from the Russian prisons, something which it has not been legal for the army to do. Those forces have been used as cannon fodder by Wagner leaders; Wagner has often performed better for Putin than the official military.

Wagner has also been a useful intervention force for Putin in Syria and in a number of African states (Mali, Central African Republic, Libya and Sudan). Wagner has been plausibly accused of murder, rape and torture on a vast scale in these countries, but its non-state structure allows Putin both to intervene and simultaneously to deny knowledge of Wagner’s activities.

Prigozhin has had a long-running running battle with the army leadership over access to military supplies. And the conflict between Shoigu and Prigozhin has become extraordinarily acute recently.

A Russian army colonel, Roman Vinivitin, was abducted by Wagner in eastern Ukraine in June, beaten up, and then coerced to make a video confession to having ordered his troops to bomb Wagner. This is not a normal military.

On 10 June Shoigu announced that Wagner would have to sign army contracts. This would effectively end Wagner’s existence and subsume it into the army.

Prigozhin rebelled demanding the removal of Shoigu and Gerasimov.

The ease with which Wagner overran the Rostov military HQ driving the Russian invasion force underlines the fragility of the state inside Russia. The lack of military resistance from Putin as Wagner drove north towards Moscow was extraordinary.

Nevertheless, it is probably the case that Prigozhin expected more active support from within the military, and within the political elite. He probably backed off because he calculated he might cause a lot of trouble, but then eventually lose an open fight.

Now Prigozhin is vulnerable. Putin seems to be rolling back on some guarantees he gave Prigozhin on 24 June. The legal case opened against Prigozhin, apparently dropped on 24 June, is now declared still open, according to Putin’s secret police, the FSB. Putin will clamp down on Prigozhin’s supporters if he can, if he is still strong enough. In a speech, Putin has given Wagner members an ultimatum: sign a contract with the MoD, or “leave to Belarus”.

Prisoners

Private military companies will no longer be able to recruit from the prisons. That right will be handed over to the army. Putin has now brought forward a prospective law allowing the Russian MoD to recruit prisoners,

The Russian state has been in discussions with African governments and has guaranteed that Russian military support will continue. Presumably, now, it is to be the Russian state directing affairs, hands-on. (But Wagner would still own its Sudanese gold refinery, and could operate outside Russia even if “incorporated” inside Russia).

Finally, let us, the internationalist left, keep in mind what we want. Not all damage to Putin’s regime is good: a fractured Russia, dominated by warlords with access to nuclear weapons, would be an alarming outcome. We want:

Democracy and workers’ rights in Russia;

Free association and free assembly in Russia; the freeing of political prisoners;

Russia out of Ukraine, and a peace based on Ukrainian freedom.