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This was published 10 months ago
Putin’s authority has been grievously wounded in three key ways
Vladimir Putin has often been called the puppet master of Russian politics, but now one of his puppets has turned on him and savaged him. His wounds ultimately could be fatal to his rule.
The abortive coup by his most effective military commander, the mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, has exposed the void at the centre of Putin’s regime.
Putin launched a war aimed at removing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and taking his country, today Zelensky is more secure than ever and it is Putin whose grip is endangered.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gives a televised address in Moscow.Credit: Reuters
“He has been grievously wounded,” says Kyle Wilson, a Russian-speaking former Australian diplomat and intelligence analyst. “Whatever eventuates, it’s impossible for Putin to re-establish his authority.”
Prigozhin has wounded Putin in three ways. First, he has spoken the unspeakable in Russia and dismissed Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine as lies.
Putin has maintained that the invasion was essential to “demilitarise and de-Nazify” Ukraine, to protect Russia. But Prigozhin said that Ukraine posed no threat before Russia invaded.
“The war wasn’t needed to demilitarise or de-Nazify Ukraine,” Prigozhin said in a tirade as he launched his coup. “The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exult in glory.”
The “animals” were Putin’s cronies who wanted to steal Ukraine’s assets and divide the economic spoils, he said. The war was merely “a racket”.
Second, Prigozhin’s fighters captured the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and occupied the headquarters of the Russian Defence Ministry’s Ukraine operations there – without a shot being fired.
Prigozhin then led a convoy of his Wagner Group mercenaries in tanks, trucks and armoured vehicles to thrust into Moscow while Putin took to a national broadcast to promise “severe” punishment for “treachery”.
Tellingly, Prigozhin’s armoured column met only minimal resistance from Russian forces and shot down the handful of aircraft sent to stop them. “In 24 hours we got to within 200 kilometres of Moscow,” he bragged as he announced that he’d cancelled the coup.
As Putin’s regime frantically started to dig ditches across the M4 highway to keep the rebel force from Moscow, the mercenary chief accepted negotiated terms.
We don’t know the full price Putin paid to buy off his former flunky, but he allowed Prigozhin to leave the country without punishment and to take many of his fighters with him.
“So Putin retreated and was shown to be weak,” remarks Wilson, and this is the third injury inflicted on his rule. “His system failed – he allowed Prigozhin too much power. This is a failure of Putin’s professionalism. Just as the KGB failed to prevent the disintegration of Russia, the FSB has failed to keep this man on a short leash.
“If a Russian leader is perceived to be unable to rule, you get some kind of bloodbath, even if it’s a metaphorical one. The brittle nature of his regime is demonstrated starkly,” observes Wilson, also a visiting fellow at ANU.
So, the wayward warlord has stripped any remaining shred of legitimacy from Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine, exposed the military’s feebleness inside Russia and demonstrated the weakness of Putin’s position.
The Ukrainians are electrified and Putin presumably petrified by this turn of events: “Russian history tells us that tsars who lose wars lose their life or retire to a monastery,” says Wilson. “He hasn’t lost the war yet, but he isn’t winning.”
“No longer the puppet master,” comments Yale University’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld writing in the journal Foreign Policy, “Putin is now increasingly the hunted.”
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