A Crisis Erupts in Russia
The Kremlin is accusing a Russian mercenary of an attempted coup—a stunning development that could change the course of the war in Ukraine.
Updated at 7 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023
A simmering political feud in Russia has exploded into a crisis. The head of a Russian mercenary army fighting in Ukraine alongside Moscow’s official military forces has declared war against the Russian ministry of defense, claiming that Russia’s war in Ukraine was all the result of a giant plot by defense bureaucrats to mislead Russian President Vladimir Putin into a pointless conflict.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, also claims that Russian government forces struck his men and inflicted numerous casualties. The Russian Defense Ministry denies any involvement with the strike, but Prigozhin has gone, literally, on the warpath, claiming that he will march into the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and onward if necessary to topple the corrupt officials leading the Russian Defense Ministry and military high command. He is asking Russian police and military forces to stand aside while he gets “justice” for his troops.
The Russian government, which has long welcomed Prigozhin’s assistance in conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, has apparently had enough of all this, especially now that Prigozhin is dismantling the Kremlin’s rationalizations for the war—and by extension, making Putin look like a fool or a liar or both. The Russian security service has opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for instigating a coup and issued a warrant for his arrest, something they could do only with Putin’s approval.
That’s as much as we know right now, so take everything that follows with the understanding that at this moment, almost no one—perhaps not even officials in the Kremlin—knows exactly what is happening. Police and some military forces in Rostov-on-Don and Moscow are reportedly on alert, and the White House says it is monitoring the situation.
Beyond that much, all we have are questions, and some tentative possibilities.
1. Why is this happening, and why is it happening now?
Think of this conflict not as a contest between the Russian state and a mercenary group, but as a falling-out among gangsters, a kind of Mafia war.
A government doing a lot of bad things in the world can make great use of a cadre of hardened and nasty mercenaries, and Prigozhin has been making his bones for years as a tough guy leading other tough guys, ultranationalist patriots who care more about Mother Russia than the supposedly lazy and corrupt bureaucrats in Moscow do. The Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, is led by a political survivor named Sergei Shoigu, who has managed to stay in the Kremlin in one capacity or another since 1991. Shoigu never served in the Soviet or Russian military, yet affects the dress and mannerisms of a martinet.
Prigozhin and Shoigu, both personally close to Putin, have good reason to hate each other. Shoigu’s forces have been humiliated in Ukraine, shown up both by the Ukrainians and by Prigozhin’s mercenaries (a point Prigozhin hammers home every chance he gets). Prigozhin claims that Shoigu has withheld ammunition and supplies from Wagner, which is probably true; a defense minister is going to take care of his own forces first. The two men have a lot of bad blood between them, and Prigozhin might have been hoping to displace Shoigu or move up somehow in the Moscow power structure. But Shoigu is no rookie, and a Russian Defense Ministry edict was about to go into force requiring all mercenaries to sign up with the Russian military, which would place them under Shoigu’s control.
This order was likely an important part of the conflict we’re seeing now. I do not know why the Russians would hit Wagner’s forces—or whether that is what happened—but the tension between Prigozhin and Shoigu was unsustainable. Prigozhin, however, is a hothead, and this time, he has gone too far, essentially forcing Putin to choose between them. The fact that there is now an arrest warrant out for the Wagner chief means that Putin is siding with his defense minister; meanwhile, the Russian security service, the FSB, called Prigozhin’s actions a “stab in the back” for Russia’s soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
My friend and veteran Russia-watcher Nikolas Gvosdev summed it up to me tonight by saying that Prigozhin might be the better fighter and leader, but Putin is choosing loyalty over competence. As Michael Corleone might say: It’s the smart move.
2. Is this the outbreak of civil war in Russia?
A full-scale civil conflict—for now—seems unlikely, if only because Prigozhin has no institutional base and no major force beyond his fighters, who are a pretty unsavory bunch. He claims that his forces have entered Rostov-on-Don, but it’s unclear if that’s happened. (If Wagner’s troops gain control of Rostov-on-Don, they could seize more arms and imperil Russian-military supply lines in Ukraine.) Prigozhin is, in any case, making a dangerous appeal to the anger and desolation of regular Russian military troops, the men who’ve been taking a beating in Ukraine, asking them to stand aside as he hunts down the defense minister.
Although civil war might not be in the offing, someone in Moscow seems worried. Russian television has reported the story tonight by denouncing Prigozhin’s claims of an attack as lies, and noting the criminal case now open against him. Weirdly, two Russian generals thought it was a good idea to issue grim videos asking the military to ignore Prigozhin’s appeals. One of them is General Sergei Surovikin, the supposedly ironfisted leader Putin appointed last year to destroy Ukrainian resistance. He failed and Putin fired him.
Surovikin appeared on camera with a rifle in his lap and spoke in a slow and halting voice. “The enemy,” he said, “is just waiting for our internal political situation to deteriorate.” Such appeals from senior military people raise another possibility.
3. If it’s not a civil war, is it a coup—with support in Moscow for removing Putin?
Prigozhin in the past was always careful to avoid criticizing Putin, instead blasting Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov. After a year and a half of disasters in Ukraine, however, a lot of angry officers in Moscow may well agree with Prigozhin and want Shoigu and Gerasimov gone—and might well be holding Putin responsible for not firing them. But Shoigu is Putin’s man, and while that relationship is clearly under a great deal of strain, opposing the minister of defense and threatening the stability of the ruling clique in the Kremlin during wartime are not small things.
Right now none of this looks organized enough to be a coup. But coups sometimes look ridiculous in the offing—the 1991 coup against the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a complete clown show—so the possibility remains that Prigozhin has friends in Moscow who are working with him. Military failure has been known to threaten the stability of Russia’s governments in the past, as Russian imperial leaders endured in 1905 and then again, for the last time, in 1917.
4. Does any of this endanger the United States or NATO?
Instability in a nuclear-armed country is always worrying. For now, although the Kremlin is likely in turmoil, there is no evidence of imminent violence or a government crack-up. Russian nuclear control is likely divided among Putin, Shoigu, and Gerasimov, and none of them has vanished or been displaced (as far as we can tell). That’s the good news.
Of more concern is the possibility that Prigozhin’s gambit all along was the leading edge of an effort by hard-right Russian nationalists to push Putin to be even more violent in Ukraine and more confrontational with the West, and perhaps even to provoke a conflict with NATO. So far, tonight’s chaos does not seem to involve the U.S., NATO, or even Ukraine, but a fight among Russian gangsters, in part over whether Russia is being brutal enough in a war of unprovoked aggression, is something to watch.
For now, with Wagner out of the picture—or perhaps even in open revolt against Russian regular forces—the Ukrainians have caught a break. But there are still a lot of bad things that can happen in Moscow in the next few days, or even hours. As the political scientist and Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer noted tonight: “Putin’s never looked weaker than right now. in the Ukraine war. and at home. which is welcome. and extremely dangerous.”
5. Now what?
The fact that Prigozhin’s threats could make the Kremlin’s teeth clench to the point of issuing alerts and emergency news broadcasts suggests that Prigozhin is not the only angry ultranationalist out there. It’s also possible that none of this is true, that this is not a coup so much as it is a settling of accounts among a group of violent and terrible men. Perhaps Prigozhin is just a hard case who thought he could move to Moscow by stomping on Shoigu’s neck, literally and figuratively, and he overplayed his hand. But no matter how this ends, Prigozhin has shattered Putin’s narrative, torching the war as a needless and even criminal mistake. That’s a problem for Putin that could outlast this rebellion.
This article originally identified the Russian city the Wagner Group entered as Rostov, not Rostov-on-Don.