One Year Later, the Prigozhin Mutiny Still Leaves a Mark
The mercenary chief’s march on Moscow and its aftermath showed the Putin regime’s ruthlessness but also exposed its weakness.
A YEAR AGO TODAY, the world watched in amazement as, for the first time since 1941, an army marched toward Moscow. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the onetime Vladimir Putin crony and head of the infamous Wagner mercenary group whose clashes with the Russian Ministry of Defense and army brass had grown increasingly vocal over the preceding months, was leading a column of several thousand Wagner fighters in a self-styled “March for Justice.”
Early in the morning on June 24, Prigozhin’s forces entered Rostov-on-Don, the largest city in southern Russia, capturing the headquarters of the Southern Military District and apparently forcing the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, to flee. The convoy then turned north, reportedly coming within 125 miles of the capital while the Kremlin was stricken with panic. Several Russian military planes and helicopters that approached the column were shot down by anti-aircraft defenses, with at least a dozen pilots killed.
And then, by that evening, the insurrection was over. Prigozhin agreed to stand down in a deal negotiated by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, with security guarantees for the Wagner chief and his men.
There was much speculation at the time about Prigozhin’s motives for this baffling adventure—and about the future of the man who had recently become a star on the Russian political scene. Some Russian pundits in exile suggested that the man once nicknamed “Putin’s chef” for his Kremlin-backed catering business could become as a serious political rival to his former patron.
But the most common prediction—that Putin would eventually dispose of Prigozhin in one way or another, not only as payback for betrayal but as a message to anyone else harboring thoughts of rebellion—proved correct. On August 23, exactly two months after the start of the mutiny, Prigozhin’s private jet crashed on a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg, with Prigozhin and several other top Wagner figures on board. A few days later, Russian authorities said that a DNA test confirmed Prigozhin was among the dead. In October, Putin gave his dead frenemy one last vindictive kick by speculating that the jet exploded because Prigozhin and his fellow passengers were high on cocaine and playing catch with live hand grenades.
Plenty of speculation remains about Prigozhin’s motives for both starting and aborting the insurrection—and about his real views of the war in Ukraine at the end of his career. (In his final interviews, Prigozhin seemed to move away from a standard war-hawk position and scathingly criticized the official Russian narratives justifying the war.) And there is another unanswered question: What do Prigozhin’s rebellion, his spectacular fall (so to speak), and his posthumous image say about the current state of Putin’s Russia?
THERE IS A WIDESPREAD CONSENSUS—articulated by, among others, political scientist and former Kremlin adviser Abbas Gallyamov in an interview on TV-Rain, the exiled dissident Russian channel—that Prigozhin’s rebellion exposed the clay feet of the Putin regime. A warlord with a force of 6,000 to 8,000 men and about 1,000 armored vehicles was able to march from the Ukrainian border to Moscow, seizing a major city along the way, where he was treated like a rock star by much of a populace and encountered no resistance from regular military units. Some observers, such as Yevgeny Savostianov, who served as head of the Moscow branch of the KGB during the reformist era of 1990-1992 and was later deputy chief of staff in Boris Yeltsin’s administration (and thus knows something about security in Moscow), are convinced that Prigozhin had a realistic chance of seizing control of Moscow if he hadn’t stopped.
Savostianov finds it particularly significant that the military divisions stationed in the capital were not sent out to stop the Prigozhin march, likely because they couldn’t be trusted not to switch sides. Indeed, it is widely believed that Prigozhin folded precisely because he realized he was on a path to toppling Putin and got cold feet. (His apparent goal was far more modest: to strongarm the man he had once called “Papa” into backing him in his conflicts with the Ministry of Defense and the army leadership.) For many people—including opposition leader Alexei Navalny, then still alive and in prison—the most striking lesson of the Prigozhin rebellion was that “no one came out to defend Putin.” “During the mutiny, so many figures within the military and certainly within the National Guard were basically willing to sit it out and wait and see what happens,” noted Mark Galeotti, an expert in the Russian security system. Putin himself was reportedly “paralyzed” at the start of the rebellion and may have fled to his Valdai residence some 250 miles away.
And yet, in keeping with the paradoxes of Prigozhin’s late-stage career, his rebellion—or rather, its failure and his subsequent fiery demise—may have also strengthened Putin’s hold on power. Gallyamov told TV-RAIN that “by killing Prigozhin, Putin undoubtedly solidified his position in the eyes of the elites; that is, no one wants to repeat Prigozhin’s fate, and so people are more careful and loyal toward Putin.” He explained:
Until Prigozhin’s murder, people were starting to think that Putin was done, completely deflated, no longer someone to be reckoned with. But now it’s clear that maybe he can’t beat the Ukrainians or the Americans, but rip the head off someone he considers dangerous or a traitor inside the country—yeah, he can still do that.
Political analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky has also observed that the rebellion significantly changed Putin’s leadership style: Whereas he had previously tolerated and even encouraged the presence of different factions inside the Kremlin and often played them off against each other, post-Prigozhin Putin was determined to “build a system much more oriented toward personal loyalty to himself,” staffed by people with no other loyalties.
Putin is still not done with the post-Prigozhin loyalty purges. While Prigozhin’s nemesis, Sergei Shoigu, has been replaced as minister of defense and several of his cronies in the army command have been arrested, Prigozhin-friendly army general Ivan Popov was also arrested last month on charges of corruption that even critics of military corruption generally regard as false. And on the anniversary of the rebellion, two men linked to for Prigozhin’s media empire—one of them the former chief of Prigozhin’s “troll factory,” Ilya Gorbunov—were arrested in St. Petersburg, allegedly for an extortion scheme.
MEANWHILE, PRIGOZHIN REMAINS a hero to some Russians. On June 1, when he would have turned 63, the newly unveiled life-size bronze monument to the dead Wagner chief (pictured above) was strewn with flowers.
There is no question that, for all his colorful antics and the riveting drama of his final months, Prigozhin was a monstrous figure. He presided over a mercenary band notorious for war crimes, and was likely responsible for murders of dissidents and journalists. He made a ghoulish joke out of the sledgehammer execution of a Wagner defector. He started the recruitment of convicts for service in Ukraine that has now become a norm for the Russian military—and used most of them as literal cannon fodder in the notorious “meat storms” at Bakhmut and elsewhere. (Those who survived and returned to Russia regularly show up in the news by committing new murders, rapes, robberies and arsons.)
As Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulman pointed out, the “folklore” of Prigozhin the brave patriot and martyr “murdered for telling the truth” has very little in common with the real Prigozhin, “the felon, mid-level oligarch, and beneficiary of Russian corruption and kleptocracy.” But for Russians who mourn Prigozhin, he likely represents the mythical rebel, not the real war criminal.
There’s an eerie parallel between Prigozhin and Navalny, two Putin opponents murdered last year, who were on opposite sides in almost every way but paid reluctant semi-tributes to each other near the ends of their lives. Prigozhin—who had been the target of one of Navalny’s investigations—described the dissident as a “total scumbag” who nonetheless performed a useful function by keeping corrupt oligarchs and officials on their toes, and even suggested that Navalny should be given access to the internet in the penal colony so that he could continue his exposés. For his part, Navalny spoke of the Prigozhin rebellion as a moment of truth—evidence, among other things, of the abyss into which the Putin regime was plunging the country—and later described Prigozhin’s murder as a shocking demonstration of the regime’s terrorist nature.
Speaking of Navalny and Prigozhin in the same breath, or comparing Navalny’s followers to Prigozhin’s followers (some of whom, earlier this year, were spotted stealing flowers from an improvised memorial to Navalny in Moscow and taking them to a Prigozhin memorial) feels borderline sacrilegious. But in a doubly paradoxical way, the trajectory of both men’s lives and deaths demonstrated both the crushing power and the essential weakness of the Putin regime.
And, in their very different ways, both men may ultimately contribute to the regime’s demise.