It was a chaotic 36 hours in the Kremlin. Over the weekend, the Wagner Group, a team of Russian military mercenaries led an armed rebellion in Russia with forces coming within 300 kilometres of Moscow. Wagner’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin abruptly aborted the mission and accepted a deal that saw him and his men offered safe passage to Belarus.
But the damage was done. Russian president Vladimir Putin accused Mr. Prigozhin of trying to start a civil war. Now for the first time in nearly two decades, Putin’s regime appears to be shaken publicly.
The Decibel’s guest host Sherrill Sutherland spoke with the Globe’s senior international correspondent Mark MacKinnon about Mr. Putin’s rise to power and what this mutiny says about his control in Russia.
Sherrill Sutherland: The armed rebellion that happened over the weekend was a really big deal, partially because it says a lot about the position Putin is in right now. Can you explain why?
Mark MacKinnon: It was 24 years ago that Vladimir Putin first emerged onto the scene in Russia as this man from nowhere who was suddenly made Prime Minister by Boris Yeltsin. And then he was president for most of the last two decades. He’s been almost unchallenged. There’s no one else really on the political map. And then all of a sudden, one of these characters that was always viewed as an appendage of the Kremlin was turning around and pointing his weapons right at the Kremlin.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary company, said his aim was never to challenge Putin. It was to challenge the defense establishment that he said had misled the war in Ukraine, that had bungled the war in Ukraine. But obviously, when you have a column of tanks and troops driving towards the capital of any country, that poses a challenge to the government in power. And it was shocking for a lot of Russians because they’re not used to pondering the question of what or who comes after Vladimir Putin. I don’t think anybody was really particularly pleased with the idea of Yevgeny Prigozhin – who has a reputation as a man who was a petty thief in the Soviet era and who later rose to become known as Putin’s chef, was famous for meddling in elections in the West, and for running with this mercenary company that has a horrific human rights record in Africa and the Middle East – no one was happy about him taking power.
Even though this particular mutiny appears to be over, the question of how long Vladimir Putin can remain in the Kremlin is alive for the first time in a very long time.
Sutherland: You said earlier this week that Putin has “never looked weaker” than he did at that point when this mutiny was happening. What do you mean by that?
MacKinnon: First of all, there was no one rising up to defend his supposedly extremely popular rule with these Wagner fighters that took over the city of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, where, as far as we can tell, were being welcomed by residents who were cheering them as they were challenging the supposedly popular Kremlin. There was no real opposition. There was flight tracking software that showed that the private planes usually used by Mr. Putin and his prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, had taken off and gone north towards Saint Petersburg. It looked like he’d fled the capital, although the Kremlin denies that happened.
Mr. Putin spent the last 12 to 24 hours really trying to re-establish himself and to combat that narrative. He went on television Monday night and gave a pretty angry speech in which he referred to the leadership of Wagner, not mentioning Mr. Prigozhin’s name – which is something he’s famous for doing – saying these people are traitors and they were, if not collaborating with the West or with Ukraine, [trying] to divide Russia.
And then on Tuesday he gave an unexpected address to soldiers inside the Kremlin walls, where he’s held them up as heroes for stopping the civil war. But the social contract in Russia has for most of the last two decades essentially been as long as the economy was growing, as long as there are stability in Russia, Vladimir Putin looks like a safe bet for most of Russia. It’s no longer clear that Vladimir Putin represents stability, which is the one thing he could claim to have offered Russians.
Sutherland: Now, that’s really interesting. And you mentioned these speeches: What is Putin’s strategy here with making these comments?
MacKinnon: He’s putting himself in the centre of events. Russians are not used to seeing Vladimir Putin speak three times in four days. He is someone who has an annual question and answer session with journalists. But they’re not used to hearing directly from the man this often. So, by speaking this often, by meeting with the soldiers, by specifically thanking individual units, the Interior Ministry, the National Guard, the army, is trying to both claim their loyalty and thank them for a loyalty that frankly, they didn’t necessarily show on Saturday. I think he’s just trying to assure people that never would have gone any further than it did. They would have been crushed. I chose to avoid bloodshed is the line he’s giving, because of the loyalty of my men. We didn’t need to have a battle for Moscow.
Sutherland: So just how powerful is Putin in Russia?
MacKinnon: Putin established very early in his rule what he calls the helm of last vertical power. And what that means is he abolished all other power centres. Everybody reported up and eventually the top of that pyramid was him and him alone. Any major dispute would get eventually resolved at the very top. And he backed off a lot on the day-to-day governance of Russia and held himself above it.
And there was a really crucial turning point. In about 2004, there was an infamous takeover of an elementary school by Chechen terrorists in southern Russia and hundreds of people were killed. It was atrocious, the worst thing I’ve ever had to cover. And what happened in the aftermath, though, Putin said we need to rebuild the system.
He abolished the system of local elections so that you no longer had all of Russia’s regions individually-elected governors. For the last 19 years, the president of Russia appoints the governor of every single region of Russia. And from that moment on, he took direct control of the entire country, effectively in parallel. He was abolishing free press in Russia. He has obliterated the opposition. Major opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov were murdered. Others were driven into exile. Alexei Navalny sits in prison right now. He rewrote the constitution multiple times, effectually making himself president for life at this point.
Sutherland: And what about the Russian public? I know it might be difficult to know, but how do they feel about Putin, given all the way he’s maintained his power all these years?
MacKinnon: There are opinion polls and interestingly, about 70 per cent of Russians, sometimes more than that, still support Vladimir Putin. [They] consider him the most trustworthy figure in Russian politics. But given the atmosphere in Russia right now, this atmosphere of fear that’s been created – the possibility that you can be drafted off the streets, the fact that holding up a blank sign can get you jailed – if a stranger calls you on the phone and asks ‘Do you support the president?’, you’ll probably say yes just because that’s the safe answer for you and your family.
So there’s not much stakes that could be put in those opinion polls. There’s something that used to happen in the Soviet era. When you were having a conversation that you weren’t sure of the safety of the situation, people would go in the kitchen and turn on the tap. It would make it difficult for listening devices to pick up. And then you would talk politics. My last trip there, I actually had that happen a couple of times. People would go in the kitchen, and almost out of habit, start talking. So you have that atmosphere of fear – the fact that you don’t quite trust your neighbours, the fact that you don’t quite know what’s safe to say – has returned. That tells you a lot about the direction the country is heading and the fact that, people, they’ll say out loud they support the president because that’s what you have to do. Just like during the Soviet era, you had to go and sort of wave a banner for Lenin.
Sutherland: Big picture here: could what have happened mark a shift in Putin’s war efforts in Ukraine?
MacKinnon: I think the Ukrainians certainly are hoping so. And not only do we have 20,000 Wagner fighters now sort of scattered in different directions, but there has to be a morale blow here for the Russian military. Like what are they fighting for? Who are they fighting for? Did Vladimir Putin get on the plane to Saint Petersburg? Did he flee the capital? This is a turning point in the war.
But you can certainly see why there’s optimism that if, as we saw last fall in the Kharkiv region, if there’s a breakthrough, maybe the Russian troops in that area will melt away faster than you’d expect. The other worry is that Mr. Putin will look to reassert himself as the as a tough guy leader by taking some new and dramatic actions in Ukraine or in the standoff with the West.
Sherrill Sutherland