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Yevgeny Prigozhin led his Wagner Group mercenaries on a “march of justice” toward Moscow in June to oust Russian military leadership that he cast as incompetent.
Russian military blogger Igor Girkin used his popular Telegram channel in December to declare that the “fish’s head is completely rotten” and that top officials in Moscow had botched the invasion of Ukraine.
Last month, Valery Garbuzov, a leading scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences, released a treatise that skewered the Kremlin’s foreign policy doctrine and said Russia is suffering from an “extremely painful syndrome of ‘suddenly lost imperial greatness.’”
Today, Prigozhin is dead and Mr. Girkin is in prison. Mr. Garbuzov was fired from his post as director of the academy’s Institute of the USA and Canada just days after his essay went public.
They are just three who have fallen victim recently to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive crackdown against his domestic critics. The crusade over two decades has reached military and political circles, outspoken academics and influential bloggers who build followings on social media with their blunt takedowns of Russian power players.
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Observers see the deadly explosion of Prigozhin’s private jet last month during a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg as a shining example of the evolution of Mr. Putin’s war on dissent, which now seeks to silence anyone who might even appear to undermine or question Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine.
The Kremlin vehemently denied connection to the Wagner Group leader’s death. It said claims that Mr. Putin ordered Prigozhin’s assassination are nothing more than Western disinformation.
Cold and calculating
If Mr. Putin was involved, as Western observers generally believe, it may seem surprising on the surface that the Russian president allowed Prigozhin to live for two months after his short-lived mutiny. Outsiders have also remarked on how Mr. Putin allowed Mr. Girkin and other widely read military bloggers to slam the Russian war effort online for more than a year before taking them into custody.
Analysts say Mr. Putin is following his standard playbook and is behaving less like an unhinged dictator and more like a cold, calculating mob boss, a onetime KGB operative who lulls opponents into a false sense of security and waits for the perfect moment to exact revenge.
“This is not unlike Putin’s personality, what we know about him. He usually takes time to act,” said Maria Snegovaya, a senior fellow with the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She closely watches the Kremlin.
“He likes procrastinating until he absolutely has to do something. That quality could be considered a weakness, but also, he’s not too radical, too abrupt. That’s one of the things people like,” she said.
Ms. Snegovaya said the Prigozhin-led Wagner Group mutiny, which ended in a negotiated truce before the mercenary troops reached Moscow, was the first domino to fall. She said the entire Prigozhin affair may have demonstrated to Mr. Putin and any adversaries that the strong support for the Russian president has faded.
“The mutiny itself might have created a new chain of events,” she said in an interview. “I think that’s why we’ve seen this intensified wave of repression. When Prigozhin was marching toward Moscow, he exposed the fundamental hollowness of the system.”
That wave of repression is manifesting itself in several ways, some more deadly than others. Over the first six months of this year, the Kremlin reportedly blocked more than 885,000 websites from the Russian public as part of an apparent effort to filter out information critical of Russian leaders and their ongoing war in Ukraine. Kremlin officials said those sites contained information banned under Russian law.
Moscow is also aiming at prominent military bloggers, who backed the invasion of Ukraine but emerged as some of the harshest critics of how the war was being fought. Mr. Girkin was arrested in July on charges of extremism. Another prominent war critic, blogger Andrey Kurshin, was arrested in late August. Russian state-controlled media said he was spreading “fake news” about the Russian army.
Specialists say critical voices in the Russian blogosphere have gradually disappeared over the past several months. The community of military bloggers, or “milbloggers,” so sharply critical of Mr. Putin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and other top officials throughout 2022 and into 2023 seems to have been greatly diminished. They have been at least partially replaced by bloggers and social media figures more supportive of Russia’s war effort.
‘Russia’s ace’
Throughout Mr. Putin’s nearly quarter-century rule, domestic and foreign critics have regularly met their demise under mysterious circumstances. Some have been poisoned, and others reportedly fell from windows. Many others — most notably opposition leader and corruption critic Alexei Navalny — have been arrested, often on charges that appear exaggerated at best.
For all of the criticism aimed at Mr. Putin and his war in Ukraine, no other detractor carried nearly the influence of Prigozhin, who cultivated a close personal relationship with Mr. Putin over two decades and made his Wagner Group almost indispensable to Russia’s broader foreign policy aims. Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was vital to Russia’s military intervention in Syria and its activities in Africa and elsewhere. In Ukraine, Wagner troops often appeared to be better trained, better equipped and more disciplined than soldiers in the Russian army proper.
That led to deep divisions between the two camps. Prigozhin made no secret of his disdain for Russian military leadership. In May, he released a video blaming Mr. Shoigu, top Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov and others for the deaths of his Wagner fighters in Ukraine. He said the Russian Defense Ministry failed to provide ammunition and other equipment that his men needed.
“They came here as volunteers, and they died to let you lounge in your mahogany offices,” Prigozhin said. “You are sitting in your expensive clubs, your children are enjoying good living and filming videos on YouTube. Those who don’t give us ammunition will be eaten alive in hell.”
In retrospect, it’s little surprise that Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion seems to have pushed Mr. Putin toward another round of violent crackdowns. Specialists say Prigozhin’s activities before and after the aborted mutiny may have left the Russian president little choice but to take him off the playing field, especially after Mr. Putin struck a deal that seemingly offered Prigozhin immunity and a free ride out of Russia.
“Here’s where things start to look really shaky for Putin,” said John E. Herbst, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Prigozhin “marches early on a Saturday, and a few hours later Putin denounces what’s going on as treason.”
“Within six or eight hours of Putin’s speech, they announced the deal. But what type of strongman makes a deal with a guy he’s accused of treason?” he said.
In the weeks afterward, Prigozhin was seen across Russia and even appeared publicly at the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg while offering the assistance of his Wagner Group fighters to help restore order in chaotic African nations.
“He’s making himself look kind of good,” Mr. Herbst said of Prigozhin and his public relations offensive after the June mutiny. “He’s looking like he’s Russia’s ace.”
“Putin decided he had to get rid of him,” Mr. Herbst said. “But even that decision does not demonstrate that the strongman is back, tougher than ever. He does it in a way he can deny responsibility even while taking out the plane, taking out Prigozhin, was understood by all of the elites to be payback.”
Mr. Herbst said Mr. Putin remains “vulnerable as long as he’s fighting in Ukraine” and that further Russian setbacks — perhaps in the form of significant Ukrainian advances in its counteroffensive — could lay the groundwork for another figure to rise and threaten Mr. Putin’s control.
That may mean the Russian leader’s most prudent course of action is to scale down his ambitions in Ukraine and possibly even declare victory now, with just a portion of eastern Ukraine under Russian control.
“We have already seen as this war unraveled, the Russian army is able to rethink its original goals radically,” Ms. Snegovaya said. “In that sense, limited rationality is there and Putin is the one who is making these final decisions. He is able to revise the goals to more limited ones.
“Russia may actually be more interested in some sort of break at this point to reset, maybe rebuild what was lost, to lick its wounds,” she said. “But it’s clear to me that he is not going to leave [Ukraine] alone.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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