Russia After the Rebellion
2023-07-06 00:31:12
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From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Taverny-See, and this is the Daily.
Last month, a rebellion inside Russia left lingering questions about what really happened and what it would mean for Vladimir Putin. Today, my colleague Anton Traynovsky on the surprising actions Putin has taken since, what they tell us about how shaken he really was, and how vulnerable he might be.
It's Thursday, July 6..
So, Anton, the last time we spoke a week ago, on Sunday, we saw this really remarkable thing happening in Russia, and what it looked like was an armed rebellion by this guy, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and his Wagner paramilitary force. And coming out of that weekend, we really had two big unanswered questions. One was, what was going to happen to Prigozhin? And the other, perhaps more important one, was, what does all of this mean for Vladimir Putin and for his rule in Russia? But before we get to those questions, let's start first with the event itself, because it's been a week and a half, and a lot has come out.
What do we know now about what happened that we didn't know at the time?
Well, remember, Sabrina, what we're talking about is the most dramatic threat to Putin's rule that we've seen at any point, at any moment, since he took power in December of 1999.. So, a really key moment in modern Russian history. And Prigozhin, as you recall, is this mercenary leader. He runs an organization called the Wagner Group, which is thousands of mercenary fighters who have been on the ground in Ukraine fighting for Russia. And he, over the last few months, got more and more publicly angry with the official Russian military leadership, claiming they were ineffective and that they were, he claimed, disrespectful of Russian life.
And it got to the point late last month, when Prigozhin was actually going after the whole rationale behind the war in Ukraine, claiming that it wasn't true, that Ukraine posed a threat to Russia. So that was the background. And then, on June 23rd, he launches this straight up mutiny. And what we now understand happened is he sent two columns of his Wagner forces, armed with artillery, with tanks, with anti-aircraft equipment, into Russia from Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine. One of those columns went into the city of Rostov-on-Don.
That's the city of a million people in southwest Russia where the military command for the Ukraine invasion is based. He went in there with one of those columns, took control of that military base, effectively took control of the city. And then, with a separate second column of forces, he went toward Moscow and got to within 125 miles of Moscow.
Okay. So that kind of helps for me explain something really odd about that weekend, which was how did that column all the way from the south of Russia get all the way to Moscow over the course of one day? It just didn't make any sense to me. How are they going so fast?
Right. I mean, they were still going fast. They still traversed hundreds of miles. But yeah, it looks like there were actually at least two separate columns. And as he was doing this, his forces actually shot down a number of Russian aircraft, about a half dozen military helicopters.
So now that we're about 10 days out of these events, it's really become clear that this was a bonafide rebellion, very much thought out, planned out by Prigozhin and his commanders. And these were troops that were ready to kill and did kill. We're talking on the order of 10 or more Russian crew members that died.
Wow. So Russians actually killing Russians.
Correct.
Okay. So what have we learned about what Putin was doing at the time?
So we still don't know for sure, but we have one pretty interesting narrative from Alexander Lukashenko.
That's the president, authoritarian leader of neighboring Belarus, very much an ally of Putin.
He gave a news conference last week where he described his involvement trying to resolve this situation.
He talks about getting on the phone with Putin Saturday morning. So remember, that's the morning after the rebellion has begun. At this point, Prigozhin's troops are already controlling the city of Rostov-on-Don and marching toward Moscow.
And in Lukashenko's telling, at that point, Putin has essentially already decided to destroy Prigozhin's forces.
Interesting, because that was also another question I had about that weekend, which was like, did Putin ever give the order to kill them? I mean, that was always kind of a big blank spot in my mind.
Very much.
And in Lukashenko's telling, he tells Putin on the phone, not so fast. That's a bad idea.
And then, you know, Lukashenko does this real play by play of his alleged conversation with Putin.
Lukashenko claims that he asked Putin to let him speak directly to Prigozhin. And then Lukashenko claims that Putin told him.
It's useless. Prigozhin doesn't want to talk.
At some point, it sounds like Lukashenko has convinced Putin to let him talk to Prigozhin. But Lukashenko doesn't actually have Prigozhin's phone number.
Putin says, I don't have his phone number either. The domestic intelligence agency does. So. Lukashenko says he gets Prigozhin's number from the FSB. And he says that Prigozhin is in a euphoric or a manic mood.
Euphoria.
There's a lot, a lot of cursing. And it sounds like they really go back and forth. And Lukashenko also tells Prigozhin, essentially, that Putin is prepared to kill him and bomb his troops or whack his troops, to use Lukashenko's language.
Very rough, kind of coarse, crude language he's using.
Exactly. A very, very colorful conversation.
And at the end of Saturday night, so about 24 hours into the rebellion, Lukashenko announced that he had reached an agreement allowing Prigozhin and his Wagner fighters safe passage into Belarus. And Prigozhin put out an announcement saying he was turning his column around and aborting that march toward Moscow.
Okay, so in Lukashenko's telling, he's really just in the center of it, all, right? He's multitasking on his phone with Putin, with Prigozhin. Do we believe him?
So Lukashenko was certainly not the most reliable of narrators. Again, this is an authoritarian leader who cracked down viciously against pro-democracy protests in 2020.. But it does seem like Lukashenko did play an important role here, that he was to some extent involved in diffusing this situation and finding a way to stop this rebellion without large scale bloodshed.
Right. Okay, so I understand why Prigozhin would take this deal. I mean, he's basically kind of stuck out there with his columns, right? But why would Putin, who's of course famously vengeful, agree to give immunity to someone who's posing a violent threat to his power?
Well, first of all, I think Putin has no interest in making Prigozhin into any more of a hero or any more of a symbol for people who are unhappy with various aspects of the war. Remember, Prigozhin, in the lead up to this, really turned himself into more and more of a politician, saying things that others are leaving unsaid, whether it's about the problems with the justification for the invasion of Ukraine or simply about Russian soldiers not being provided for enough and the military leadership becoming incompetent. So Putin has no interest in turning Prigozhin into a martyr or more of a historical figure than he already is. And then there's the matter of Putin's own simple, cold calculation of how to get out of this problem with the least risk and damage possible. So, in Lukashenko's telling, he clearly did consider the option of violently putting down this rebellion, right?
But if he had gone ahead with orders to destroy Prigozhin's column, who knows? Maybe there would have been Russian military servicemen who refused to carry out those orders.
He couldn't rely on everybody being loyal to him.
Exactly. Or at least he didn't want to test that question, right, of who would be loyal to him in a situation where he's ordering Russian forces to fire on other Russian forces. And, of course, he didn't know how Prigozhin's troops were going to respond. If they had fired back with the heavy weaponry that was at their disposal, especially if they were near a major city, we would have seen damage and probably bloodshed far beyond anything that's happened on Russian soil since the beginning of the invasion in February 2022.. So if Putin was going to violently put down this rebellion, he was looking at a lot of uncontrollable risks.
And so that option of allowing him to retreat into Belarus, I think, was essentially an off ramp for Putin that he was happy to take.
So practicality won the day.
Yes, as frankly, it often does with Putin.
And Anton, what are the Americans saying? I mean, did they have any inkling that this was afoot?
So, yes, they did. Our colleagues in Washington have reported that the U.S. did get intelligence before Prigozhin's rebellion started, that he was planning military action inside Russia against senior Russian defense officials. Now, the U.S. didn't go public with that information before the rebellion happened, because they were very, very concerned of Putin or the Kremlin accusing America of trying to orchestrate a rebellion inside Russia.
They didn't want to be blamed for it.
They didn't want to be blamed for it. And, in fact, after it began, the U.S. sent messages to Moscow to try to make clear the U.S. didn't have anything to do with this. Bill Burns, the head of the CIA, called his Russian counterpart to say that, because clearly the U.S.
was so concerned about the potential consequences of instability in a nuclear superpower.
Interesting.
But the U.S. had intelligence about this, and we also understand from the reporting of our New York Times colleagues in Washington, so did a senior Russian general, a guy named Sergei Surovikin, who for a period last year actually led the Russian invasion forces in Ukraine, then was demoted. But he was someone who was very much seen as a Prigozhin ally inside the Russian military. So then the rebellion happens. And then that night, a few hours into the rebellion, we actually see a video of Surovikin sitting in a very strange setting against a white background.
And in this almost terrified way, he pleads with the Wagner forces to stop their rebellion, to stand down.
We are of one blood, we are warriors. I urge you to stop.
That video, first of all, looked a little bit like a hostage video, like Surovikin may have been forced to say those things. And that, combined with the fact we haven't heard from him since, and our colleagues in have reported that a preliminary finding of American intelligence agencies is that Surovikin may have been arrested by the Russian authorities, really gives us reason to consider the possibility that there was some kind of collusion between Surovikin and Prigozhin, that Prigozhin may have had support in the higher ranks of the Russian military. That's partially speculation, and there is still so much here that we don't know. But really, it's just becoming more and more clear that this rebellion was a really big deal.
Okay, so since then, this Russian general, Surovikin, who's a Prigozhin ally and might have even helped him plan the rebellion, basically disappears. No one's heard from him or seen him. Meanwhile, Prigozhin has gotten immunity and fled to Belarus. But what about all the other people who helped Prigozhin, like his troops, people like that? What happens to them?
There is a camp for Wagner fighters coming together in Belarus. At the same time, the Russian authorities have offered Wagner fighters to sign contracts with the Russian military and continue to fight. So I think it's also possible that we will see these folks again in battle, even if they're not officially doing that as part of Wagner. But in general, we have seen no evidence of any kind of crackdown on individual fighters in the Wagner force in the aftermath of this.
So I wanted to ask you, Anton, what does that add up to? I mean, does that mean effectively that all of them, troops and commander, got away scot-free?
It looks like that's the deal that Putin made.
He, again, was just looking for a way out of this with minimal risk, minimal drama, minimal bloodshed. And to do that, he made this really incredible deal that he allowed a force who were responsible for the deaths of Russian military service members, all of this chaos that we saw on the ground in Russia, he allowed them to get off scot-free. But that left us with questions about how Putin would respond in the weeks after the rebellion.
We'll be right back.
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So, Anton, what's Putin's response to all of this been?
Well, that's a great question. Because when we last spoke two Sundays ago, I figured that Putin was going to do what he often does when bad things happen to him, which is just kind of ignore the thing publicly and pretend that everything is business as usual. Right. But the opposite happened.
He really leaned into it.
On Tuesday, so that's the third day after the rebellion ended, Putin holds this huge ceremony in the cathedral square of the Kremlin. He lines up all these security forces there, gives a big speech, thanking them for their resolve and courage that they showed in stopping the rebellion.
The traffic police was there. The Russian version of the Secret Service was there. The National Guard was there. The military was there.
So, he makes a show of gathering all these security forces around him, as if to telegraph to the Russian public and to the world that he's still firmly in power and that the men with guns are still very much behind him.
Then, later that day, he holds a televised meeting with military officials, at which he makes these really stunning assertions about the degree of financial support that Wagner and Prigozhin were getting from the Russian government. So, remember, Wagner was supposedly an independent entity. Putin always said that the Russian government didn't have anything to do with Wagner. Here in the Kremlin, he says, in fact, the Russian government was financing Wagner in full. He says that just in the last year, the Russian government had spent roughly a billion dollars on financing Wagner and that the Russian government had spent another billion dollars on catering and other contracts being provided by Prigozhin's companies.
Which is pretty remarkable since, as you said, Putin didn't even acknowledge the existence of Wagner even a year ago. And we remember that. the reason for that is because he gets to have plausible deniability when Wagner does something somewhere in the globe and he doesn't really want to have to claim it. But now he's saying, look, this guy got tons of money from the Russian state and he's just a greedy trader.
Exactly. And, you know, I think what we saw last week was how shaken Putin was by the rebellion and this real need on Putin's part to show himself to be the real hero. And then, on Wednesday, he flies down to Dagestan in southern Russia, has meetings there, conversations about developing domestic tourism. So business as usual.
That seems very business as usual. Why does he care about domestic tourism at a moment like this?
I thought, OK, now we're definitely back to business as usual. But no, Wednesday night, Putin does yet another incredible thing.
He ventures out into a crowd, shakes hands, does a selfie, kisses a girl on the forehead.
I mean, on its own, it's obviously not every day that the Russian president does this kind of thing. But for Putin in 2023, it's absolutely stunning, because up until now, Putin has been keeping up this incredibly rigorous anti-coronavirus regimen. He actually still forces people who meet with him to not just do PCR tests, but to quarantine for days before they get anywhere near him.
Famously.
Famously. Exactly. And so, Wednesday night, Putin, by all accounts, makes a major exception. for the first time since the pandemic. He ventures out into a crowd.
And that was also really a clear sign showing us how much this rebellion had rattled Putin and how important it was for Putin to show the world that he still has this popular legitimacy, that the people still love him.
Presumably trying to contrast with all of the photos and all of the selfies that were taken in Rostov when Wagner had taken over that city a week and a half before. That was a real challenge in a lot of ways to his power, to his authority.
Yeah, absolutely. He needed to reestablish that authority. He needed to show that he was the real representative of the Russian people.
And so you're seeing this uncharacteristically active and potentially even frightened Putin. Did all of those efforts work? What was the effect?
Well, that remains to be seen. In a way, this was kind of an unwitting referendum on Putin's leadership. When the rebellion began, we did not exactly see a big, spontaneous outpouring of support for the president from the public or from the elites. The sort of well-connected and prominent individuals in Moscow who are close to the Kremlin.
And responsible for keeping him in place and responsible for the whole system working.
Exactly. We didn't see them rushing to speak out in his defense either in the first hours of the rebellion. So we saw this passivity that is really at the root of the Russian people's support for Putin. At the same time, in the aftermath, with all that activity that we talked about, we also saw that Putin remains a pretty skilled political animal. He saw his weakness and he rushed to correct it.
And it did look by the end of that first week after the rebellion that Putin had managed to stabilize the situation in the short term. But where this leaves us longer term, I think, is still very much an open question. One really interesting conversation I had in the aftermath of all this was with a very well-connected newspaper editor in Moscow, who told me that he could now imagine the unthinkable of Putin not running again in the presidential election next year. That is one other sign of how fragile the system is. And then, finally, one other sign of that is the fact that we haven't seen any kind of mass arrests here.
We haven't seen a big, big crackdown against people who may have been involved in the rebellion. Putin is clearly trying to avoid doing anything that could risk destabilizing his system any further.
Anton, what I'm taking from all of this is that Putin was taking clear and intentional action to save himself and therefore his system, because he knows what we all know. In authoritarian systems, power can unravel really quickly because it's all linked to one man.
Yes, exactly. And Grigorin has showed Putin's weakness. He has showed that rebellion is possible, that Putin can be undermined, even militarily. There is this whole patchwork of security forces in Russia. There are all these different groups of people who are heavily armed, who have their own forces, who have their own interests.
And that's why, when you talk to experts on Russia right now, what you hear about a lot is this idea that Putin is not out of the woods yet, and this kind of thing could repeat itself in the future. And this has reminded us that whatever comes after Putin is not necessarily democracy and pro-Western leadership, right? I mean, Prigozhin is a guy whose Wagner forces were behind terrible war crimes in Syria. He is not a friendly guy when it comes to the West. He is not someone known for having any democratic bona fides.
In fact, in many ways, what he says publicly is much more radical than what Putin says. One of the things that Prigozhin has said is that Russia should be turned into North Korea in order for the war to be won in Ukraine.
Right. Not necessarily a guy you want running Russia.
Exactly. And we don't know what would come after Putin. We just don't. And there are, of course, pro-democracy activists like Alexei Navalny, who's in jail, but there are also people like Yevgeny Prigozhin.
So, in some ways, there's potentially a much more chaotic version of Russia. And that could be even worse.
Yeah. I mean, to be sure that in a way has been Putin's pitch to the West, that he is someone who is keeping those Russian forces at bay. But at the same time, remember, Putin is the guy who launched the biggest land war in Europe since 1945.. He is not exactly a guarantor of stability, but he is clearly scrambling to get back to that position right now as Russia's guarantor of stability.
Anton, thank you.
Thank you, Sabrina.
On Thursday, Lukashenko, speaking in a press conference in Belarus, said that Yevgeny Prigozhin was not in Belarus, nor were his Wagner forces.
Lukashenko said that as of Thursday morning, Prigozhin, who's not been seen in public since the rebellion almost two weeks ago, was in St. Petersburg. And he said that Prigozhin's Wagner forces had remained in their permanent camps, which are believed to be in eastern Ukraine. None of Lukashenko's claims could be verified.
We'll be right back.
Here's what else you should know. today. A federal court in Louisiana has barred certain agencies within the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat misinformation. The case is seen as a flashpoint in the broader effort by conservatives to document what they contend is a conspiracy by Democrats and tech company executives to silence their views. The legal question at the heart of the ruling is whether the federal government violated the First Amendment by unlawfully threatening social media companies to censor speech that President Joe Biden's administration found distasteful.
And on Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had finished its incursion into the West Bank city of Jenin, ending a 48-hour military operation that was one of the largest in many years against armed militant groups in the occupied West Bank. Twelve Palestinians were killed during the operation, which included deadly airstrikes not seen in the area for about two decades.
Today's episode was produced by Rikki Nevetsky, Mary Wilson, and Stella Tan. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Rachel Quester, translated by Anastasia Voroshytsova, contains original music by Dan Powell and Alicia Beethoven, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. Special thanks to Valerie Hopkins.
That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernissi. See you tomorrow.
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