The Wagner Group, a mercenary force that is effectively an arm of the Putinist state, has been very good at meddling in the politics of countries other than Russia—and ensuring that its preferred regime either takes or stays in power. Before Wagner’s fighters became infamous over the past few months for their extremely brutal attacks on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the group honed its expertise in political control mainly in Africa, supporting governments that served its interests in the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Libya, among other states.

In that light, what we’ve witnessed over the past 24 hours has every appearance not of a spontaneous mutiny but of an extremely well-planned attempt to manipulate President Vladimir Putin and even threaten his rule. Within a day, what looked like a pretty far-fetched stab in the dark evolved into a military incursion approaching the gates of Moscow. This has resulted, the latest developments suggest, in a deal with Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. If that agreement meets one of his central demands—the removal of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov—that would potentially give Prigozhin greater say over the Russian war effort.

What has become clear is how well plotted this operation was. Putin’s onetime caterer of choice, Prigozhin has emerged as one of the most ruthless operators in the Russian oligarchy—and this political move is perhaps his pièce de résistance.

What can we tell so far? Prigozhin’s preparations for this operation—at least as a contingency plan—must have been in the works for months. Military supplies, including armored vehicles and air-defense systems, had to be stockpiled and moved into place inside Russia itself. All of Prigozhin’s very public complaining about being deprived of supplies by the Russian military now appear to have involved an element of crocodile tears. Prigozhin and his supporters were not only able to send a significant military force into action last night, but they also had a logistical network to back it that was capable of moving hundreds of miles in a day. The Russian army now trying to resist Ukraine’s counteroffensive probing must be looking on in envy.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

The timing of the plot seems shrewdly chosen. The Ukrainian counteroffensive began in earnest almost three weeks ago, and the bulk of the Russian army—an estimated 80 to 90 percent of its strength—has been deployed to Ukraine. Much of that force has already seen combat, and a significant portion of its reserves are also now in the field. At the same time, the Ukrainians have gone to great lengths to degrade the Russian army’s logistical capacity in Ukraine.

The consequence of all this was that Putin could not easily draw upon those forces to hold Wagner off. He would have had to order Russian troops facing Ukrainian attacks to retreat—potentially weakening points in Russia’s defensive line. And even if he had ordered them back into Russia, that movement would have taken many days, and more likely weeks, to have a significant effect.

Even an efficient army faces real challenges taking troops out of action, shipping them to a new location, and redeploying them into action. And one thing we can say about the Russian army today is that it is not particularly efficient.

So Prigozhin’s timing seems optimal. Putin would have had to either try to get by with the relatively small number of troops left in Russia—whose loyalty and willingness to fight for him appear in question—or accept the risk and delay of ordering frontline troops to leave Ukraine. (The troop shortage Putin faces seems evident from the fact that the quickest force sent into action has consisted of troops under the orders of the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.)

If Prigozhin was careful in both his preparations and his timing, he also selected ideal locations for his operation. The first two large cities his forces appeared in, Rostov and Voronezh, are among the most important transportation hubs for the Russian army in Ukraine. These cities, with their large railway systems, have been used to stockpile military equipment. By seizing control of them, Prigozhin planted his boot on the windpipe of the Russian army.

[Anne Applebaum: Russia slides into civil war]

Whether the Wagner fighters felt that they could count on wider support remains a mystery, but striking, almost shocking, was the lack of organized military resistance to Wagner’s maneuvers—even as the group’s motorized military column advanced on Moscow itself. The operation seems to have faced just a handful of mostly ineffective attacks, but very little evidence of organized resistance on Putin’s behalf. According to some reports, Wagner shot down much of the aerial-attack force sent against it, including six Russian helicopters and one fixed-wing aircraft. This would equal Russia’s losses on some of the heaviest days fighting against Ukraine.

For now the question of whether Prigozhin will benefit from all of this planning remains. Reports have emerged that Putin has been forced to cut a deal with Prigozhin, brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, to call off the Wagner Group. The details are still emerging, but the plain fact that Putin was willing to settle after calling Prigozhin a criminal earlier in the day is telling. If he agrees to sacrifice Shoigu and Gerasimov, that will be even more significant—and a triumph for Prigozhin. But if, after the Wagner Group’s withdrawal, Shoigu and Gerasimov are still in place, all of Prigozhin’s planning might have been in vain. In that case, he will soon have to start making new plans—if he wants to stay alive.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive now under way is an operation that no advanced military would ever want to have to launch. Last year, Ukraine surprised many Western experts with its ability to defend against Russian invaders and even win back territory from them, exposing flaws in Russia’s strategy, logistics, and military leadership. But Russia has still managed to occupy a slice of Ukraine, and Ukraine is now trying to go on the offensive against a military that has spent months building entrenchments while maintaining considerable stocks of modern weaponry. Starting a counteroffensive under these conditions would be risky for the United States or another NATO power, and the Ukrainians lack the technological and training advantages that a NATO member’s military typically enjoys.

In some ways, what Ukraine is trying to do is unprecedented. When Anglo-American or Red Army forces advanced against the Nazis in World War II, and when Israel pushed its opponents back in the 1967 Six-Day War, the successful offensive side had command of the air. That is, it was able to use air power both to protect its own ground troops as they moved forward and to batter the enemy armies that they would soon encounter.

Ukraine does not have this luxury. The airspace over the battlefield throughout Ukraine is contested fiercely. The Russians have a larger air force, and their fixed-wing aircraft are technologically superior to Ukraine’s (even if the Russians do not always operate theirs as intelligently as the Ukrainians do). Russia can also use large numbers of drones, for both intelligence-gathering and direct action against Ukrainian forces. Russian helicopters, such as the Ka52s, have shown themselves capable of destroying Ukrainian armored vehicles.

A further challenge is that the Russians can also use ground-based systems against the Ukrainians. The Russians still deploy a large number of artillery and rocket-launching systems, have their own handheld anti-vehicle weapons, and have laid extensive minefields across terrain that Ukraine must cross. Indeed, if the two armies were evenly matched in terms of intelligence, motivation, training, and the ability to operate complex systems, the Ukrainians would have only a small chance of success.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

Yet although the counteroffensive is in its early days, the story so far suggests that Ukraine has the abilities to achieve more than current conditions might indicate—but also that success could take more time than people realize. No one should expect to see an immediate armored break through Russian lines. Pictures are circulating of disabled Ukrainian vehicles, including at least one German-designed Leopard 2 tank and a number of U.S.-built Bradley fighting vehicles.

These are some of the most modern armored vehicles in the Ukrainian arsenal. Yet they were disabled by a range of the different systems that Ukraine will face as it advances. In many areas, Russian minefields have constricted where the Ukrainians can operate, forcing them to bunch their forces together more than they would prefer and contributing to their losses at the start of the counteroffensive. In other areas, Russian artillery fire or attack helicopters have been responsible for blunting the Ukrainian assault.

Because the counteroffensive forces must contend with varied Russian defensive firepower from so many different areas, Ukrainian advances have been modest so far. The Ukrainians have been moving forward a few miles here and a few miles there. Since the withdrawal of Russian forces from around Kyiv in late March 2022 and the hardening of defensive lines, the only major breakthrough occurred in September 2022, when the Ukrainians liberated a large chunk of land near Kharkiv. In this counteroffensive, a force of Ukrainian vehicles rushed forward for many miles a day—but that was possible only because Russian forces in the area were very thin on the ground. Once the Ukrainians pushed their way through the Russian front, there was precious little to stop them.

Ukraine is unlikely to repeat that feat. Over the past six months, Russia has been on the offensive, albeit able to advance only at a glacial pace. From January to May, Russian forces around the city of Bakhmut managed to advance maybe five miles in total (while suffering major casualties that the U.S. estimates at about 100,000 over approximately the same timeframe). By this standard, the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is slowly pushing the Russians back in a number of locations, already appears more successful.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine pulled off a masterstroke]

However, Ukraine will want to achieve much more than it has so far, and to do that it will probably have to be content with modest advances as it undertakes the brutal work of weakening Russian forces enough to allow for greater forward movement later. Because they lack control of the air, and the Russians have strong defensive firepower, the Ukrainians have no choice but to wear down the enemy’s ground troops enough to compensate for Russia’s air advantage. President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged as much when, in an address this week, he stated that Ukrainians were “destroying” Russian forces in the south and east, a process that would go on for a while.

Instead of trying to rush forward, the Ukrainians have continued and in some ways amplified their efforts to hit Russian forces behind the lines. Recent Ukrainian probing attacks have been useful in prompting the Russians to move their own forces—which creates additional opportunities. Ukraine has been able to strike a number of large targets. Most important, perhaps, it has been able to start hitting Russian ammunition and supply depots that were out of range of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System equipment obtained from the West. Using British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles, the Ukrainians seem to have destroyed a large Russian supply hub at Rykove, just north of Crimea. They also reportedly wiped out a gathering of more than 100 Russian soldiers in Luhansk Oblast who were waiting to hear a rousing speech before being sent into combat.  

Fortunately for Ukraine, it retains the advantage in motivation, intelligence, and strategic high command. It is also receiving better and better weapons from the West. In time, these factors will become evident. But no one should expect immediate results. If the Ukrainians are going to achieve major gains from the counteroffensive, it will be by first destroying so many Russian forces that they can eventually advance. They are doing something audacious, risky, and time-consuming, and they won’t simply steamroller through.

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, Central Africa Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement on Friday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks,  mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Minister of Defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” On Friday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.  

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” Given the snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast food restaurant, formerly known as McDonalds), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

[Read: A crisis erupts in Russia]

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.  

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—there are no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, since so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it) you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler) of Bellingcat and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said that the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke to him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly eleven months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now Military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that the Defense Minister Shoigu come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation on Saturday morning. A telegram channel that is believed to represent  Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

[Read: Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire]

If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months—years, really—Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a façade made of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.

Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: they failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.

There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance on Saturday morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.  

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 private military company, 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 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, and then “justice for Russia.”

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 services have opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for instigating a coup and issued a warrant for his arrest, something they could only do 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 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 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. 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 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.

[Read: Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire]

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, but it’s unclear if that’s happened. (If Wagner’s troops gain control of Rostov, 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 the regular Russian military, the men who’ve been taking a beating in Ukraine, asking them to stand aside as he hunts down the defense minister.

While 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 iron-fisted 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 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 government crack-up. Russian nuclear control is likely divided among Putin, Shoigu, and Gerasimov, and none of them have 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, 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.

[Read: The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

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.