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There is no freude like schadenfreude. Friends and admirers of Ukraine and enemies of Russian despotism and brutality have been chuckling this week, even as they scratch their heads about the opéra bouffe that was the Prigozhin putsch. I learned of these events on my way back from Kyiv with some senior Polish foreign-policy experts and practitioners. We shared ingenious theories about what was unfolding, most of which had to be revised drastically the next time we got internet access. I have to confess that it was entertaining.

Many shrewd guesses about what happened are floating about, most of them contradictory: Prigozhin acted alone in a fit of pique about the Wagner Group losing its valuable contracts; Prigozhin acted under the sponsorship of “men in the shadows”; Prigozhin thought he had backers and got out ahead of himself; Prigozhin was staging a bit of theater at Putin’s behest (that one evaporated quickly). Who knows? What is important is what the drama of the weekend means for the war in Ukraine and for the security of Europe and the rest of the world.

Parsing shreds of evidence—The minister of defense is in the newspapers, which means his position is safe! Charges again Prigozhin are still pending!—can only get us so far. Focusing on the three logics that will drive the war long after we figure out what just happened is more productive.

The first and deepest logic remains Russian imperialism, which requires the subjugation of Ukraine not simply as a matter of national ambition, but as a matter of self-understanding. Vladimir Putin is a thug seeking power and wealth, but that does not mean that he and his cronies are insincere in their belief that Ukraine is, in fact, a subordinate element of Russia. The summer before the war, Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” an article pervaded with the falsehoods and myths that inspired his attack. Authors like Ivan Ilyin, the reactionary anti-Communist, laid the groundwork for even wilder Russian fantasies. (Timothy Snyder’s essay “Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism” provides a useful overview of his thought.)

But imperial fever and fascism only take one so far. The second logic of this war is the logic of any war, and for that we must turn to Carl von Clausewitz, whose depiction of the intangible elements of war—the connection between politics and strategy, the nature and effect of clashing wills, the culmination of offensives in exhaustion, the intrinsic power of the defense—has never been bettered. In many respects, the war in Ukraine is a war like any other, in which tactical competence, training and morale, operational-level design, and above all logistics play key roles in shaping results  on the battlefields of southern and eastern Ukraine.

The third logic, which is now dominant, is that of mafia politics. And here the best guide is unquestionably Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Indeed, one can imagine Putin pondering the scene in which the aging Don Corleone warns his son and successor, Michael, that one of his trusted lieutenants will offer to broker a peace deal, in order to betray him: "Now listen, whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor. Don't forget that." Is President Lukashenko of Belarus, who negotiated the stand-down with Prigozhin, still Putin’s loyal subordinate? What about anyone who recommended that the Russian president take the deal that let Prigozhin go free? Why are some in Russia suggesting replacing faithful if dull military leaders like Valery Gerasimov with people like Sergey Surovikin who were once close to Prigozhin?

One of the common phrases in The Godfather is “It’s not personal, its business”—a sentiment usually expressed just before another gangster gets rubbed out. Of course, it’s all personal, and that is the point. What is now going on in the Kremlin is a murky and potentially lethal game of guessing who the traitors are, eliminating them before they eliminate you, forming unlikely and unpredicted alliances, and plotting to get in the first blow before your car explodes with you in it, or you take a tumble from a tenth-story window or down a cocktail laced with Novichok.

Putin is probably as uncertain as the rest of us about what just happened, but he has to be fearful, furious, and vengeful. He has to decide whether to get rid of his mediocre defense minister and chief of the general staff to appease the men in the shadows, or whether that would weaken him further. He has to be looking for the traitors in the military, the FSB, and other security services who seemed unable or unwilling to stop Wagner’s march on Moscow. Because he looks weak, he will be desperate to look strong, while others, perhaps tired of this war, will seek to weaken him further. Or maybe they’ll just kill him. Or maybe Putin is no longer really in charge, and there is already an opaque struggle among the men in the shadows to succeed him, because mafias are run by dons, not committees.

For the moment, the mafia logic dominates all others. If forced to choose between survival and either ideology or sound strategy, Putin and the rest of the political and military leadership will unquestionably choose the former. Prigozhin had the nerve to throw a gut punch at the ideas behind the war—even if, perhaps, he did his erstwhile boss a bit of a disservice in saying that the invasion of Ukraine was about loot and nothing else. But now that he has broached the forbidden subject, there will be others, in private and maybe in public, who will take up the refrain.

The impact on the battlefield will be the most interesting. A bloody and extensive Russian civil war would have been good for Ukraine, diverting troops as well as attention from the front lines opposite them. But the pervasiveness of mafia logic will still do Ukraine considerable good. Senior generals in the Russian military cannot be apolitical professionals: They have patrons, and they have clients. They know that there will be witch hunts for traitors, particularly in the special-forces units that did not fight Wagner. Defending against the mounting Ukrainian offensive will be considerably more difficult for officers looking over their shoulders at Moscow. And Putin may still see a need to shift units to the country’s center to forestall another putsch.

Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.

It may not be ever thus. The Russian superhawks who want a still more violent war remain in the grip of the first, fascistic logic—and they may resurface after a time. The second logic will still hold as well: Breaching in-depth defenses will remain a difficult and bloody business for Ukraine, and political chaos in Moscow will not deliver 155-mm rounds, HIMARS, or deep-strike munitions to General Zaluzhny’s men and women in their dugouts and bunkers.

The Prigozhin putsch will reverberate for some time to come; it has already shattered illusions about Putin’s grip and even his physical courage. But it should also shatter the illusion that the West can forge a kind of Goldilocks solution to this war, in which Ukraine does well but not too well while Russia is humbled but not shattered. We are spectators to a play in which the actors have decided to rip up their scripts, and are instead improvising an anarchic tragedy, but one that is not without its comic moments.

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