Russia’s disastrous war against neighboring Ukraine has exposed the hollowness of President Vladimir Putin’s carefully cultivated military and intelligence machine to the outside world and to people in Russia, including Putin’s generals, ministers, and oligarchs. In a system with alternative centers of power, such an incompetent ruler might have been toppled by now. Yet after 16 painful months of national humiliation, Putin is still in charge, and his regime has even fewer checks on it than before the invasion. The secrets of his success are the atomization of the Russian population and the elite through repression, and adaptation to the challenges the regime faces. Nothing indicates that the Kremlin’s reaction to the armed mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the notorious Wagner mercenary-army boss, will be any different. Ample evidence suggests that Putin will be able to muddle through as usual.

Like the invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin’s mutiny is a disaster that Putin inflicted on himself. Created as a tool for doing the Kremlin’s dirty work while it could maintain plausible deniability, Wagner played a key role when Russia fueled tensions in Ukraine’s Donbas region and launched an undeclared war on the country in 2014, then in Syria, aiding Moscow’s efforts to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and later in various conflict zones in Africa. Putin himself said Tuesday that the “private” military group was funded entirely by the Russian government; the salaries alone, the president contended, had cost the state budget $1 billion a year. Yet Wagner maintained a high degree of autonomy—which, from Putin’s point of view, turned out to be a profound flaw.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin is caught in his own trap]

Along the way, Prigozhin—an entrepreneur from Putin’s native St. Petersburg who served a prison term for robbery in his youth—found lucrative commercial opportunities such as gold mines in Africa and oil fields in Syria, enriching himself and helping to line the pockets of his patrons.

Prigozhin’s appetite for influence in the Russian system started to grow exponentially in the first few months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, when Wagner’s fighters—with their rich combat experience, including in urban warfare—proved to be indispensable. He started to challenge the official military leadership through foul-mouthed public rants, amplified by paid bloggers and media personalities.

For a long time, Putin ignored Prigozhin’s insubordination, as though he were using the Wagner boss as a counterweight to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. This emboldened Prigozhin even further. When Shoigu finally convinced Putin in May that Wagner should be brought to heel and its fighters obliged to sign contracts directly with the Defense Ministry, Prigozhin revolted and attempted to force Putin to fire his rivals.

Prigozhin’s ability to seize the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don—home to more than 1.1 million people and the main military command center for Russia’s operations in Ukraine—and then take his fighters to within 200 kilometers of Moscow without resistance from any part of the security apparatus evidently surprised both the regime and the military top brass. But once Putin made clear that he would not meet Prigozhin’s core demand of removing Shoigu and Gerasimov, the mutiny turned out to be pointless. Wagner didn’t have enough troops to seize the well-protected capital, and a face-saving solution was found with the mediation of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko.

The whole sorry spectacle was a major embarrassment for Putin. The domestic security machine on which the Kremlin has spent billions of dollars has shown itself to be hollow. It is well designed to intimidate unarmed protesters and to jail critics of the Ukraine war, but it cannot prevent a large group of armed men—who are by definition criminals, because Russian law prohibits private military companies—from marching on the capital and shooting down military aircraft.

Yet even in Putin’s humiliation, no figures from within the regime and no military units joined the mutiny. The generals Sergei Surovikin and Vladimir Alekseyev, who have worked extensively with Wagner in Ukraine, recorded speeches denouncing Prigozhin’s uprising. After Putin accused those taking part in the mutiny of “treason” in his televised national address, most senior officials and regional governors pledged their loyalty to the president. No public figures have spoken out in favor of Prigozhin’s gambit, which left the Wagner boss with the suicidal option of marching into the capital and trying to keep Rostov, or accepting the Kremlin’s offer of exile in Belarus.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The three logics of the Prigozhin putsch]

The steps the Kremlin is taking in reaction to the mutiny may fortify the regime’s foundations. The Kremlin is already dismembering Prigozhin’s fiefdom. The FSB, the domestic-security service and the main successor to the KGB, immediately went after Wagner’s money, confiscating stockpiles of cash that Prigozhin was using to pay his fighters’ salaries. FSB operatives also started to intimidate the families of Wagner fighters, forcing relatives to call their sons, husbands, and fathers and dissuade them from following Prigozhin.

This combination of pressure tactics should allow the government to dismantle Wagner and fold most of it into the Russian army, just as Shoigu and Gerasimov had planned. The state can then continue to use Wagner fighters against Ukraine. Furthermore, the state is allowing the army to emulate Prigozhin by trawling the country’s jails for new recruits. At this point, keeping Wagner as a separate entity has more disadvantages than advantages for the state, which no longer needs a mercenary force to provide plausible deniability for Kremlin-directed acts of violence outside Russia’s borders. After invading Ukraine in February 2022, Russia is already the most sanctioned country in the world.

In taking down Wagner, Putin will have removed one of the most potent threats to his rule: an amalgam of battle-hardened professional soldiers and poorly trained criminals who were not fully integrated into the official power structure. (That separation helps explain why the U.S. intelligence community ironically appears to have known more about Wagner’s preparations to mutiny than Russian military counterintelligence did.)

Furthermore, conspiracy among Putin’s top lieutenants remains unlikely, because all of them were handpicked by Putin and owe their careers to him, distrust one another, and are implicated in a criminal war against Ukraine. If anything, the president is likely to respond to the mutiny with more repression against the elite and the further injection of resources into the FSB and the National Guard, a parallel internal military force run by his former bodyguard Viktor Zolotov.

The extent of the regime’s decay is staggering. But what keeps Putin’s system going is a combination of public apathy, inertia, fear, and, of course, petrodollars. As long as these elements are in place and the Russian president is still active and healthy, no one should be staking their hopes on a magical fix for the world’s problem with Putin.