Fears that that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant could be damaged by occupying Russian forces have prompted Ukraine to run radiation fallout drills. The power station is Europe's largest nuclear plant.

The BBC called more than a dozen Russian recruitment centres and was told it's business as usual.

When we write history, it tends to be tidy and led by great men. In real time, it’s messy but still astonishing. Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads a private army called the Wagner Group, attempted what many have called a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Technically, it failed. He landed in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, pledged to march to Moscow, and then turned around. Nothing about this series of events suggests expert planning or high competence. Prigozhin is a former prisoner and a former hotdog salesman. Staff writer Tom Nichols puts him in a league with “gangsters” and “clowns.”

But sometimes gangsters and clowns are the ones who shake up the established order. Prigozhin’s march lasted barely 48 hours, yet it seems to have changed the conversation about Russia. Putin appears shaken and, as staff writer Anne Applebaum put it, “panicky.” His response to such a direct threat has been surprisingly tentative. The mutiny may have technically failed, but it left some revolutionary thoughts in people’s minds. Putin is not, in fact, invulnerable. Which means Russians might have a choice.

In this episode, Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols explain this week’s wild turn of events in Russia and the door those events opened.

“We’ve lived with Putin for 23 years. We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever, and that he reigned supreme,” Nichols says about this remarkable moment. “That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?”

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the weekend, something wild happened in Russia. A man named Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to start a rebellion. His private army, the Wagner Group, fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. But this weekend they turned their guns against Russia itself. They took over a major southern city called Rostov-on-Don and then pledged to march on Moscow, making it hundreds of miles before turning around.

Was this a mutiny? Was it a failed coup? People are debating Prigozhin’s motives and whether he thought he had internal support. Zooming out, though, what it means is that one man—a guy who was in prison, then became a hotdog salesman, and then rose up to become a loyal protégé of President Vladimir Putin—turned on Putin, humiliated him, and somehow survived. We’ve been told that Prigozhin is now in Belarus. Anyway, the news is moving quickly and there’s been lots of speculation. Two people I trust to ground us are Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols.

So Tom, the past week’s events in Russia have been called a coup and a mutiny; however, you refer to it as a falling-0out among gangsters. What did you mean by that?

Tom Nichols: Well, the problem is that the Russian state is a conglomeration of power players who are much like the five families—you know, in the old Godfather movie—these are mobsters, and Putin is the gangster in chief. But he has capos under him. And there was some issue there about territory and control with Prigozhin and his forces, who were going to be pulled in under another one of Putin’s cronies, the minister of defense.

And, um, things got outta control.

Rosin: So how does Prigozhin fit into that picture? Sort of where is he in the gangster taxonomy?

Nichols: Well, he’s got his own crew. He’s a powerful captain. He’s got his own army. He has, you know, 25,000 well-armed, battle-hardened men who answer to him. And another capo was threatening to take that away from him, and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

Rosin: So you see it less as a geopolitical battle than just an internal fight for power between two people?

Nichols: People have multiple motivations for doing things. I think a lot of what Prigozhin tapped into is real. People are, both in the military and back home, fed up with the way that the guys in Moscow have run this war and taken immense casualties and pretty much gotten nowhere. I mean, that’s a real thing.

It’s a real problem, but it’s also in part a struggle for power among these players. So there are multiple things going on here and, and not all of them, I think, are clear to us over here right now.

Rosin: Right. So Anne, looking towards the real motives that Tom brought up, Prigozhin has for a long time been openly criticizing the war in Ukraine and the motives for the war in Ukraine. What types of things has he been saying, and why do you think they struck a chord?

Anne Applebaum: For the last several weeks and months, really, Prigozhin has been blaming the leaders of the army, the leaders of the military, for failing to provide leadership, failing to provide equipment. I mean, he’s focused in particular on the minister of defense, [Sergei] Shoigu and the army chief of the general staff.

And he talks about them using very insulting language. He talks about Shoigu, you know, living a luxury life. And [Valery] Gerasimov being a paranoid, crazy person who shouts at people. These are very personal anecdotal descriptions of them. Um, which may well ring a bell among people around them as something that’s true.

More recently, and right before his strange ride to Moscow, he came out with a much more substantive critique. In other words, he began talking about the causes of the war itself. He said, well, the war was—the only reason we’re fighting this war is because Shoigu wants to advance. He wants to be a marshal. You know, he wants a better rank.

And because lots of people in Moscow were making money off of the 2014 occupations of Ukraine territories in the east that they gained at that time, and they want more. They got greedy and wanted more.

In other words, it’s not a war for empire. It’s not about the glory of Russia. It’s not about NATO. It’s not about any of the things that Putin has said. It’s just about greedy people wanting more. The appeal of this narrative is that it’s very comfortable for Russians to hear that there’s a reason why they’re failing. You know that there are specific people to blame.

Rosin: And you mean failing in the war in Ukraine?

Applebaum: I mean failing in the war in Ukraine in that they were supposed to conquer the country in three days and that didn’t happen. There’s been massive casualties [and] losses of equipment. It may also have an echo among people who want someone to blame for general misery. The economy hasn’t been going well for a while. People can see corruption all around them. It’s not like it’s a big secret. And pinning it on specific people saying these guys are responsible for failure might be something that a lot of Russians want to hear.

Rosin: Yeah. I can see as you guys are talking how it can be both a gangster war and something that is sincere and taps into a true vein of discontent. Like, it can be both of those things at the same time. Now, this question is for either of you: We are getting news trickling out this week about the possibility that Prigozhin had some kind of support in the Russian military. If that’s true, and I know that’s a big if, what does that change about how we should understand the situation?

Applebaum: So I assumed he had some kind of support in the military, both because of the way he behaved in Rostov-on-Don, where he seemed chummy with the generals at the head of the Southern Military District and where his soldiers were tolerated and almost welcomed in the city. He couldn’t have done that and he couldn’t have kept going without somebody being on his side. And it seems like he expected more, or he thought there would be more support, so that doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, the precise names of who it was and what their motives were, I don’t think we really know that yet, although there have been concrete names mentioned in the press. But he clearly expected something more to happen.

Nichols: Yeah, I agree with Anne. I don’t think you march on Rostov-on-Don and then turn north toward Moscow and think that you’re on your own. There may have been some specific people that he had spoken to, but I think there was also a larger expectation—because remember, Prigozhin’s a pretty arrogant guy, and there is a lot of discontent in the Russian military—that he was just expecting that there would be units that he would just pick up along the way or that around Moscow would get word of this and say: We’re on your side.

And I’ve been curious about Putin’s tentativeness, his procrastination and all this, and I wonder, given these reports, whether he had concerns himself about which units—if he ordered an attack or if he wanted to do something more demonstrative—which units would actually obey his orders or which units would actually stay with him or join the mutiny if they were forced to make a choice. But again, we can’t know that for sure. But it certainly makes a lot of sense that Prigozhin wasn’t going to do this without having spoken to somebody in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don.

Rosin: Right. So the reason this continues to be a live issue is because it matters who supported him. It matters because it speaks to the degree of insecurity on Putin’s side, and it speaks to sort of how strong the discontent is.

Nichols: It matters because it says that the Russian government and the Russian high command have serious stresses and cracks that are now obvious that had been either smaller early on and hidden, or that had somehow been papered over. But the idea that somehow Putin is completely in charge and invulnerable to challenges—that’s gone.

Rosin: Yeah, and that’s important. Now, Anne, if Prigozhin, as you say, was aiming for something bigger and it didn’t quite work out or technically failed, as we talk about it we still have to grapple with what happened on the other side, which is that he arrived in a Russian city and the citizens kind of shrugged. What did that tell you?

Applebaum: So I thought that was quite significant. We’ve all read many times these somber analyses of so-called polling data from Russia saying that people support Putin. What this showed was that the citizens of Rostov-on-Don weren’t particularly bothered that a brutal warlord showed up in the city, said he wanted to change some things and get them done.

Maybe he was going to go and take Putin’s people down. Maybe he was going to go and take Putin himself down. And they applauded him and they were taking selfies with him. And they started chanting when the Wagner Group was pulling out of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday evening—they were chanting, “Wagner, Wagner” in the streets.

That shows that the support for Putin is pretty weak. It’s passive. He’s the guy there and we don’t see any alternatives, but the instant an alternative emerges, well, you know, that might be interesting. I mean, Prigozhin is not exactly an attractive figure, but maybe from their point of view, he’s more honest; he seems more effective.

And as I said in the beginning, he’s offering them an explanation that’s psychologically comfortable. Why is this war going so badly? Why haven’t we won? Why is everything so corrupt? Why is the army so dysfunctional? Why are so many people dying?

Okay, well he just gave us a reason. The reason is because there are these corrupt generals in charge and they’re doing a bad job. And that’s something that people would like to hear. They want an explanation for this strange war that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and is only causing damage.

Rosin: Now, Tom, in the aftermath of all of this, Putin has given a statement talking about treason, not naming Prigozhin explicitly. And given what Anne just said, and what you just said about how strong a challenge this actually is, what is this hesitation about? I mean, this whole incident could have ended with Prigozhin dead, but instead he’s in Belarus, or we think he’s in Belarus. And he’s alive, or we think he’s alive.

Nichols: I think both of them are feeling about to figure out who their allies are and they’re both making appeals to society that are meant to isolate. In Putin’s case, he’s just isolating Prigozhin without naming him, saying: Hey, all you heavily armed crack commando mercenary guys, I understand that you were led astray. And it’s okay to come home.

So when he talks about traitors, I mean, this isn’t Stalinism. He’s not saying, Oh, that whole unit, they’re all dead. He’s trying to plant internal divisions there. As is Prigozhin, who has been really careful to say, Look, I’m not trying to overthrow the president. I’m not trying to overthrow the government. But these two guys at the top, Shoigu and Gerasimov, the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff, they gotta go. And if I have to march to Moscow to get them out, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So they’re both being very careful not to proliferate more enemies in society or among the other elites than they need to. Now, for Prigozhin, that makes sense. For Putin, that’s very revealing. I mean, he’s the president of the country and here he is, kind of tiptoeing around, trying not to aggravate thousands of armed men who were part of a mutiny. So while they’re both doing the same thing, I think it’s really revealing that one of them happens to be the president of the country.

Rosin: Yeah, and as much as I understand the iconography of Putin is important—who’s weak, who’s strong—as a unit of analysis. Strong man, shirtless on a horse, does not necessarily wanna lose out to a hotdog-salesman ex-prisoner.

Nichols: Right. He actually appeared in public the first two times—he looked awful; I mean, it looked like a bunker video—where he is standing in front of a desk and he’s kind of raging to the camera. He finally came out again with all of the pomp and all the trappings of his office, coming down the big staircase and the honor guard snapping to attention.

And addressing the troops, the officers, he said something really interesting. He said: You prevented a civil war. Which is not true. Nobody actually did that. It’s certainly not true that the army put down a civil war in the offing. Nothing like that happened, and to make that appeal is to try to pull the military closer to the president, to say: You’re my heroes. I know you saved the country and you will keep saving the country. Which to me was a really striking thing to do. Again, as you and everybody’s been pointing out, Prigozhin is still—at least we think—still alive and running around issuing statements.

Rosin: So what comes next? After the break, we speculate. But with restraint.

[BREAK]

Rosin: Now, because both of you have studied the situation so closely, my natural temptation is to lob a lot of future-prediction questions at you. Like, what does this mean for Ukraine and what does the weakened Putin mean for a global order? Is it just too hard to speculate?

Applebaum: I feel there are so many missing pieces of this story and so many oddities about it that don’t add up. I would need to know more before I would be confident about telling you that, you know, at 7 o’clock on September the first, X or Y will happen next. Almost everything we know about this story, I mean, it’s like the shadows on Plato’s Cave, you know? We’re seeing the reflections of activities. There are these Russian military bloggers who you have to follow in order to understand any of this. And of course, they’re telling the story from their point of view.

State television is telling it from Putin’s propaganda point of view. It’s not as if we have a reliable source of information who will lay it out for us and give us the facts. Even the story as we’re speaking. I mean, this may even change before this podcast comes out, but as we’re speaking, we’ve been told by several very unreliable people that Prigozhin is in Belarus,—by the Russian spokesman and by the Belarussian.

And, you know, those people have lied so many times that until I see a photograph of Prigozhin, I don’t believe it. He’s gotta have a photograph of him in Minsk and I need to know that it’s not Photoshopped. And then I’m sure it’s true. So that’s why I think it’s very hard to—you don’t wanna make too many sweeping conclusions yet.

I mean, we know what we saw on Saturday. And what we saw on Saturday was a mutiny, and it did demonstrate far more weakness in the state and unpreparedness than anybody was certain was there. We know that Putin was the first to start using the language of civil war. He did it on Saturday morning, and so that indicates that he at least thinks something very serious was happening.

Which is an indication, again, that there may be more to the story to come, but making clear predictions about what will happen, certainly to the war in Ukraine—I mean, I’m not sure yet that it has affected the war in Ukraine. Maybe it will affect Russian troop morale. Maybe it lets us know that there will be more trouble with the military command.

But it hasn’t had a specific effect on the ground yet that we can see. And until that happens, I’m just reluctant to make too many predictions.

Nichols: Yeah, I think when it comes to the war in Ukraine, too many people have had this idea that all the Russian forces are going to stop and say, No, wait. We’re not going to fight until we get this sorted out. Um, they’re still fighting. The situation at the front is the situation at the front, and that doesn’t really change because of this.

So what Ukraine has to do, and the support we need to give them—that doesn’t change … the reluctance to prognosticate. Well, you know, there were a lot of people who said the Soviet Union couldn’t fall. People that study Russia have figured out that you can get burned on these predictions, in part because when you’re predicting stuff, you tend to be predicting the behavior of institutions writ large because you know how they operate. This is all contingent on individuals, and trying to predict the behavior of these kind of Mafia-like characters is really difficult to do, because that could all change in a moment when they decide to shift alliances or one of them runs afoul of another of them.

So I’m with Anne here. I don’t want to get too detailed about what’s going to happen next week … This definitely wounded Putin and he is in a different situation than he was.

I don’t think there’s any going back to sort of pre-June in Russian politics right now.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean that’s important enough. As you were talking, Tom, I was thinking if you write the histories of a lot of mutinies and coups, they do start with an action by someone who seems like a gangster and seems to be behaving in a ridiculous way. Like, coups can start in ridiculous ways.

Applebaum: It is also true that coups and mutinies that don’t succeed can have an impact on politics too. And there’s some famous examples from Russian history: There’s a revolution that doesn’t succeed in 1905, but it had a profound impact on the state. It forced the czar, Nicholas, to pass a constitution and create a Duma—a Parliament.

It very much changed the way that he was perceived. And then in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were also a number of strikes and moments, you know, and other, different kinds of events that happened. And some of them were unsuccessful. The Bolsheviks had a march that was unsuccessful, but ultimately there was a revolution.

They did take power. And those earlier events, you know, looked retrospectively more important than they may have seemed at the time. And it’s too early to say whether that’s what this is. But it’s clearly the case though that a failed event can have political consequences even beyond those of the immediate moment.

Nichols: Right. The 1991 coup was a complete clown show, and it failed. The guy that was actually was supposed to step in as president and replace Gorbachev was, like, drunk all the time, and the whole thing was just a complete mess. But it had a profound impact on the final days of the Soviet Union and on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Most mutinies and coups don’t succeed, but as Anne pointed out, they can have an immense impact just because they happened at all.

Rosin: Now all I wanna do is ask you guys to speculate, because now it’s very interesting. Now I’m thinking: Okay, so which directions does it go? You know, Is there a future for Prigozhin? Is he making a play to replace Putin one day? Are there other Prigozhins out there? I mean, are any of those answerable questions?

Applebaum: I think you can talk about options. Again, you can look at the past. It seems to me, in the case of Putin, one possibility is: Now that there’s been a challenge that didn’t succeed but that revealed weakness, will there be more challenges? And so you might say, Well, that’s clearly now an option in a way that it wasn’t before last week.

You could also guess that Putin might now try another crackdown. What do leaders do who have been weakened? Leaders like him. Dictators. Well, one of the things they do is they lash out and they try and reestablish their preeminence or their dominance. And they do that by arresting people or purging people. I don’t know what that would be in the case of modern Russia. Cutting off the internet? Or shutting the borders? I mean, you can sort of imagine scenarios, because he will now need to make up for the fact that he’s seen to be weaker. And I’m not saying either one of those will happen, but those are things that, based on how these things have played out in other times in other places, you can guess at.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, as you look at this, I’m trying to put myself in your head. You’re sort of looking at the dictator’s playbook, watching how he rewrites the story of what just happened in real time and trying to see what other dictators would do or have done in the past. Is that how you track these events?

Applebaum: Yes. And I’m also thinking of Russian history. In the history of the Soviet Communist Party, every time there was a failure or a disaster, they would try to re-up the ideology and sort of restart the project and crack down. It goes in waves, all the way from 1917 up to 1991. And you can imagine a similar pattern working itself out here, yes.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I feel like I’m going back to the toolbox of the old-school Sovietology that I learned back in the 1980s. And so, rather than prognosticate, I’ll just say the things I’m looking for. I’m literally now looking at videos of who’s sitting next to whom at these meetings. Who’s still in. Who might be out.

I’m looking for personnel changes. Does the minister of defense survive? Does the chief of the general staff get replaced? This now becomes kind of a game of trying to follow all of these people and their portfolios as some kind of indicator of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Rosin: Tom, what’s the larger through line you’re tracking? You’re tracking the chess pieces—who’s going here and who’s falling off the board—but what’s the bigger story?

Nichols: I think it’s going to be: Is Putin trying to shore up his power base or is there an alternative base forming against him? I think that’s the thing to watch. You know, we’ve lived with Putin for 23 years seeming to be [invincible], except for when he first arrived in power and when he had a serious challenge around 2011.

We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever. And that he reigns supreme. That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?

Because until now he has made sure that there were no alternatives to him. And I think what Prigozhin did was to say, well, there could be at least some alternative. Maybe not good ones. But you can in fact oppose this guy and criticize his team and get away with it.

Rosin: Yeah. Basically, Russians, you might have a choice. That’s as much as we can say.

Nichols: Not a great choice, but a choice somewhere.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, this may be a strange way to put it, but is there a sense that this incident exposes how alone, or kind of lost in his own head, Putin is? He conceived of the war in isolation. The military was never necessarily enthusiastic. Now we have a vision of him not exactly sure who his allies are and who’s on his team, and I just got this vision of: dictator alone.

Applebaum: So we’ve had intimations of that for a couple of years now. In fact, Prigozhin himself has hinted that Putin doesn’t really know what’s going on [and] they’re lying to him. And many others have said that too. So we’ve already had this idea that he doesn’t really know what’s going on on the battlefield. And this incident did make it seem like he also didn’t really know what was going on at home.

I mean, for someone who’s now saying they had foreknowledge of this, he didn’t react like somebody who was confident of the outcome. The speech he gave on Saturday morning was panicky. It was about the civil war in 1917 and “our nation is at stake.”

He didn’t give off the impression of someone who was staying in charge. And so there very much is the impression that he somehow lives in this by himself, surrounded by security guards in some bunker. And that feels more and more like an accurate description of his life.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, I guess a lot more to come this week. This year. For a while. But thank you both for helping us understand what just happened.

Applebaum: Thanks.

Nichols: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Engineering is by Rob Smerciak. Fact-checking by Yvonne Kim. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, A. C. Valdez, and Vann Newkirk. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Speculation grows after a top Russian general disappears from public view following the Russian mercenary mutiny.

France and Germany are leading two different approaches to defending Europe's skies from Russian missiles with both livelihoods and lives at stake.

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.

Yevgeny Prigozhin had his reasons for launching a mutiny over the weekend. Russia’s military leadership—including Generals Valery Gerasimov and Sergei Shoigu—had made a bid to subordinate Prigozhin’s mercenary army to their command. The extremely hierarchical, martinet culture of the regular army surely clashed with the efficiency-oriented, entrepreneurial culture of the Wagner paramilitary group, whose motto was “Death is our business, and the business is going well.” But Prigozhin’s message, which he delivered in a 30-minute speech on Friday, was not just about his personal grievances, or even just about the prosecution of the war. It was also political, and full of contradictions.

The mercenary leader accused the military leadership of poor planning, which had led to the betrayal and sacrifice of Russian soldiers, and at the same time, he challenged the very rationale behind the war in Ukraine. He called for a more organized—and more brutal—fight, but also claimed that the entire conflict was the result of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hubris, because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had been open to negotiations at the start. He assumed a threatening posture toward Ukraine, but spoke respectfully of that country’s military and political leadership. At one point, Prigozhin called the Russian leadership “mentally sick scumbags and wankers” for deciding to “throw yet another several thousand Russian guys into the meat grinder to croak like dogs.” Then, shockingly, he added, “But that can be a legitimate option too. Sometimes, it is reasonable to act like that.”

For all the inconsistencies, Prigozhin’s speech carried an overarching message that was entirely clear: Putin fails to execute his own plans. His system is so inefficient that it cannot win the war it started, and it failed to achieve its goals through diplomacy as well. No matter what the aims are, they should be carried out.

Anne Applebaum: Putin is caught in his own trap

Prigozhin’s statements can seem chaotic, but they are not improvisations. Rather, the mercenary warlord commands a team of spin doctors and speechwriters that has been running political campaigns in Russia for years. His appeals to various discontented constituencies, from military hawks to anti-war pragmatists, are based on a careful analysis of the tendencies and moods in Russian society. And that analysis yields a singular conclusion: More and more Russians feel that the country has reached a dead end.

In Ukraine, no visible path leads to a Russian victory. Putin keeps inventing stories about how Russia will inevitably prevail: First, it was supposed to win easily by removing the government in Kyiv, then by seizing the Donbas, then by destroying Ukraine’s crucial infrastructure, then by freezing Europeans last winter, then by waiting until the West grew tired of supplying Ukraine with weapons. Many in Russia were once willing to believe Putin’s fairy tales, but few can now pretend to believe a good end is in sight. Rather, a defeat is looming, and even though the word is virtually prohibited for public use, it comes up more and more often in private conversations. In his public appearance during the mutiny, Putin finally hinted at the real possibility of a defeat, openly invoking the “dagger in the back” metaphor that was used to fuel resentment in Germany after it lost in World War I.

Many Russian elites have anticipated the Ukrainian counteroffensive with great anxiety, as it would put to the test their apprehension of a looming rout. Putin was aware of those stakes, which was why, when the counteroffensive turned out to be underwhelming in its initial stages, he rushed to call it a failure. Prigozhin is speaking to the same frightened elites when he publicly overestimates Ukrainian gains and paints a bleak picture for Russia.

Remarkably, when Prigozhin launched his mutiny, he faced little resistance from the elites, who remained mostly silent for almost a full day. After Putin addressed the public, a flurry of supporting statements from officials followed in a matter of minutes, seemingly more an orchestrated performance than an expression of genuine sentiment. The officials did not follow their statements with actions, and Prigozhin’s convoy proceeded toward Russia’s capital without meeting much resistance from the the military, either.

Elliot Ackerman: Prigozhin’s loss is Ukraine’s gain

What about the Russian people? Maybe the elites and even some of the military brass were sitting on the fence, but opinion polls have long confidently indicated that ordinary Russians stand firmly behind their president. Last Saturday, however, the majority of Russians apparently chose to disengage from the unfolding drama. In most parts of the country, life continued as usual, with students attending their graduation ceremonies, seemingly indifferent to “some sort of war somewhere in Moscow,” as one graduate in St. Petersburg put it to a Russian journalist.

In the cities directly affected by the mutiny, the attitude was hardly different. People carelessly walked past the military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don occupied by the Wagner troops, even after a blast happened there, fortunately killing no one. Among those who did show interest were some passersby who showed enthusiasm for the Wagner troops’ arrival in the film clips that circulated on social media. Except for one minor scuffle on the streets of Rostov-on-Don, there were no reports of people rushing out to save the president, or stop the mutineers, or even to let them know they were unwelcome.

In Moscow, where I was that Saturday afternoon, the city streets were eerily empty, even though no curfew or evacuation had been declared. On a public bus, I overheard conversations that mentioned the mutiny, but not with strong emotion. Muscovites seemed calm, as if such a thing had long been bound to happen and would be greeted with indifference.

I had lunch with a military expert that day. He told me that three divisions were in principle tasked with defending Moscow, but he was far from certain that they would obey the orders. Short of that, he reckoned that the Wagner troops would meet no resistance on their way to the capital. A bridge across the Ob River had evidently been prepared for destruction if a natural barrier was needed, and a few military vehicles patrolled the city. But Moscow did not look at all likely to withstand an assault.

Was Putin deliberately refraining from taking military action? Not exactly: The Russian air force consistently (and unsuccessfully) attacked the Wagner convoy, which shot down several helicopters and planes, killing their pilots. There seemed to be neither an order to stand by, nor one to intervene, nor any order at all. The government fled to the north, while many rich people headed south, to Turkey or Dubai.

Read: The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble

Prigozhin’s aborted march on Moscow made clear that Putin was no longer the arbiter of a conflict among warlords: He was himself part of the conflict, which was why not he but Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, served as its mediator. And although the two forces at odds on Saturday could hardly be classified as supporters versus opponents of the war in Ukraine, the deeper import of their standoff is the unspoken acknowledgment that the invasion, and with it Russia, has reached a dead end. Nobody has a working plan, all responsibility is delegated, and the president keeps doing what is clearly not working, while his power gradually erodes. Russia is reckoning with the fact that it cannot continue like this.

Today this recognition enters Russia through the loathsome figure of Yevgeny Prigozhin. But the Wagner group leader’s  uncanny crusade is probably a sign of things to come. Russia needs a way out of the impasse, and Putin is unlikely to offer one. Even getting rid of Prigozhin will not change this basic fact. His march may be the last call to start the search for a way out.

The factions close to the Russian president are thinking about life after him

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Wednesday Russian President Vladimir Putin had been "weakened" by the Wagner mercenary group's mutiny, but that the ultimate consequences of the rebellion remained unclear.

Ukraine's President Zelenskyy says man who 'spotted' for Russian forces attack on restaurant charged with treason.