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.

Valery Gerasimov, Russia's top general, has not appeared in public or on state TV since the aborted mutiny. Absent from view too is Gen. Sergei ...