Her family says they are shocked and saddened at the incident in Thailand's Don Mueang airport.

Ever since he led his party to a surprise first-place finish in Thailand’s election last month, he’s faced a flurry of legal complaints and controversies ...

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“A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote yesterday. Today’s newsletter will walk you through our writers’ most urgent and clarifying analysis on the whirlwind events of the past weekend.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first MAGA Democrat Dear Therapist: I’ve been dumped by my friends. The battle for I-95

A Permanent Scar

This past Saturday morning, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense. After advancing hundreds of miles toward the capital, Prigozhin announced that a deal had been struck and that his forces were turning back around.

As Atlantic writers reminded us throughout the weekend, Prigozhin’s brief coup was and remains a fast-moving story, and following it requires disentangling complex webs of disinformation. Below is some of our writers’ most useful analysis to help you put Russia’s crisis in context.

The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble.

“We can at this point only speculate about why Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly,” Tom wrote on Saturday, but “this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin.” Tom explains:

The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game.

As for Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader “drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. But Putin may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation,” Tom writes.

The Russian president is caught in his own trap.

Our staff writer Anne Applebaum suggests paying attention to the reactions of the Russian people. When the Wagner Group mercenaries arrived in the city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday morning and declared themselves the new rulers, “they met no resistance,” Anne reported. “One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.” She goes on:

This was the most remarkable aspect of the whole day: Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public. On the contrary, many seemed sorry to see him go.

To understand this response, Anne explains, observers must reckon with the power of apathy. “A certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all.” Through a constant barrage of propaganda, Putin convinces Russian citizens that there is no truth to be found. And if nothing is true, then why protest or engage in politics?

But apathy works both ways: “If no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war,” Anne explains. “Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.”

Why did Prigozhin’s coup fail?

Brian Klaas, who has studied coups around the world, offered some lessons from the history of such uprisings. The most successful coups are those run by a unified military, Klaas writes. “In Thailand, for example, coups are usually executed by the military brass, who announce that they are toppling civilian politicians. With nobody with guns to oppose them, Thai coups almost always succeed … After all, what’s the president or prime minister going to do—shoot back at the army?”

In Russia, however, the coup was carried out by a faction connected to the country’s military sector. In those cases, “the plot will likely succeed less on strength than on perception. The plotters are playing a PR game, in which they’re trying to create the impression that their coup is destined to triumph.”

I recommend reading Klaas’s explainer in full. But if you’re wondering what to look for as you follow this news story, I’ll leave you with his advice:

If you’re watching events and trying to understand the strategic logic of coups and how Putin’s regime might end, look out for whether the loyalists stay loyal or start to peel off toward those challenging him. If important figures begin to abandon the regime en masse, Putin is toast.

What do the weekend’s events mean for Ukraine?

Prigozhin’s loss is Ukraine’s gain, the Atlantic contributing writer Elliot Ackerman argued today. “Although Prigozhin was able to negotiate a safe exit from Russia (at least for now), an early casualty of this coup seems to be the Wagner Group itself; Vladimir Putin is unlikely to keep it intact,” Ackerman explains—which means that “over the course of a single weekend, Prigozhin and Putin have jointly done what the Ukrainian military and its NATO allies have failed to achieve in 18 months of war: They’ve removed Russia’s single most effective fighting force from the battlefield.”

“The question we should all be asking now is how to capitalize on Prigozhin’s success,” Ackerman writes.

Related:

The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble. Putin is caught in his own trap.

Today’s News

Fox News announced that Jesse Watters will fill Tucker Carlson’s former prime-time slot, which has been vacant since Carlson’s show was canceled in April. The Supreme Court restored a federal ruling on racial gerrymandering, which stated that Louisiana’s congressional lines likely diluted the power of Black voters. President Joe Biden announced more than $42 billion in federal funding to expand high-speed internet access across the country.

Evening Read

Venice Gordon for The Atlantic

The Monk Who Thinks the World Is Ending

By Annie Lowrey

The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.

Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance. Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”

Humanity has “exponentially destroyed life on the same curve as we have exponentially increased intelligence,” he tells his congregants. Now the “crazy suicide wizards” of Silicon Valley have ushered in another revolution. They have created artificial intelligence.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Disney

Listen. American narratives about “freedom” can make us miss out on the joys of coming together. The newest episode of How to Talk to People teaches us how to not go it alone.

Watch. It’s hard to be mad at Indiana Jones. The action franchise’s fifth installment, in theaters this Friday, doesn’t break new ground, but it does give viewers what they want.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

Or play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Russia is splintering. Even though Yevgeny Prigozhin just announced a surprising stand-down while en route to Moscow, it’s clear that his effort remains by far the greatest threat to Vladimir Putin since he took power in the summer of 1999. The story of the Wagner Group plot may not yet have reached its end, so it’s worth understanding how coups work: what causes them to succeed or, in this case, why they fizzle or fall short.

The prospect of a dictator meeting his demise conjures images of crowds taking to the streets and toppling statues, the despot fleeing his palace with henchmen carrying hastily packed suitcases full of cash. Such events do happen, but they’re the exception. Most of the time, dictators fall when their military splits into factions, and one faction turns against the regime. If all factions turn against the dictator, then it’s time for the henchmen, the suitcases of cash, and a hasty exit.  

Since the end of World War II, two-thirds of all dictators have been toppled in coups d’état—irregular seizures of power that are usually led by a group within the military. However, in recent years, coups have become less common. During the height of the Cold War, an average of 13 coup plots were executed per year globally. Since 2010, that number has hovered around two to three per year. Because they are rare events and because no two are alike, coups are difficult to predict. But some patterns can help us understand whether a plot will succeed or fail once it has begun.

For more than a decade, I’ve studied coups around the world, including those in Thailand, Madagascar, Zambia, and Tunisia. And in speaking to dozens of generals and soldiers who have hatched coup plots—and those who join them once they’re under way—I’ve learned that the successful ones share a few major factors.

The most successful coups are those in which the military is unified. In Thailand, for example, coups are usually executed by the military brass, who announce that they are toppling civilian politicians. With nobody with guns to oppose them, Thai coups almost always succeed. No splintered factions, no risk of failure. After all, what’s the president or prime minister going to do—shoot back at the army?

When the coup is carried out by a faction within the military sector—as has happened in Russia—the dynamics become more complicated. Such a coup plot is not like a battle, in which the bigger, superior force tends to win. Rather, the plot will likely succeed less on strength than on perception. The plotters are playing a PR game, in which they’re trying to create the impression that their coup is destined to triumph. Nobody wants to be on the losing side, because the punishments are brutal. If you stay loyal to the dictator and the dictator gets toppled, you might be jailed, even executed, by the usurpers. But if you join the plot and it fails, the same fate awaits, often with an unpleasant visit to the dictator’s torture chambers. A soldier or officer can make no higher-stakes bet. Picking the losing side never ends well.

[Read: Russia slides into civil war]

When coups succeed, they hit a tipping point that produces a “bandwagon effect.” Just as sports teams tend to see their fan base expand dramatically when they’re on the cusp of a championship, coup plotters see their ranks swell when they look like they’re on the cusp of ousting the dictator.

When dictators face coup attempts, then, they desperately try to control information, assert their authority, and remain as visible as possible. That’s why Putin addressed the nation this morning—and why there are reports of digital censorship aimed at blocking access to information about the Wagner Group or Prigozhin’s videos. It’s important to appear calm and in control, a strategy that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, used effectively in 2016, when he broadcast a message to the nation via FaceTime during an attempted coup.

Successful coups also take the regime by surprise at a moment of weakness. Many plots are carried out when a dictator is abroad, sick, or vulnerable in some other way. In those instances, the dictator is slower to respond (some successful plots have even been carried out while a dictator is undergoing surgery abroad). In this instance, Prigozhin chose to strike at a moment when the Kremlin is mired in a bloody, seemingly pointless stalemate in Ukraine. He timed his plot well, because bandwagoning becomes more likely if people around the dictator already have doubts about him.

So what would it look like if a military gambit against Putin were to succeed? The answer, surprisingly, doesn’t likely involve a mass-casualty tank battle or a gunfight in the streets of Moscow. Instead, a successful coup requires one of two things: defections to the plotters, or inaction against them.

For coup ringleaders, the best-case scenario is a series of high-profile defections, in which senior leaders within the military announce that they are backing the plot. Their decampment reinforces the perception that the plot will succeed, which changes the behavior of even the lowest-ranking soldier who was previously on the fence.

But sometimes, sitting on the fence is sufficient to allow coup plots to topple governments. After all, Rostov saw no gun battles, just acceptance on the part of Russian soldiers who didn’t feel like sacrificing their lives to shoot soldiers who, until a few hours earlier, were on the same side. Prigozhin’s forces took Rostov the same way that Putin thought he would take Kiev—with little to no resistance. When a military fails to act decisively against a coup, then, that delay gives the plotters an opening to create an aura of inevitability around the putsch. If Prigozhin had kept it going for longer, his chances of success would have been higher.

However, Putin, while sometimes irrational, is no fool. He has engaged in extensive “coup proofing,” which means that he’s taken steps to ensure that when someone starts shooting at his forces, they shoot back, rather than turning their weapons on him. Putin has coup-proofed his dictatorship by creating a splintered security sector rife with internal competition, which means that no one faction dominates the rest. Three of Putin’s core security and intelligence services (the GRU, SVR, and FSB) also have elite special-operations branches full of loyalists.

Beyond that “praetorian guard,” Putin has also insulated himself by creating such an intense fun-house mirror of disinformation that nobody within Russia knows what to trust. The environment is, as Peter Pomerantsev puts it, one in which “nothing is true and everything is possible.” But the effects cut both ways. In Putin’s favor, few soldiers would have wanted to break with their superiors on the basis of mere whispers, rumors, and unverified reports about Wagner’s advance. At the same time, however, soldiers in Putin’s Russia will always wonder whether they’ve been told the truth when Putin asserts that he still has complete control.  

[Read: A crisis erupts in Russia]

Coup plots are fast-moving crises defined by uncertainty, in which nobody really knows what’s going on, and everyone is operating on imperfect information, forced to make impulsive, snapshot decisions within the fog of war. Coups are therefore among the most unpredictable events in politics. If anyone claims to know how Putin will fall, they’re lying. But even though this plot seems to have been called off, Prigozhin’s challenge to Putin will nonetheless be a decisive moment in Russia’s dictatorship and the war in Ukraine.

Everyone—loyalist or not—can see that Putin has been openly attacked, which conveys weakness. Putin’s forces in Ukraine will wonder whether they should get killed in a seemingly futile war, particularly when the biggest territorial gains of the war so far have now been in Russia, not Ukraine. And Putin, already a paranoid and irrational figure, will now make more decisions out of fear. So even if the coup fizzles, it will change Russia’s internal politics, Putin’s behavior, and the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine.

There are no “good guys” in a battle in which two Russian war criminals vie for control of a major nuclear power. However, if you’re watching events and trying to understand the strategic logic of coups and how Putin’s regime might end, look out for whether the loyalists stay loyal or start to peel off toward those challenging him. If important figures begin to abandon the regime en masse, Putin is toast.

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