I’m quoting here some of the more sensible commentary I’ve seen on last Saturday’s strange events in Russia involving an apparent revolt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his notoriously brutal Wagner mercenary group.
Anatol Lieven cautions against any facile early assumption that Putin’s government may be on the verge of collapse because of this:
[T]he background (and perhaps also the solution) to the Wagner revolt have displayed some key features of Putin’s approach to the exercise of power. By training and instinct he is a secret serviceman, not a soldier. His preference has always been when possible to opt for ruthless but indirect, semi-covert and quasi-deniable methods over direct military force. Hence his hesitation to invade Ukraine, something long urged on him by hardliners within his regime. Hence, too, his sponsorship of Wagner, which as a “private military company” could pursue Russian goals in the Donbas, Syria and Africa while allowing the Russian government to maintain official distance from its actions.
Secondly, while Putin is regarded in the West and is presented in his own domestic propaganda as an absolutist autocrat, he has in fact often functioned more like the chairman of a squabbling collection of state oligarchs. …
Finally, the Wagner revolt, however brief and unsuccessful, will inevitably renew speculation about whether Putin’s prestige has been so badly damaged that he will decide not to stand again for president in the elections due (according to the constitution) early next year, and instead hand over to a chosen successor (as President Yeltsin handed over to him in 1999). However, while the revolt has been a bad blow to Putin, it may also have underlined once again his vital personal importance to the political system that he has created – which could lead his associates in that system to beg him to stay on, for fear that without him they would be incapable of peacefully mediating their own rivalries. [my emphasis]1
Trevor Filseth’s view suggests that observers who expected that Prigozhin’s coup attempt (or whatever it actually was) was on the verge of ousting Putin are not looking very closely:
In a narrow sense, Prigozhin might have succeeded in his objectives. He ended his offensive within Moscow Oblast, less than 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the capital. Russian troops remained garrisoned within the city, but their defenses would have been gravely inadequate against Wagner’s hardened and well-equipped veterans. Absent outside interference, Prigozhin could have captured Moscow in short order.
But then what? The rogue warlord’s next move would not have been at all clear. Putin, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Army Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, and any other Russian leaders of importance would have fled the city before Prigozhin could capture them. The Russian state has famously abandoned Moscow before; the city’s fall would not cause the collapse of the government. Even if he had wanted to extend his northern march to St. Petersburg, Prigozhin would not have had the strength. While he nominally had a total of 25,000 troops at his disposal, the convoy traveling north only contained around 5,000—hardly enough to hold Moscow, a city of 13 million, even if the population had been totally compliant. If Russian troops had arrived in greater numbers from the front lines in Ukraine, Prigozhin could not possibly have held the city, even with additional Wagner reinforcements.
More importantly, by shooting his way into the Russian capital—and then fighting to defend it against the military—Prigozhin could have caused thousands of deaths, both among the soldiers on both sides and the civilians caught in the crossfire. In doing so, he would have abandoned any pretense of acting on behalf of the Russian people, or of having the country’s best interests in mind. One of the reasons that Wagner troops were able to travel north so quickly was the lack of opposition from the Russian military or police units between them and Moscow. The military’s inaction bodes poorly for Putin, but it also gave both sides a critical opening to defuse the crisis before it escalated further. If Prigozhin had fought an open battle in Moscow—or even a battle with Kadyrov’s troops near Rostov-on-Don—a deal between the two sides would have been much more difficult to reach.
In no conceivable universe would the crisis have ended with the installation of “President Prigozhin” in the Kremlin. [my emphasis]2
Cenk Uygur noted on his Young Turks program on June 26 noted about the reports that Russians in Rostov were applauding Prigozhin’s troops were applauding a guy who is known for being particularly effective in the war in Ukraine, and for doing so in a very brutal way. So this doesn’t automatically mean that those people were somehow opposed to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Some commentators have been quick to assume that such signs of support for Prigozhin represents mass disaffection with Putin’s government. How they would get to that conclusion isn’t at all clear. They could have just been applauding them in hope the ‘Wagner troops wouldn’t follow their standard operating procedure of rape, torture, and murder in Rostov or elsewhere inside Russia. Or maybe they were applauding because they were glad to see the Wagner Group thugs and criminals leaving.
David Remnick also cautions against the easy assumption that the Prigozhin stunt is particularly good news for Ukraine.
In ideological terms, [Mikhail] Zygar said, “Prigozhin combines two ideas. The first is anti-corruption and anti-oligarch. Despite his own wealth, which is immense, he always portrayed himself as the oligarch-fighter. At the same time, he is super illiberal. He hates the West, and he claims to be the real protector of traditional values. He probably has more supporters beyond the Wagner Group; there are people in the Army, the F.S.B. [intelligence agency], the Interior Ministry, who could be his ideological allies.” …
But, at the same time, there is no guarantee that the current chaos in Russia is purely good news for the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. Zygar is concerned that after such a domestic embarrassment like the Prigozhin affair Putin might lash out abroad and escalate the war in Ukraine. [my emphasis]3
But it’s also hard to imagine the whole affair wasn’t bad news for Vladimir Putin in the short run. And it also seems clear that differences within the government and the military over conduct of the war in Ukraine played a major role. But very much about state of public opinion in Russia right now is speculative. And the public manifestations like the cheering for Wagner troops in Rostov aren’t in themselves signs of public discontent with the war as such.
It’s worth keeping in mind that for a significant part of the foreign policy establishment, the Soviet war in Afghanistan basically led directly to the fall of the Soviet Union. To get there, one has to ignore other factors, like the fact that by the 1970s the USSR had become a petrostate and was hard hit by fluctuations in world oil prices. Arms control treaties, improved economic relations between Russia and the West, failures of economic modernization - those don’t have quite the sex appeal of a tale about how the US cleverly tricked the Rooskies into a disastrous war.
Of course, that also had some downsides. Notably, it spawned the modern Islamic jihadist movement symbolized by Osama bin Laden. In a 1998 interview, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted what former CIA Director Robert Gates had already revealed publicly that the Carter Administration had begun funding mujahidin (aka, Islamist terrorists) groups in Afghanistan six months before the Soviets sent the Red Army into Afghanistan.
Asked if he regretted anything about that, Brzezinski replied:
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire. …
What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?4 [my emphasis]
Yes, the Very Serious People take this as sober judgment. Cold War triumphalism is a strong drug.
Russiagate and Trump’s foreign policy
This piece by Paul Pillar doesn’t relate specifically to lessons of the recent internal confrontation in Russia. But it’s a good fact-based discussion of Trump’s Russia policy as President in the light of the “Russiagate” narrative - part of which was reality-based and part (especially on MSNBC) an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College loss in 2016.
The fact of the Russian interference, to the benefit of Trump, in the 2016 presidential election is beyond any doubt. The interference has been documented by the intelligence community, the Mueller report, and most thoroughly for the public in a bipartisan report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.5
Matthew Duss dissects the claim that Trump as President was antiwar or even anti-imperialist.
Trump massively escalated the country’s existing wars in multiple theaters, leading to skyrocketing casualties. …
Trump also came very close to tweeting the country into a nuclear war with North Korea in late 2017 and early 2018, a completely self-inflicted incident that seems to have been bizarrely memory-holed. …
In 2018, Trump bowed to Washington’s neoconservative hawks and withdrew from a working nonproliferation agreement with Iran, resulting in Iran scaling up both its provocative activities in the region and its nuclear program. …
Trump put the U.S. on a path to “great-power competition” with China, incited a failed coup in Venezuela, and increased support for reckless, repressive clients around the world.6
It’s worth noting that on Russia policy, Trump’s approach wasn’t always exactly what Russia would presumably have preferred:
Trump’s defenders praise him for demanding that NATO allies meet their spending obligations, but of course, he’s not the first to do that. Indeed, Trump’s argument against NATO and other partners, such as South Korea, was that they should pay up for the protection racket [which is how Trump apparently views NATO].
This 2017 clip shows how Trump did take an insulting tone toward the NATO allies while nevertheless pushing them to increase their military budgets. Trump’s statement here is garbled because talks about the defense spending commitments as though they were contributions to the US (which they aren’t) but also increases to their own national military budgets (which they are).7
And, “in 2018, with Donald Trump as president, the U.S. reversed course and agreed to provide Ukraine with $47 million worth of lethal weapons, which included 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 37 launchers.”8 Trump, like the Obama Administration, had initially resisted sending such armaments, and he did try to use the aid to blackmail Ukraine into creating a phony case against Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which led to his first impeachment. But the “lethal” aid began with the Trump Administration.
This does not mean that Trump hasn’t been involved with Russia in ways that could damage the US or that may be (probably are) illegal. But Trump is a loose cannon. Manuevering the US into a policy that would directly and openly support Russia at this point would require some real finesse, something for which Trump has nevre been known.
But as Paul Pillar notes:
Trump said and did a number of things favorable to the Russian regime while he was in office, including publicly siding with Putin rather than U.S. intelligence agencies when the Russian president falsely denied interfering in U.S. elections. Such sayings and doings represent part of the payoff that Russia has gotten for its investment in Trump. Another big part of the payoff is the exacerbation of political division in the United States and discrediting of American democracy that Trump has done so much to foment. Most or maybe all of this was part of the approach Trump would have taken anyway in his bid for power, but it is a consequence that is in Russia’s interest and very much against U.S. interests.9 [my emphasis]
In other words, Russia has reason to view Trump acting as a chaos agent in American politics as beneficial in itself.
Whether that calculation is more sound that their decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 is another question.
Fixation on Putin and Cold War 2.0 commentary
Branko Marcetic has this relevant observation after seeing how the Cold War 2.0 enthusiasts, including establishment pundits, reacting to last Saturday’s crisis in Russia:
Engulfed in a war fever that went into overdrive last year, US and European discourse has become dominated by a single-minded fixation on schadenfreude and vengeance toward the figure of Putin, at the expense of just about any other consideration, including the risks of nuclear disaster and destabilization. In the process, one of the chief lessons of Iraq and other US misadventures — that no matter how vile, authoritarian, and prone to foreign aggression a leader is, the consequences of toppling them from power are dangerously unpredictable — seems to have been lost in a jingoistic amnesia.10 [my emphasis]
Lieven, Anatol (2023): Putin: Disastrous but indispensable for the system he created? Responsible Statecraft 06/25/2023. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/25/putin-disastrous-but-indispensable-for-the-system-he-created/> (Accessed: 2023-27-06).
Filseth, Trevor (2023): Why Prigozhin Blinked. Yevgeny Prigozhin just tried to take over Russia. Why did he change his mind? The National Interest 06/26/2023. <https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-prigozhin-blinked-206583> (Accessed: 27-06-2023).
Remnick, David (2023): Putin’s Weakness Unmasked. New Yorker 06/24/2023. <https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/vladimir-putins-weakness-unmasked-yevgeny-prigozhins-rebellion> (Accessed: 27-06-2023).
Quoted in: Gibbs, David N. (2000): Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect. International Politics 37: 2008, 241-2.
Pillar, Paul (2023): The Trump-Russia Problem Remains. The National Interest 05/24/2023. <https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/trump-russia-problem-remains-206494> (Accessed: 27-06-2023).
Duss, Matthew (2023): Calling Trump an Anti-Imperialist Is Nonsense. Foreign Policy 04/18/2023. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/18/donald-trump-presidency-anti-imperialist-militarism-war/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921> (Accessed: 27-06-2023).
Donald Trump tells Nato allies to pay up. BBC News YouTube channel 05/25/2017. (Accessed: 29-06-2023).
Gollom, Mark (2022): How successive U.S. administrations resisted arming Ukraine. CBC News 03/05/2022. <https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/obama-trump-biden-ukraine-military-aid-1.6371378> (Accessed: 2023-29-06).
Pilar, Paul (2023), op. cit.
Marcetic, Branko (2023): The Prigozhin Mutiny Is a Lesson in the Folly of War. Jacobin 06/27/2023. <https://jacobin.com/2023/06/prigozhin-mutiny-putin-invasion-ukraine-war-regime-change-western-commentary> (Accessed: 2023-27-06).