The Runback: Что посе́ешь, то и пожнёш

Putin's War Bites Back

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News and Politics

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• Except for the 6th, Maryland Congressional Races Retain Their Sleepy Stasis: A quick look at Maryland's Eight Congressional Primaries

The Monday Thought

Well, a potential coup d’etat in Russia was not on anybody’s bingo card for the weekend. That uneasy feeling you had was a country with 5,000 or so nuclear missiles pointed us on the brink of a massive, violent civil war.

There were no good guys in this “conflict” if you can even call it that. You have the vicious, near-dictatorial Russian government in the middle of the 16th month of their “three-day” “military operation” to Ukraine on one side. On the other side there you had a megalomaniacal head of a mercenary army with Neo-Nazi tendencies who had committed territorial incursion and acts of terrorism on behalf of the regime.

For everybody but those involved in the operation, there was never a good outcome to be had.

What’s most telling about all of this is how much of a paper tiger Vladimir Putin looks like at the present time:

The speed with which Putin backed down suggests that his sense of vulnerability might be higher even than analysts believed. Putin might have saved his regime Saturday, but this day will be remembered as part of the unraveling of Russia as a great power — which will be Putin’s true legacy.

Putin’s deal with renegade militia leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin is likely to be a momentary truce, at best. The bombastic rebel will head for Belarus, in a deal brokered by his pal President Alexander Lukashenko, in exchange for Putin dropping charges against him and his mutinous soldiers, according to Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov.

This was a real coup, until it wasn’t. For much of Saturday, Prigozhin was marching units of his 25,000-man Wagner militia toward the gates of Moscow, rolling through Russia’s Ukrainian command headquarters at Rostov-on-Don and north to Voronezh. Sources tell me the Russian FSB put up roadblocks along the way, to little effect. Putin called up the National Guard to defend Moscow.

So much for all of the Americans like Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the like who worship the ground Putin walks on.

Putin, of course, is not out of the woods. Not by a long shot.

Despite it lasting less than a day, the “Wagner uprising,” which grew out of this performance, is likely to deal a serious blow to Putin’s power. The mutiny has demonstrated the vulnerability at the core of Putin’s system of power. Prigozhin has just proven that it is possible to seize a city of millions in Russia without firing a single shot, and then move toward Moscow without meeting any resistance. This may suggest that many of Russia’s security officials and soldiers do not like their commanders, and will not risk their lives for them. The confrontation ending in stalemate has not changed anything in this respect.

A look into Russia’s post shows us what has happened there before. And as you know, history does not repeat itself but it surely rhymes.

In the midst of World War I, Tsar Nicholas of the Russian Empire was toppled in the February Revolution. By September, there was a coup against the Provisional Government led by General Lavr Knornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army. The coup was actually directed at the Petrograd Soviet due to the Provisional Government’s leniency toward the Bolsheviks.

Less than two months after Kornilov’s attempted coup, the October Revolution toppled the Kerensky Government, bringing the Bolsheviks to power and kicking off the Russian Civil War.

Fast-forward to August 1991. A group of hardline communists within the Soviet government launched a populist coup against President Mikhail Gorbachev stating that “the honour and dignity of the Soviet man must be restored”. That coup, much more organized than the Wagner coup, failed within three days. But it brought about the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. Within a week, the Communist Party crumbled. By Christmas, the Soviet Union was dissolved.

None of this, of course, is to say that fall of the Putin regime is inevitable. Prighozin folded quickly, was exiled, and only had 25,000 men at his disposal. But it certainly showed that historically when Russia sees its regimes challenged, the fall of the regime is often not too far behind. We may only be at the beginning of a prolonged period of Russian unrest. And what comes next is anybody’s guess.