[This past weekend’s attempted insurrection in Russia is a
reminder of the self-defeating stupidity of Vladimir Putin’s
invasion. It should also be a reminder of the profound dangers of
attempting to carry out regime change.]
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THE PRIGOZHIN MUTINY IS A LESSON IN THE FOLLY OF WAR  
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Branko Marcetic
June 27, 2023
Jacobin
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*
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*
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*
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_ This past weekend’s attempted insurrection in Russia is a
reminder of the self-defeating stupidity of Vladimir Putin’s
invasion. It should also be a reminder of the profound dangers of
attempting to carry out regime change. _

Members of Wagner Group stand on the balcony of the circus building
in the city of Rostov-on-Don, on June 24, 2023. , Roman Romokhov / AFP
via Getty Images

 

In a war that’s continually confounded expectations and brought us
to the brink
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of World War III more than once
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you’d think by now we would have lost the ability to be surprised by
developments in Ukraine. And yet, life finds a way, as this past
weekend saw the most serious challenge to Russian president Vladimir
Putin’s rule and the stability of the Russian state more generally
in his nearly two decades in power.

Last Friday, mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched what was,
depending on who you ask, either a mutiny, a coup attempt, or a
protest
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against the Russian government, after months
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of bubbling resentment at what he viewed as his soldiers’
mistreatment at the hands of an incompetent military leadership. Some
commentators have expressed suspicion that Prigozhin’s real
motivation was the Kremlin’s June announcement that his private
military company, the Wagner Group, would be coming directly under the
control of the Russian Ministry of Defense, leading Prigozhin to make
a play to try and secure his moneymaker.

Whatever the exact truth, the result was alarming scenes of Wagner
troops and tanks rolling unopposed into Russian cities, seizing
military headquarters, shooting down Russian military helicopters, and
announcing that they were making a beeline toward Moscow, with
Prigozhin calling for
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removal of Russia’s top military leaders. Though short-lived in the
end, the Kremlin clearly took the threat seriously, barricading roads
into the capital, mobilizing Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s troops
to meet the rebellion, and putting out videotaped statements from
military and other officials calling on Prigozhin to stop what he was
doing and for Wagner troops not to follow.

The most obvious takeaway from all this is the self-defeating folly of
war as a means to resolve national and geopolitical problems. Russian
security, let alone the stability of Putin’s rule, would undoubtedly
be in a better place today had he listened to his foreign minister
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and continued
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diplomatic efforts in late February 2022 — or even if he had simply
done nothing at all. As it is, Putin has brought upon the Russian
population — whose interests he’s meant to be serving — painful
sanctions, global stigma, a stream of terrorist attacks, the
possibility of nuclear annihilation, and now, the threat of civil war
and the possible violent overthrow of the government. A war supposedly
launched for the sake of [[link removed]]Russian
[[link removed]]national security
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thing to it.

Ironically, Putin himself had once upon a time understood this,
watching the unfolding US-made disaster in Iraq
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which was born from the same arrogance and shortsightedness that drove
his own war of choice last year, and at one point warning
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that “the use of force rarely brings the hoped-for results, and its
consequences at times are more terrible than the original threat.”
Yet he evidently failed to learn from this and is now trapped in his
own self-made quagmire, one that, even if and when this war is
mercifully over, will continue to be a festering problem for himself
and whichever Russian leader follows. There’s a lesson here, too,
for US elites, who continue to inch toward
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their own war with Iran while simultaneously threatening
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absurdly, to attack Mexico — if they would dare to learn it.

Another lesson: the danger of private military outfits, another issue
that’s hardly foreign to the US political landscape, where
Blackwater’s Erik Prince has turned his hand
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in recent years to domestic political spying, alongside the
increasingly common political meddling by a host of other former
intelligence officials. It turns out that there’s a good reason for
governments to have a monopoly on the use of violence, particularly if
part of giving up that monopoly means letting the competition
stockpile
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and ammunition without check. But Wagner’s very existence in the
first place can’t be separated from Moscow’s geopolitical hubris,
since it was a way for the Russian elite to fulfill their great power
pretensions, intervening
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way beyond
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Russian borders without leaving the Kremlin’s fingerprints on the
scene or incurring the political costs of too many dead Russian
troops.

Yet Putin is not the only one here dealing with a deadly case of
buyer’s remorse, driven by a failure to think through the risks of
foreign policy gambles and to consider the laws of unintended
consequences. Since the start of the invasion, there’s been an
outpouring
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of hopes
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and prayers
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from the US
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and European
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policy establishments that Putin’s faltering war effort would mean
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the end
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his rule
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— whether by triggering a palace coup, a popular uprising, or the
collapse of the Russian state — and even the disintegration
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Russia. Meanwhile, US defense secretary Lloyd Austin has said
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that the goal of US policy toward the war was “to see Russian
weakened,” US officials have openly modeled
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their strategy on the US response to the USSR’s Afghanistan invasion
(which helped trigger the Soviet Union’s collapse), and senior
officials have both privately
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and publicly
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expressed hopes that the war would lead to regime change in Russia.

Prigozhin’s coup attempt seems to have violently shaken awake at
least some of those pining for this outcome, as the reality of what
serious Russian destabilization would mean came frighteningly close to
fruition. In the wake of the episode, Edgars Rinkevics — current
foreign minister and incoming president of Latvia, one of the
collection of Eastern European states that had reportedly
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been most resistant
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to an early ceasefire if it meant inflicting less damage to Russia —
told
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the _Washington Post_ that “if there is chaos in Moscow,” it
brings up “the same question people were asking back in 1991” when
the Soviet Union dissolved: “Who controls the nuclear football?”

A senior NATO official likewise told the outlet that the country’s
massive nuclear stockpile means that “we don’t want a Russia that
is too weak” or “a failed state.” At G7 talks, while members
discussed
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possible disastrous scenarios ahead, officials stated that “we are
not in the business of regime change,” that “the message to those
getting carried away is that nobody wins from civil war in Russia,”
and that someone more hardline than Putin could take power in Russia,
with one concluding that “we are not in agreement on the outcomes of
what will happen if Ukraine wins this war and what that will do to
Russia.” Since the weekend, US intelligence analysts
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officials
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and commentators
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all registered alarm at the Russian nuclear arsenal falling under the
control of rogue actors or extremists, including some
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who had just days earlier
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appeared to cheer the coup on.

What’s particularly striking about all this is that not long ago
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express any of these concerns and suggest that the highest priority
should be to avoid such disaster was deemed unacceptable, appeasement,
and giving in to nuclear blackmail
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But special mention is owed to the commentariat, which, with notable
exceptions, has performed abysmally throughout this war, scraping what
might be new lows over the weekend. A dearth of reliable information
and an event unfolding in real time didn’t stop the usual pundits
from scrambling to make sweeping pronouncements that didn’t come to
pass, from declaring the imminent collapse of the Russian government
and Putin’s presidency, to the all but certain turning of the tide
in the war and even its end, sprinkled with the usual amateur
Kremlinology and premature declarations of who won and who lost.

Maybe most shameful was the sight of numerous prominent voices
actively cheering on the prospect of Wagner succeeding in their coup
— even though, as we’ve been told throughout the war, they’re
not just vicious war criminals who have been demanding
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that Putin escalate
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the war and domestic repression
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but are comprised partly of Nazis and other extremists
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As Prigozhin and his men advanced on Moscow, former US ambassador to
Russia Michael McFaul criticized
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“better-the-devil-you-know hot takes I’m seeing” as he shared an
earlier post
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he’d written asserting that even if a right-wing coup came to
Russia, “I’m not convinced that it would be worse than having
Putin in the Kremlin,” but that “things eventually might get
better.” Financier and prominent Putin critic Bill Browder assured
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that “there’s a chance if [Prigozhin] wins, the war would end,”
while that would be “impossible” with Putin. The_ Atlantic’s_
Anne Applebaum, who just last month told
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her readers that “even the worst successor imaginable, even the
bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be
preferable to Putin,” giddily floated
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prospect of revolution. A variety
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liberal [[link removed]]
commentators
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celebrated what was at minimum the possibility of violent,
destabilizing conflict in a country with the world’s largest nuclear
stockpile.

It vividly illustrated one of the problems of this war on the Western
side. 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.

It’s an amnesia that’s shared, ironically, by both Putin and his
fiercest adversaries in the West as they each point the finger at the
other. The hope is that, together with a robust peace movement making
demands of our political leadership to finally bring this war to a
close, this episode might trigger a jolt of remembering for them all.
But don’t get too complacent: if there’s one thing this conflict
has taught us, it’s how fast, easy, and comforting it is to forget.

===

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Chicago,
Illinois.

* Yevgeny Prigozhin; Wagner Group; Russia; Ukraine War;
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