Putin reinforces his deep vulnerability via Yevgeny Prigozhin meeting
Tom Rogan
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We’ve just learned that Vladimir Putin met with Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin just five days after the latter’s June 23 aborted rebellion. The meeting evinces just how vulnerable Putin feels he still is to the Wagner Group‘s military power.
The Russian president prizes public displays of loyalty as an almost sacrosanct imperative. Prigozhin shredded that expectation with his coup, damaging Putin’s presentation of power more than anyone ever has. Putin’s rhetorical response to the coup attempt reflected his fury and concern: He lambasted Prigozhin as a treasonous enemy of the Russian people. That Putin would then host Prigozhin and other Wagner commanders at the Kremlin tells a different story. It underlines just how vulnerable Putin believes he remains in the face of Prigozhin’s power.
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In the aftermath of the coup attempt, Putin desperately sought to present an image of boring, business-as-usual stability. News of this Kremlin meeting shreds that image. Instead, it greatly reinforces the notion that Putin doubts the ability of his regime to survive a follow-on coup attempt by Wagner’s tens of thousands of well-armed fighters. Wagner retains its military potential and Prigozhin remains an unpredictable, likely also psychopathic, leader. Still, this meeting will alarm the United States intelligence community in what it suggests about the stability of the nation with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
The Kremlin’s excuse for the utter incongruity between Putin’s post-coup rhetoric and thereafter hosting of Prigozhin is patently ridiculous. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov played down the meeting, suggesting it was a business formality rather than a grand concession to a coup plotter. According to Peskov, Prigozhin simply “gave assessment to the [coup attempt]. Putin listened to the [Wagner] commanders’ explanations and suggested variants of their future employment and their future use in combat.”
From ally to traitor to colleague in the space of less than a week.
Even Kremlin-aligned media is struggling to square this impossible logic circle. As the normally Putin-sympathetic Moskovskij Komsomolets columnist Mikhail Rostovsky put it on Monday:
“Putin made this assessment and made his choice — a choice in favor of pragmatism, and not some formal standards (let’s put it this way) … Various questions still remain open, the main of which looks like this: where are the guarantees that the [coup attempt] will not be repeated?”
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Indeed. There are no such guarantees, nor does Putin have obvious means of imposing them on Prigozhin. If the Russian leader had those means, he would have already applied them. Hence his need for the alternative of “pragmatism.”
The basic truth is that Prigozhin retains both his military power and an associated, if far less casual, measure of Russian political capital. Top line: Putin’s government is significantly less stable than it appears.