Putin gives Navalny the gulag and Prigozhin a five-star pass
Tom Rogan
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Following his suspended June 23 coup attempt, Russia’s Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has been keeping a low profile.
Or has he?
In late July, Prigozhin met with African delegates on the sidelines of a summit hosted by Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. The location of one of Prigozhin’s meetings, the city’s opulent Trezzini Palace Hotel, was hardly clandestine in nature. Nor was the photo he took with a summit delegate.
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Moreover, Wagner’s deep business arrangements in Africa suggest that Prigozhin wasn’t simply catching up with old friends. Considering that the Kremlin would have known Prigozhin was in Putin’s hometown and allowed him to hold his meetings, we must assume that Putin either wanted Prigozhin to hold those meetings or was too fearful to stop him from doing so. In either scenario, it’s clear that Prigozhin feels the confidence to carry on with his business as much as before June 23.
This is quite stunning.
It’s hard to exaggerate the profound betrayal that Prigozhin committed against Putin with his coup. As I’ve noted previously, it is dangerous for Putin that he has tolerated and evidently continues to tolerate what was an unprecedented public challenge to the most sacrosanct principle of his regime: Putin’s publicly unquestioned authority. Putin again emphasized how much he values this principle last Friday, when he had opposition journalist Alexei Navalny sentenced to an additional 10 years in an even harsher gulag than the penal colony in which Navalny is currently imprisoned. Putin fears Navalny not for his political prospects, but for his public disobedience to the Kremlin’s regime.
Again, the striking dichotomy between how Navalny and Prigozhin are being treated by Putin is telling.
Navalny’s crime, in Putin’s eyes, has been to point out the Kremlin’s endemic corruption and suggest Putin is a poor public servant. For that, he has been subjected to a nerve agent assassination attempt and assigned to die in prison. In contrast, Prigozhin quite literally attempted to overthrow Putin’s power center with the use of force. And yet, somehow, Prigozhin remains a fixture at the relative forefront of Russian political and business life.
Indeed, Russian media has reported that tens of millions of dollars were returned to Prigozhin after Kremlin authorities temporarily seized them. Other media reports suggest companies linked to Prigozhin have secured at least $21.4 million in new government contracts since the coup attempt. Do coup d’etat attempts pay in Putin’s 2023 Russia?
I jest, still, what is going on here? Why is Putin putting up with Prigozhin?
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Some in state-aligned media suggest it’s because Putin is using Prigozhin and Wagner to train Belorussian forces to support a new southern offensive against the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Wagner forces have now relocated to Belarus and are threatening neighboring NATO member state, Poland. Still, I suspect that the reason Prigozhin is able to operate so freely has far less to do with some grand Ukraine war strategy on Putin’s part. Instead, it’s likely for the far simpler reason that Putin believes any new move against his former chef would provoke a new coup attempt against his rule.
A coup attempt which, this time perhaps, might see Putin fall.