Yevgeny Prigozhin, a man with medieval manners fabricated by Vladimir Putin himself, has now become his main enemy and the man who can kick him out of the Kremlin.
How does a war end? George Kennan, the diplomat and historian who designed the cold war against the Soviet Union, prescribed, in an article published in 1947, a strategy to contain the expansion of Moscow, the strengthening of democracies and, above all, a lot of patience. The USSR would already fall. He collapsed forty years later. How do wars like the one in Ukraine end where neither side seems capable of fully achieving its objectives? According to all the experts, they always end up at a negotiating table after many, many deaths on both sides.
This was the script of the war that began on February 24, 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nothing suggested a week ago that Russia was strong enough to achieve its goal in the neighboring country; nor that the Ukrainians were capable of reversing the invasion and fulfilling the expectations that they themselves had imposed (the recovery of Crimea, among them).
In the first days of the war, and to the indignation of the Central European countries, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, when France and Germany were still wondering if they had any strategic autonomy left from the United States, asked that the United States not be cornered. Putin and that they leave him an honorable exit in the event that things do not go well for him. But it was one thing to imagine the failure of the Ukrainian campaign. And another very different one, to think of an implosion of Russia in the format of civil war, which is what we have been witnessing since Friday night.
In the next few hours, conspiracy versions will circulate about US involvement in the crisis in Russia. The war in Ukraine would be, according to this version, an instrument of the neocons to provoke a regime change in Moscow. But frankly, it doesn't sound like Wagner is a Washington weapon. The truth is that very few analysts could have imagined such an outcome, a crisis that does not bode well. Because in the current circumstances, what comes after Putin is something much worse than Putin. More militaristic and much more dangerous for stability in Europe.
The trigger for this situation is Yevgeny Prigozhin, a man to whom the best documented book on the Russian president, Putin's Men, by Catherine Belton, devotes only a couple of paragraphs. Belton dispenses with his past as a cook and goes directly to his involvement and financing of an army of trolls that in 2016 interfered in the US elections to get them to vote for Trump.
He does not mention Wagner, another State operation created in 2014 with the aim of creating a group of mercenaries capable of reaching where the Russian army did not.
One of the great problems that the Soviet Union bequeathed to the Russian governments in the 1990s was the size of the Army. It was an obsolete, expensive and endemically corrupt structure, an institution that sucked up a significant part of the state budget. It had to be reformed. But in the new Russia there was no money.
The 2000s were good years for President Putin. Oil was expensive, the budget improved and in 2008 the government had already paid the international credits that Russia owed. He commissioned Sergei Shoigu to modernize the Army to make it smaller and more dynamic. But that mirage vanished in 2022, when the column of tanks and armor advancing from Belarus towards Kyiv became bogged down due to obvious logistics and supply problems.
The insufficiencies of the Army in the Ukraine opened the door for Wagner, who concentrated his forces in symbolic areas of the front, such as Bakhmut, where the men enrolled by Wagner served as cannon fodder for a campaign that was extremely costly in lives. By then, Prigozin was already a giant with political ambitions, a man who insulted high-ranking military officers like Shoigu in his videos, whom he accused of corruption.
This is the man Putin now fears. Fiona Hill, one of the best experts on Russia in the American administration, has explained that Putin has been one of the men who has best known how to use fear as a political weapon. He knows his value and has not hesitated to use the fear of the nuclear holocaust when his campaign in the Ukraine has shown signs of failure. Now he is the one who is afraid of a man with medieval gestures that he did not even dare to mention in his empty speech on Saturday morning.
This is the third coup that Russia has experienced in the last thirty years. In the first, against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, the old communist apparatus failed. In the second, led by Boris Yeltsin in 1993, he got away with it. It is not at all clear what will happen in the next few hours.
