Iron hand in kid glove? Hours after the rebellion of the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, on June 23 and 24, a dozen high-ranking Russian officers were arrested and 15 more were suspended or expelled from the ranks, according to The Wall Street Journal. and they were picked up yesterday by independent Russian media.
Among those suspended, and apparently held, but not arrested, is General Sergei Surovikin, nominally commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces and head of operations in Ukraine between October 2022 and January 2023, when he was relegated to command the southern front, precisely the most committed right now before the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The fact that the general and Prigozhin enjoyed some mutual trust makes Surovikin suspicious, something that is not helped by his public appeal to Wagner's boss asking him to back down from his alleged "march of justice" to Moscow. .
However, Vladimir Putin has not cited these or any other names, which gives an idea of the caution with which the Russian president treats the matter.
It is not for less. The coup sought a major bankruptcy in the Russian Defense Ministry. It did not occur. Arriving, in his march, 200 kilometers from Moscow, on June 24, Prigozhin realized that he had no support. But the paradoxical thing about the case – or the most serious thing – is that the intelligence and security services, the FSB (formerly the KGB), with all its branches, did not stop him from the first moment.
It is believed that Putin's regime is based on the balance of three powers: the FSB –of which he himself was an official–, the oligarchs and the military caste. The latter was dubious, while the former did not intervene, letting everyone know that the column of Wagner militiamen (supposedly 25,000) was headed for Moscow, that the National Guard was mobilized, that the Russian president had to leave to the scene and speak publicly of "betrayal"... Never had Putin been so compromised in his supposedly careful balance of powers.
Contrary to what was said at first, Prigozhin did not take the headquarters of the operations in Ukraine, in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. There he had a friendly meeting with Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Evkurov, and Deputy Head of Military Intelligence (GRU), Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev (it should be noted that the Wagner Group is originally an appendage of the GRU). . Alexeyev, who had condemned the revolt from the outset, has been suspended.
Just as interesting is that among the detainees is former Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, formerly Deputy Defense Minister, who led the assault on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol and since April 2023 worked for Wagner (a natural refuge for ex-combatants, on the other hand). According to the expert Mikhail Komin, Mizintsev and the other general who was equally brutal, Surovikin, were the aces that Prigozhin was eager to see replacing, respectively, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov.
Both highly regarded among the officialdom, Mizintsev and Surovikin were among those promoted by Shoigu-Gerasimov's predecessors on Defense, Anatoly Serdyikov and Nikolai Makarov, whose reforms liquidated as many as 150 top officials a decade ago. Prigozhin would have tried to win the support of this new group of officers, now frustrated by Shoigu's management. But when it came down to it, everyone waited and left him alone.
This attitude and the constancy of discontent among the commanders would explain why Putin did not want to draw blood and why, in the words of the chairman of the Duma Defense Committee, Andrei Kartapolov, General Surovikin is "resting". But, at the same time, the dismissal of the commander of the 58th Army, General Ivan Popov, for denouncing the disasters suffered by the Russian forces in Ukraine, has only confirmed what Prigozhin had been saying and has highlighted a fracture in Russian military families.
Prigozhin claimed that defense officials were lying to Putin about the reality of the war, that they are corrupt, and that ethnic Russians were being murdered in eastern Ukraine who they were allegedly defending. Furthermore, the Ukrainian president Zelenski wanted to negotiate (which is true) and he was not allowed to. Prigozhin may be a cynic – among other things – but, as the media boss he has been up to now, he has managed to take over the narrative of the war, and in this sense he has been Ukraine's best ally in the face of crude pro-government propaganda.
If propaganda – which has made the epic of the great patriotic war a basis for the Russian state – and the security services are somehow the support of the regime, the first has been challenged and the second has not worked as expected by the days 23 and 24 of June. In the days that followed, leading analysts who had previously failed to highlight the importance of the Wagner Group appeared confused.
Perhaps Yevgueni Prigozhin is nobody anymore, but he has opened Pandora's box in a military establishment disconnected from civil power in which everyone works for themselves, according to the expert Kirill Shamiev.
However, the idea of a hypothetical military coup is distant. In fact, Prigozhin did not intend to, but apparently only to open his eyes to the tsar. The "balance of terror" -in the words of Mark Galeotti- created by Putin between the army, the National Guard, the FSB, the presidential security service... means that, for Shamiev, "if some politicians in the Council of Russian security would have to overthrow Putin with the FSB and with the military staying in the barracks, and in every regiment there is the FSB. It would be very difficult to coordinate, because everyone knows each other”. As seen in the June riot.
In the immediate future, the Ukrainians have wanted to see an impact on the Russian campaign. And it is true that in a military structure that depends a lot on the generalate, logic says that in these circumstances an officer seldom used to having initiative can find themselves paralyzed.
The troops that already in the first days complained, in videos and messages, of a very serious precariousness of means, have seen how Prigozhin agreed with them when he spoke of an army undermined by corruption. An army subjected to abuse, mistreatment, poor nutrition, given to looting as soon as possible (washing machines, televisions, even toilets, in Ukraine).
In Berlin in 1945, a Red Army captain did not even have enough to pay for a movie ticket, according to testimonies of the time. In 1917, the czar's impoverished army was the engine of the revolution.
