Iron hand in a silk glove? Hours after the rebellion of the head of the mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, on June 23 and 24, a dozen high-ranking Russian officers were arrested and 15 others were suspended or expelled from the ranks, as published by The Wall Street Journal and collected yesterday by independent Russian media.
Among those suspended, and apparently detained 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 of the southern front, precisely the most committed right now in the face of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. The fact that the general and Prigozhin enjoyed a certain mutual trust makes Surovikin suspicious, something not helped by his public appeal to Wagner's boss to back off on the so-called "march of justice" towards Moscow.
However, Vladimir Putin has not mentioned these or any other names, which gives an idea of the caution with which the Russian president treats the matter.
There are many reasons. The uproar aimed at a total failure of the Russian Ministry of Defense. It didn't happen. When he arrived, on his march, 200 kilometers from Moscow, on June 24, Prigozhin realized that he had no support. But what is paradoxical about the case - or the most serious - 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 and let 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 go on stage and speak publicly of "treason"... Putin had never been so compromised in his supposedly careful balance of powers.
Contrary to what was said at the beginning, Prigozhin did not take the headquarters of operations in Ukraine, in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. There he met amicably with the Deputy Minister of Defense Yunus-bek Ievkúrov, and with the Deputy Chief of Military Intelligence (GRU), Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeiev (it should be noted that, originally, the Wagner Group is an appendage of the GRU ). Alexeiev, who had initially condemned the revolt, has been suspended.
Equally interesting is that among those arrested is ex-Colonel General Mikhaïl Mízintsev, formerly Deputy Minister of Defense, who led the assault on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol and since April 2023 worked for Wagner (a shelter natural ex-combatants, on the other hand). According to the expert Mikhaïl, Mizintsev and the other general similar in brutality, Surovikin, were the aces that Prigojin longed to see replacing, respectively, the Minister of Defense, Serguei Xoigu, and the Chief of the General Staff, Valery Guerassimov.
Both prestigious among officials, Mizintsev and Surovikin were among those promoted by Shoigu-Gerassimov's predecessors in Defense, Anatoli Serdikov and Nikolai Makarov, whose reforms liquidated up to 150 senior officers a decade ago. Prigojin would have tried to win the support of this new group of officers, now frustrated by Xoigú's management. But at the moment of truth they all waited and left him alone.
This attitude and the constancy of discontent among the commands would explain that Putin did not want to draw blood and that, 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 done nothing more than confirm what Prigozhin said and has highlighted a fracture in the families Russian military
Prigozhin claimed that the Defense officials lied to Putin about the reality of the war, that they are corrupt and that ethnic Russians were being murdered in the east of Ukraine whom he was supposedly defending. Even more so, that Ukrainian President Zelenski wanted to negotiate (which is true) and was not allowed to. Prigozhin may be a cynic - among other things - but, as the media boss he has been until 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 massive propaganda official
If the propaganda - which has made the epic of the great homeland war a base of the Russian State - and the security services are in some way the support of the regime, the first has been challenged and the second has not it worked as it should on June 23rd and 24th. In the following days leading analysts who previously did not emphasize the importance of the Wagner Group appeared confused.
Yevgeny Prigozhin may not be anyone anymore, but he has opened Pandora's box in a military establishment disconnected from civilian power in which everyone works for themselves, according to expert Kirill Xamiev.
However, the idea of a hypothetical military coup is far-fetched. In fact, Prigozhin did not intend to, but apparently what he wanted was only to open the Tsar's eyes. 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, according to Xamiev, "if some politicians in the If the Russian Security Council wanted to overthrow Putin, they would have to count on the FSB and have the military stay in the barracks, and in every regiment there is the FSB. It would be very difficult to coordinate, because everyone knows each other." As has been seen in the uproar in June.
Right now the Ukrainians wanted to see an impact on the Russian campaign. And it is true that in a military structure that depends a lot on the generals, logic says that in these circumstances an official not used to having initiative can be paralyzed.
The troops who already in the first days complained, in videos and messages, of a serious precariousness of the media, have seen that Prigojin proved them right when he spoke of an army undermined by corruption. An army subjected to abuse, mistreatment, poor nutrition, which loots when it can (washing machines, televisions, even toilets, in Ukraine).
In Berlin, in 1945, a Red Army captain could not even pay for a cinema ticket, according to witnesses of the time. In 1917, the tsar's poor army was the engine of the revolution.
