Over a startling and chaotic 36 hours this weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin faced the most significant challenge to his rule in over two decades, as Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner private military group led an armed rebellion within 120 miles of Moscow before abruptly turning back. The about-face followed an amnesty deal brokered by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, a close Putin ally. But as the crisis seemed to abate temporarily, new questions about Putin’s hold on power remain.
As the mutiny unfolded, Putin promised “decisive actions” to crush the rebellion, accusing Prigozhin of “treason” and comparing his uprising to the 1917 Russian Revolution. But under the deal, Wagner paramilitary fighters will be allowed to return to their bases and avoid prosecution, and Prigozhin’s criminal case was dropped.
Prigozhin will reportedly move to Belarus under the deal. He was seen late Saturday leaving the Russian military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, the small city temporarily overtaken by the Wagner Group Saturday morning, though his current whereabouts are unknown.
The Institute for the Study of War, a nonpartisan, Washington-based think tank, reported that Putin was caught off guard by the attempted coup. The Kremlin “struggled to cohere an effective rapid response to Wagner’s advances, highlighting internal security weaknesses likely due to surprise and the impact of heavy losses in Ukraine,” it wrote in a report.
“I think you’ve seen cracks emerge that weren’t there before,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN’s State of the Union program Sunday. “This raises profound questions . . . We do know that Putin has a lot more to answer for in the weeks and months ahead.” Blinken added that although the Wagner group is no longer menacing Moscow, the threat to Putin’s power hasn’t entirely vanished. “This is an unfolding story,” he added on CBS’s Face the Nation. “We haven’t seen the last act.”
“We don’t know if it’s over,” Alexander Vershwob, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told The Washington Post. “We can speculate all we want, but the fact is we have little idea what happens next.”
On Sunday, Rossiya-1 TV, a state-owned channel, broadcast an interview with Putin that had been recorded on June 21, before the coup attempt. “I’m focused primarily on the special military operation,” Putin said, adding that he stays up late and “begins and ends” his days with the invasion. “We feel confident and capable in our ability to achieve all our proposed plans and objectives,” he added. As of midday Sunday, Putin had not yet explicitly addressed the amnesty deal. State television also said Putin would attend a Russia Security Council meeting this week, though it didn’t elaborate.
Several Russian Internet providers blocked access to Google News as the attempted coup unfolded, according to an analysis from NetBlocks, an Internet watchdog.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the domestic turmoil in Russia in a video recorded on Saturday. “Today, the world saw that the bosses of Russia do not control anything. Nothing at all. Complete chaos. Complete absence of any predictability,” he said. “We know how to win, and it will happen. Our victory in this war.”
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