When the Russian president Vladimir Putin grew up in post-war Leningrad, his attempt to drive away one of the many rats in the building where he lived went awry.
Cornered, the rat turned, chased the boy and chased him all the way to his apartment.
"I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered," Putin described the incident in his 2000 autobiography.
The message, reinforced by Kremlin propaganda over the years, was that it was unwise for anyone to try to corner Putin's Russia because it would react in violent, unpredictable ways.
Yet as Putin faced the most dangerous moment in more than two decades of his rule on June 24, with thousands of heavily armed rebels from Wagner's mercenary forces racing towards Moscow, he backtracked on initial promises to crush the "treasonous" coup.
Instead, he accepted a humiliating compromise that shattered his irreplaceable aura of strength.
Rebel leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was allowed to set up a new base in Belarus. Putin allowed him and his men impunity under a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — even after Wagner's soldiers shot down several Russian military planes and killed their crews.
"The huge lesson we've learned about Putin is that when he's cornered, he's not a rat who pounces, he negotiates," said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank.
“What we've seen is that it's not just Russia's military power that looks weak, Putin looks weak. This is a very, very big crack in the regime.”
The rifts aren't just between the Wagners—Russia's most combat-capable military formation, funded by Putin with billions of dollars of state money—and the rest of the Russian security establishment. The uprising also highlighted deep divisions among Russian military commanders, saddled with heavy losses during the 16-month war in Ukraine.
The system looked like a monolith that remained solid when the war began, said Russian political scientist Ilya Matveyev.
"It seemed that everyone was afraid of Putin and everything would go on as before. But it turned out that was just the surface, and under the surface were all these squabbles, not only among the elites but also among the elites who run their own armed forces.”
If there are winners after Prigozhin's uprising, none are within Russia. Ukraine, Lukashenko and the US and their Western allies can benefit in different ways from the exposure of Russia's fissures. But every part of the Russian regime—Putin, Prigozhin, the armed forces, and the extensive domestic security and intelligence services—was weakened by the ordeal. "There are no heroes here," Lukashenko summed up the outcome of the rebellion.
A product of the same dangerous neighborhoods of Leningrad as Putin, Prigozhin was the president's cook and confidant, running delicate missions, missions that the Kremlin could deny. They included an internet troll farm that the FBI says interfered in the 2016 US election and Wagner himself, who until the Ukraine war focused on permanently strengthening Russian interests in Syria and Africa.
As the conflict between Prigogine and the leadership of Russia's defense ministry grew increasingly bitter in recent months, the 70-year-old Putin appeared paralyzed by indecision, unwilling to take sides until it was too late.
"This crisis was completely created by Putin. Prigozhin was Putin's creature and owed everything to Putin's patronage," said Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and former British ambassador to Belarus.
"This speaks volumes about Putin's misjudgment of the political and security situation in Russia itself."
Within the Russian armed forces, tensions between leading generals were visible even before the coup. Key commanders were removed and then sometimes reinstated, partly because of their enmity or friendship with Prigogine. In light of the aborted rebellion, mutual suspicions are further eroding parts of the system.
The head of the Russian Aerospace Forces, General Sergei Surovikin, the former commander-in-chief of Russian troops in Ukraine, once hailed as "General Armageddon" for the massive missile attacks that unsuccessfully tried to destroy the Ukrainian electricity grid and cause a humanitarian disaster, has not appeared in public for days. The only Russian officer to order his men to use lethal force against pro-democracy protesters during another failed coup, an August 1991 attempt by Soviet generals to oust President Mikhail Gorbachev, Surovikin is being investigated for potential collaboration with Prigozhin's rebels, according to multiple Russian media reports . Other high-ranking generals are also being questioned. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to answer whether Surovikin still has the confidence of the Russian president.
"How deep and wide was the support for Prigozhin in the higher ranks of the army? That must worry Putin, and I don't think he knows," said Daniel Fried, distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and former US assistant secretary of state for Europe.
The implications of a failed coup are huge not only for Russia itself, but also for the West – especially as it considers how best to help Ukraine reclaim the occupied land. President Biden and other NATO leaders are gathering in Lithuania for a July 11 summit to discuss how to deal with the new reality in Russia.
Since Putin invaded Ukraine, fear of escalation by the Russian president has limited the level and type of Western military aid provided to Kiev.
Those self-imposed restrictions, especially on long-range weapons such as ATACMS missiles and fighter jets, should be dropped now that Putin has revealed his weakness, many who support Ukraine say.
"This is the moment to strike, when the iron is hot," said retired Col. Matt Dimick, a former White House director for Russia and Eastern Europe who now works with American veterans to supply Ukrainian troops.
"The U.S. and everyone else should be putting as much support as possible and as much human equipment as possible, as soon as possible, into the hands of the Ukrainians so that they can make the most of the opportunities that are now in front of them."
The turmoil in Russia represents an opportunity for diplomacy as well, according to Stephen Headley, former American national security adviser.
"We should use diplomacy to go to countries like Brazil and India, which were in no man's land around Russia and the Russian war in Ukraine, and say: if you are tacitly supporting Putin, you are supporting a loser, and isn't this the time to move a little and be more pro-Ukrainian in his politics?”
Russia's unexpected fragility, however, has also spooked some Western officials, recalling the concerns over nuclear arms control that once animated opponents of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
"These events will reinforce the ideas of those who think that stability in Russia is paramount and that Putin is better than an unknown," said Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Studies, a Paris-based think tank that advises the government.
“This would be a mistake. Betting on the stability of the Putin regime at a time when it is so fragile risks alienating Russian democrats and other Russian alternatives, if they exist.”
While the turbulence in Russia has led to few immediate advantages for Ukraine on the battlefield, Kiev is likely to benefit in the long term if Wagner, the only Russian power to advance since last summer, is removed. Lukashenko emerged as another winner from Prigozhin's rebellion, gaining political prominence and hosting a contingent of Wagnerian troops in Belarus—a force that could now protect his autonomy.
An impulsive ex-convict turned catering tycoon, Prigozhin is far from respected in the Russian army. However, many officers, including high-ranking ones, have come to share his view, expressed in a rambling video on the eve of the uprising, that the war against Ukraine was launched under false pretenses. Hours before ordering his troops to seize the southern city of Rostov, Prigozhin claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — whose invitations Putin has refused for three years — would agree to a compromise if someone "came down from Mount Olympus to reach a deal" last year , thus avoiding bloodshed.
"The war was only necessary so that a bunch of scoundrels could celebrate and get PR showing how strong their military is," he said, before enumerating Russia's massive losses. "And secondly, the oligarchs needed the war."
Prigozhin, however, stopped calling for an end to the war. Many Russian military officers also agree with Prigozhin that, whatever the reasons for the invasion, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, whose resignations Prigozhin demanded, mismanaged the conflict — which led to a series of Russian defeats as Kiev regained half of the original occupied territories.
Without firing a shot on the morning of June 24, Prigozhin's men captured the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov, the main center of the Russian war effort – shortly after Gerasimov fled the building. Wagner's leader sat down in the courtyard with the deputy minister of defense and the deputy head of the GRU military intelligence service, raging at the "geriatric clowns" in charge of the war.
"We came here because we want to capture the Chief of the General Staff and Shoigu," Prigozhin told them, in a video posted by Wagner.
"Take them," said Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, deputy chief of the GRU, with a smile, waving his hand.
Neither Shoigu nor Gerasimov appeared in public that day to rally the troops, and Gerasimov has not yet been seen. The country's fear-mongering security and intelligence services, the army and the National Guard's internal security forces appeared powerless to halt the rebel advance - until Lukashenko negotiated a compromise, under terms that have yet to be fully clarified.
"This weakness will encourage others to continue this adventure, and sooner or later, they will do the job better than Prigogine," said Member of the European Parliament Witold Waszczykowski, a former Polish foreign minister.
Kiev-backed Russian rebels who briefly seized part of Russia's Belgorod region last month say they are definitely inspired by recent events.
Ilya Ponomaryev, the only Russian lawmaker to vote against the annexation of Crimea in 2014, is the political coordinator of Russia's Freedom Legion, one of the two main forces backed by Kiev. The Legion, he said, has thousands of fighters ready to oppose Putin's rule and march on Moscow.
“The regime is a colossus on feet of clay. These events showed not only that it is possible to act against it, but that we must act against it and that the actions will bear fruit," said Ponomarjov.
"This means that we have to finish what Comrade Prigozhin did not finish."
The Kiev-backed Russian rebels, of course, could not count on any of the support within the Russian security establishment that Prigozhin enjoyed, at least not for the foreseeable future. For now, there are no other parts of the military system with the autonomy and resources of Wagner to rise to a similar challenge—especially as Russian counterintelligence operations begin to purge the regular army of generals whose loyalties are questionable.
Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov's militia may one day play a role in the North Caucasus, but it would have little support in Moscow. "For now, there are no alternative centers. The elites are atomized," warned Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
"And the regime has shown in the past that it is learning how to adapt to the enormous failures made by Vladimir Putin."
Putin and Russian propaganda have already accepted an alternative version of reality, proclaiming that, in a difficult hour, the entire society has united around the beloved president. State TV ignored scenes of civilians from Rostov cheering for Wagner and taunting Russian police who returned to the streets after the rebels retreated.
"Looking at the actions of the Russian authorities after the end of the so-called rebellion (which can no longer be considered a rebellion because its participants are not under any persecution by the authorities), I came to the conclusion that our president has become completely senile," Igor Girkin, a former FSB officer who initiated armed rebellion against the Ukrainian government in Donbass in 2014, and who emerged as a prominent nationalist critic of Putin and Prigozhin.
"They truly believe that everyone around them is blind and deaf."
The official narrative may resonate with ordinary citizens who get their news from propagandists on state television, but not with elites who matter in Russia's power structure, said Russian political scientist Ivan Fomin, who left Moscow last year and is now a visiting scholar at the School of in Advanced International Studies from Johns Hopkins University.
"This will give more confidence to Putin's enemies, in Russia and abroad," Fomin said.
"They'll see that you can put pressure on that man if you have a weapon in your hands."
Translation: SK
Bonus video:
