Putin likely ‘long-term loser’ after Wagner Group rebellion exposes weaknesses: experts

The Wagner Group’s insurrection may have only lasted about 36 hours, but it will likely have damaging consequences for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his war on Ukraine, experts and officials say.  

Troops loyal to Putin withdrew from Moscow on Sunday after they were called in to guard the capital city against the impending threat of attack from Wagner commander Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenary troops. 

Their removal comes less than two days after Prigozhin launched a revolt that brought Russia to the brink of civil war.

“What we’ve seen is extraordinary,” US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “And I think you’ve seen cracks emerge that weren’t there before. 

“It is too soon to tell exactly where this is going to go,” Blinken said. “But certainly, we have all sorts of new questions that Putin is going to have to address in the weeks and months ahead.”

Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, told The Associated press that it is “hard to see the genie of doubt ever being forced back into the bottle.

“For a dictatorship built on the idea of unchallenged power, this was an extreme humiliation,” O’Brien said, referring to Putin’s dictatorial regime. “So if Prigozhin might have lost in the short term, Putin is likely to be the long-term loser.”

Blinken highlighted the differences between 16 months ago — when Russia launched its massive war on Ukraine — compared to the recent events.

Prigozhin was “front and center” in the past few days as he questioned “the very premises of Russian aggression against Ukraine to begin with,” Blinken noted to CNN.

He posed “a direct challenge to Putin himself,” Blinken said.

“Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of Kyiv, Ukraine, thinking they were going to take the city in a matter of days,” he said. “Now, they have to be focused on defending Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making.”

While the threat of a Wagner Group rebellion has since been stopped, it exposed not only the Kremlin’s weaknesses, but also made the country vulnerable to future attacks in Ukraine, where troops were pulled from the battlefields to respond to the Moscow threat from both sides, analysts and officials said.

“Prigozhin’s rebellion and the resolution of the events of June 23 and 24 – though not necessarily the Prigozhin/Kremlin struggle writ large – will likely substantially damage Putin’s government and the Russian war effort in Ukraine,” wrote The Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The US-based think tank closely has been closely following the Russia-Ukraine war and said the Kremlin “now faces a deeply unstable equilibrium.

“The rebellion exposed the weakness of the Russian security forces and demonstrated Putin’s inability to use his forces in a timely manner to repel an internal threat and further eroded his monopoly on force,” the ISW wrote in a Saturday release. 

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced Saturday that Prigozhin would be exiled to Russian-aligned Belarus, with any charges against him for the foiled armed revolt being dropped in exchange. 

The deal was said to have been mediated by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.

But “the Lukashenko-negotiated deal is a short-term fix, not a long-term solution, and Prigozhin’s rebellion exposed severe weaknesses in the Kremlin and Russian [Military of Defense],” the group wrote. 

The ISW highlighted contrasting images, one showing Putin warning of a revolution and demanding the end of the armed rebellion and another in which the longtime Russian president required “mediation from a foreign leader to resolve the rebellion.”

“The imagery will have a lasting impact,” the ISW wrote.

Prigozhin smiled for selfies with roadside civilians as he was forced into exile Saturday. 

Everything to know about the Wagner Group’s attack on Russia

Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenary fighting force will not face charges and will instead be exiled despite leading an armed insurrection against Moscow Saturday, the Kremlin said.

Prigozhin, owner and founder of the mercenary organization, called for an armed rebellion and threatened to rush Moscow in order to oust the minister who he accused of ordering the bombing of his war camps in Ukraine.

However, Prigozhin eventually agreed to halt the Wagner Group’s advance on Moscow just 120 miles from the capital city after a day-long negation the mercenary leader had with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who was given permission to broker a deal with Progozhin by Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s presidential plane left Moscow early Saturday, sparking rumors that he had fled the Russian capital as the Wagner Group’s mercenary forces advanced on the city.

The president’s aircraft was spotted on flight radar flying northwest from Moscow to the St Petersburg area — but then disappeared from the system near the city of Tver, the BBC reported, where Putin owns a large rural retreat.

READ MORE

The rebellious mercenary leader and onetime Putin protégé began his revolt after what he said was a Russian military attack targeting his troops’ camps in Ukraine on Friday.

He accused Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s General Staff, of calling for the attacks on his troops after conspiring with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to eliminate the mercenary group.  

Russia’s Defense Ministry denied doing so.

Ben Barry, a senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the revolt “will have been of great comfort to the Ukrainian government and the military.”

Wagner troops were among the Ukrainian military’s fiercest battlefield rivals in the ongoing war. Russia’s Chechen fighters also backed off their Ukraine war efforts Saturday when they were called to protect Moscow during the in-fighting.  

Despite Prigozhin’s claims that issues arose just Friday, US spies gathered intelligence showing he had long been preparing for an uprising.

Prigozhin also spent months leading up to the revolt railing against the Russian army leadership.

In a video clip from May, he spat profanities at Gerasimov and Shoigu as he stood in front of roughly 30 blood-soaked uniformed corpses. 

“Shoigu! Gerasimov! Where is the f–king ammunition?!” he seethed 

“These are someone’s fathers and someone’s sons,” Prigozhin said in the video, pointing at the bodies. “The bastards that don’t give us ammunition will eat their f–king guts in hell!”

With Post wires