Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Contrarian take on the Wagner Putsch - with Richard Fontaine

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched a rebellion, coup or putsch against Moscow. It's still hard to discern what it was. As of now, It seems Prigozhin has halted the Wagner operation. The situation is fluid, and we aren’t going to leap to conclusions on this podcast. But our guest today, Richard Fontaine, told me he is skeptical that these events so far reflect real cracks in President Putin’s rule. So I asked Richard to hop on our podcast to unpack where he think events are headed. Richard is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), bi-partisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, DC. Prior to CNAS, he was foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department, the National Security Council, and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He serves on the Biden administration’s Defense Policy Board – which advises the Pentagon.

You know, if you look at this in the big kind of global picture, Russia's become, for China, the drunk, embarrassing uncle at the Thanksgiving table. They're now related to him. They've signed up. They're with the Russians through thick and thin. But the Chinese are trying to portray themselves as worthy of global leadership and presenting a reasonable alternative to a Western-based, Western-led international order and all these other kinds of things. And Russia is over time showing itself to be less effective militarily than when China and Russia announced this quasi-alliance right before the war began, less politically coherent than before, less competent than before, poorer than before. And that's not good when you're looking for an ally. Over this past weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group,

launched a rebellion, or a coup, or a putsch, or it's hard to discern exactly what that was, against President Vladimir Putin's rule. As of now, it seems that Prokofiev has halted what appeared to be a military or at least a political offensive against Moscow. It's difficult to know where these events in Russia are headed. The situation is fluid, and we aren't going to leap to conclusions on this podcast. After all, you have Twitter for that. But our guest today, Richard Fontaine, told me over the weekend that he's skeptical that

these events reflect real cracks in Putin's rule. Now, if you do follow the conventional wisdom, that is a contrarian take. Many observers and analysts and historians are saying these are early signs of Putin's fall. Richard does not agree. So I wanted to bring him on the podcast and hop on for a quick conversation so we can unpack what he's seeing so far. Again, he himself recognizes it's still early days, but this is his analysis of what he's seeing so far. the Center for New American Security, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank in Washington. Prior to leading CNAS, he was a foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain and worked at the State Department in the George W. Bush administration and the National Security Council,

and also on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before that. He also today serves on the Biden administration's Defense Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon. So Richard actually has real-time insights into the thinking of the current administration and its handling of this crisis. And he also has a tremendous network in NATO countries from his years working in foreign policy. So he's an ideal guest to help us at least understand where we are in early innings of this crisis or non-crisis, depending on your take. Richard Fontaine with his contrarian take on the Wagner putsch

against Putin. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend Richard Fontaine, the CEO of the Center for New American Security, former Bush administration national security official, longtime advisor to Senator John McCain and the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a close watcher of events in Russia and Ukraine, a part of the world that he has traveled to frequently. Richard, thanks for jumping on this conversation with me, especially on short notice. It's good to be back. It took a 24-hour civil war to get me back, but here I am. Whatever it takes. You know, I think that events have to get crazy in the world for you to come back on this podcast, but it's not just that. Events have to get crazy in the world for you and I just to catch up and compare notes.

It's perfectly correlated with the chaos in the world. I bet you have a lot of friendships like that, right? So many of your friendships are probably fueled by... Maybe a few. Yeah. Civil War are we talking about this weekend?

But this weekend, we actually did seem to have the sparks of a civil war, which you are skeptical about in terms of what it actually tells us that is happening in Russia and Putin's hold on power, which we'll get to in a minute. But before we do, I just want to quote here from an interview that Stephen Kotkin, who you know from Stanford University, historian, longtime Russia watcher and historian, has written a three-volume, actually really two volumes that are published so far, a biography of Stalin, of Joseph Stalin. The third volume actually isn't published yet, but apparently it's close to being finished. Very, very thoughtful guy. I'm going to quote from something he said over the weekend here. He said, I've long been calling the Putin regime hollow yet still strong. Hollow yet still strong. It remained and remains viable as long as there is no political alternative. Now we might just see how hollow the regime is. Putin has unwittingly launched a stress test of his own regime. He has

already lost his mystique with a bungling of the aggression against Ukraine. Mystique once lost is near impossible to regain. The old cliche about the emperor in clothes. He still possesses enormous power rooted in structures he built around himself, such as the Praetorian Guard, and those he unbuilt. His raising of the landscape of political possibilities besides himself and severe repression to demobilize the populace. Almost every coup fails, Kotkin says. The odds are long. But at least now there are odds. There is one thing that all dictators

properly fear, an alternative. And Putin, shockingly, after years and years of infatigably suppressing alternatives, of promoting non-entities to his inner circle to ensure no one could threaten him, has allowed one to take shape. So the one he is saying saying that Kotkin is saying has taken shape is Prigozhin who's been much in the news over the last couple days for those of our listeners who do not know who Prigozhin is and who his history is before we evaluate what Kotkin says here whether or not while the odds may be long that at least there are odds now before we get into any of that can you tell us who Yevgeny Progozhin was before this weekend's events kicked into high gear? Sure. Yevgeny Progozhin is someone who's

been close to Vladimir Putin for years, probably decades. He's been a professional thug and grifter who's done quite well for himself. He spent most of the 1980s in jail in the Soviet Union for robbery and a series of other crimes. Got his start with Putin. Did almost a decade in jail. Yeah, that's right. And started out with Putin as his chef and caterer. So he started securing great catering contracts and started to make money on the basis of that and had proximity to Putin and sort of expanded out from there. Over the years, he was put in charge of the Wagner Group, this mercenary group of fighters.

Did he create the Wagner Group? It started with him. And for nine years, he denied that he had anything to do with the Wagner Group. And Putin and the Russian government denied that the Wagner Group had anything to do with Russia. But of course, both of those things were untrue, as so much of these things are. And a couple of years ago, he came out and started to kind of trumpet the Wagner Group as a heroic Russian valiant kind of set of fighters, especially but not limited to in Ukraine. He has had the Wagner Group operating in a bunch of countries. They operated in Syria. They're in Mali. They're in other places in Africa.

So he sort of spread them around. It's been kind of one of Putin's quasi-deniable, but not really, mercenary forces that he could dispatch. But who does Prokofiev and Wagner ultimately report to? To Putin, ultimately. And this is why there's been this tension between Progozhin and the defense minister, and the Russian defense minister. That's right. And so Progozhin has had a huge falling out with the defense minister and with the chief of general staff, General Gerasimov. I mean, the Wagner Group was largely autonomous as opposed to independent. And so the Russian military itself could employ the Wagner Group to do things. But ultimately, everybody has reported to Putin. And I think even

in this latest 24-hour sort of spectacle, you can see that it took a whole lot for Prokosian to even suggest that he was crossing Putin. He was spending months railing against Soyuz and Gerasimov, the defense minister and the chief of general staff, for being ineffective on the ground in Ukraine, for not giving the Wagner group sufficient munitions and ammunition. What seems to really have bugged him, however, and I don't see that much of that in this in the coverage, is not just that he thought, you know, the war is not going well and these corrupt incompetent officials have gotten us into it and all of that. He does seem to have thought that, but what seems to have forced the issue is that the defense ministry set a deadline of July 1st by which all of the Wagner Group fighters had to sign a contract to join

the defense ministry, which is to say Wagner would go away as an independent entity run by Prokosian. And that seems to be the thing that he wouldn't tolerate, and so he turned around. And just to be clear, is that something the defense minister wanted? What is it? Shoigu? Shoigu. Right, Sergei Shoigu. Is that something Shoigu wanted or Putin wanted? Putin wanted it. I mean, he gave it to the defense ministry to implement, and they said that they were going to sign contracts by July 1st. And why did Putin want it? I think because, I think there's a couple of reasons. One, I mean, the Wagner group had done, you know, provided a useful service in the kind of narrowly construed interests of the Russian regime in Bakhmut and in a couple of other areas by providing essentially cannon fodder, largely recruited from prisons. They would send them into the city, and that would expose

Ukrainian artillery positions, and then they would bomb those positions. But the casualty rate was just astronomically high among the Wagner group. Once Bakhmut was finally taken, which is a very long battle, and that was sort of Wagner's big claim to fame on the ground. They turned it over to the Russian defense forces. So the Russian army moved in to occupy it. So the Wagner group had, you know, one, it's been very, it's been really decimated in terms of its numbers. And two, it's probably the highest utility, at least this year has already been used. But I think also because, you know, they were looking kind of unassailable, getting a little big for their britches here

with Prokosian, you know, out constantly slamming the course of the war and the defense minister and the general who is the chief of the general staff, and I think ultimately Putin sided with the two of them and not with Prokofiev. Now, Prokofiev, just to stay on him for a moment, he is from St. Petersburg, as is Putin. You called him a thug, which I guess in one sense he is but he's he's i i guess that doesn't um reflect the the level of kind of sophistication he has about politics and about media and politics and about

technology and the military i mean to just say he's a thug kind of say you know he's not just some low-level military boss i mean he's he's he sounds like he's a pretty astute political player. He's become more astute, certainly over the years. The Wagner group has used their Telegram channel, and he has posted these videos and voice messages and things that then get picked up and are distributed around Russian military blogs and in broader media and things like that. And he's a pretty clever custodian of his own image. He is, yeah.

He has charisma. Yeah, exactly. And so over the last few months, he's been going around Russia giving these big speeches. Right, that's what I'm referring to. And sort of polishing. And some of these videos have gone viral. Right, which is why people have said that he may be the only sort of political alternative to Putin. I mean, you have to squint pretty hard to see him as a real political alternative because

of where he came from and because, you know, compared to Putin, he's still, you know, this guy who runs a mercenary army who, you know, goes out and gives sort of impassioned speeches about Russian valor and so forth. But nevertheless, I mean, one of the lessons of all this is for those who've sort of waited for the political alternative to Putin to be the Russian liberals, there were no Russian liberals to be had, right? They're all in jail like Alexei Navalny or they're in Vlade Karamurza or they're in exile like Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Garry Kasparov or something like that. And so to the degree to which there is a political alternative, Progozhin is a guy who has said that the war is not being fought in Ukraine effectively because it's not essentially brutal enough. And he said that Russia needs to turn it into a North Korean-style state in order to successfully prosecute the war in Ukraine. By the way, Prokosian's also under indictment by the United States because he owned the troll farms that were active in meddling in the presidential election

in the United States in 2016. So as much as people saw that march on Moscow and said, oh, you know, Putin may be finally getting a taste of his own medicine, it's pretty hard to root for Grzegorzian and the Wagner group, too. The flip side is, while we all would hope it's a Navalny type. The reality is, I mean, just cold, cynical analysis could easily lead you to believe that if you really want to challenge on Putin, it has to come from the inside. It has to be a true Putin-style Russian nationalist who could play to Putin's base. And that has an army. Right.

Right? I mean, so that's the key thing in all of this is, you know, I mean, if you go back to sort of political theory and Max Weber saying that, you know, the state had to have a monopoly on the use of violence. If you got an army, it's great as long as it reports to you. And when it doesn't, then suddenly you've got yourself a problem. And nobody else, I mean, the Chechens kind of have their own army, and they came out and pledged fealty to Putin and opposition to Prigozhin when this whole thing began, and actually were pulled back from Ukraine to try to deal with some of this. But Prigozhin was a guy with an army. So if we say that Putin is the ultimate Machiavelli, as Machiavelli pointed out looking at Renaissance Italy, it was like a sterling example of the dangers of relying on mercenary troops. Right, right. So how did Putin let this happen?

Well, I think part of this goes back to— I mean, it seems like the quintessential own goal. Yes, there's lots of temptations about relying on mercenary troops, as you've laid out what Putin saw in it, but again, Machiavelli said big danger, and it fits the criteria of what would be necessary to topple Putin. Well, I think there's a couple things. One, I think this was probably unthinkable for quite a long time. Two, the Wagner Group had been used in places that weren't close or very close to Russia most of the time. I mean, even if they wanted to, the Wagner Group wasn't going to turn from Syria and march on Moscow. It wasn't going to turn from Mali and march on Moscow. It wasn't going to turn from other places in Africa. But it turned out Ukraine

was right next door. And Putin tripled down on the use of Wagner in Ukraine. And there's a couple reasons for that. One, the Wagner guys have been much more effective in fighting, just from a sheer what you get and all of that standpoint, than the Russian military. One, because they're willing to take unlimited amount of casualties in order to accomplish their objective, no matter how brutal and bloody that becomes. And two, their decisions are mostly made on the ground,

as opposed to the sclerotic nature of the orders given that go back in the Russian military, usually back up to Moscow or maybe to Rostov if the commanders are there and then back down, which has made them so not nimble and so inflexible that they've missed many opportunities that they could have had in Ukraine. So I think that's why Putin wanted to use Wagner and why the value of Wagner and of Prokosian to Putin was high and why he let Prokosian get away with saying the kind of things that he was saying for such a long time. And of course, the other thing was Prokosian wasn't saying those things about Putin, right? He was saying those, basically... Well, indirectly. I mean...

Well, but it was also to some degree useful foil. It was, you know, the leader's getting bad advice. The leader's getting bad information. He's got bad advisors around him. If only the leader knew the reality, the leader would do different things,

a.k.a. it's not his fault, right? It's the fault of Shoigu and Gerasimov and these other guys. But all of a sudden, you know, seemingly pushed by this demand to reintegrate, and then what they believed to be, you know, insufficient support for Wagner and overall kind of, you know, ineffectiveness in the war, it seems to have come to a head. And he, instead of marching west, he turned around and went the other way. So we'll get to that in a moment. But you mentioned Rostov.

So Rostov is where the Russian Southern Military Headquarters is, which is the principal military hub in Russia for Putin's war in Ukraine. So what exactly did Wagner accomplish in Rostov before they reached this de-escalation? Yeah, so they were in field camps in Ukraine, on the Ukrainian side of the border. The first thing that they accomplished was to march unmolested into the Russian side of the border, which, you know, they crossed the border checkpoints, and no one stopped them, and it's not clear anyone tried to stop them. Those checkpoints are not manned by Wagner personnel, so that was indicative of, at a minimum, the lack of violent opposition to the Wagner group moving. Okay, stop right there for one second.

So does—I mean, again, I know—and we're going to get to this. I know you're skeptical about the broader implications of all of this, but doesn't that even tell you? I mean, we're all told that coups generally fail, but the first signs of a weak regime is the security forces that report to the leader of that regime are reluctant to shoot at someone pressuring the regime. Here you had forces marching into the military headquarters at Rostov. And as you're describing, these checkpoints, people manning the checkpoints were kind of letting them proceed. Yeah, so they went past the checkpoints of the border right to Rostov and then essentially walked into the city

and took over a couple of key buildings. And the number of people involved in this is still unclear, but it sounds like it was maybe 4,000 or 5,000 people and maybe, I don't know, 100 or 150 vehicles or something like that. Like a brigade. He quoted like a brigade. But, I mean, yes, if you step back from this and say 4,000 or 5,000 guys would get together with,

you know, a hundred or at max 200 vehicles and cross the Russian border, march into the Southern military district, and then announce to the world that they're going to march on Moscow and start doing it. And the response would be as it was a a couple of some plane, not a couple, sounds like maybe up to eight or nine or 10 or 12 Russian plane and helicopters were shot down by the Wagner Group when it was kind of on the road. They traveled with mobile air defenses.

And so they did things like put dump trucks in the middle of the road to stop them, and then they just plowed through that stuff, it appears. And next thing you know, you see Russian troops and police trying to destroy, basically dig up the highway on the approaches to Moscow. I mean, this is not how you advertise one's great power credentials, right? Right. These guys want to fight the West. this is not how you advertise one's great power credentials, right? I mean, you know, these guys want to fight the West. I did see one snarky kind of comment that said, you know, the Russian military in 2021 was the second best in the world. In 2022, it was the second best in Ukraine. In 2023, it was the second best in Russia. I mean, this is not going in the right direction for these guys. So yes, my skepticism more about the broader political implications, but certainly, I mean, this is a shocking, stunning turn of events, the likes of which

I don't think anybody really anticipated. Okay. And then again, I do want to get to your skepticism, which again, I think is a contrarian take. But before we do, where are we now as the week begins, the work week, the business week begins when this episode will be posted? Where do things stand? Wagner seems to have reached some agreement or some accommodation with Alexander Lukashenko. So what is the deal? Why Lukashenko? What's going on?

Yeah, and I would say that my money is not on Lukashenko to win the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the reputation of some of the Peace Prize winners over the years. But he did appear to have brokered a deal between Putin or the people around Putin and Prokhorin himself. And the deal was that the Wagner personnel who had not engaged in the act of rebellion would, as had been previously planned, sign contracts to join the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Those who did would not be prosecuted, and that includes Progozhin. Less than 24 hours before it said they're traitors, and there was a warrant out for his arrest and all of that. So that was lifted. And then Progozhin himself would fly off to Belarus and take up residence there. He hasn't so far been seen in Belarus, according to any reporting. But that's the deal. In exchange for that, the Prigozhin's forces would turn around and go back to Ukraine. And that's exactly what they have done.

They were on the approaches to Moscow on the roads. They turned around and started driving back the other way. They were occupying a couple of key installations, including an airfield in Rostov. They turned that over to the local military forces, and it appears they're headed back for their camps in Ukraine. And the kind of overall, I think, spirit that the Russian government now is trying to sort of peddle is, we're all brothers, we're all of the same blood, now let's gang up and kill as many Ukrainians as possible, which has been the plan all along.

And Lukashenko is a junior partner to Putin. Yeah, he is. Basically controlled by Putin. Does this make Lukashenko look like a bigger player than we actually thought of him? Or does it actually fit with the sort of hierarchy that Putin would have some subordinate kind of make Wagner go away? I think it fits. I mean, Belarus is now a quasi-independent country that is dependent on and controlled by Moscow in many ways. Lukashenko has been in power for a very long time. People have referred to Belarus as the North Korea of Europe, so maybe Prokofiev will feel right at home when he arrives.

But I don't know that this tells us anything particularly new about the relationship between Lukashenko and Putin or between Belarus and Russia, other than Putin found a useful intermediary, presumably either because Putin himself wasn't going to do negotiations with, you know, what he was saying was a treasonous kind of, you know, two-bit, he called him scum and the whole thing. And it could have also been the case that Prokosin wasn't going to negotiate with Gerasimov or with Shoigu. And so Lukashenko was as good as anybody as an intermediary. And before we get into your analysis of what's really going on, how do we know—I mean, I just want to be—give voice to the conspiracy theorists. Not that we have a big audience of conspiracy theorists, but to the extent that we do, we have some. How do we know this was actually really some kind of coup attempt?

I mean, Wagner is also a profit-seeking venture. And who says that, you know, Progozhin wasn't just trying to kind of collect debts and be rewarded financially, and this was just an effort to put the squeeze on Putin at a vulnerable time? It doesn't look like that was what was at issue here, and if that was, then it was a major screw up. I mean, his offices in St. Petersburg were raided and they took his cash. They had, you know, he pays his fighters in cash and they took huge bundles of cash. So if it was a financial motive, he's behind where he was before. You know, if he does indeed show up in Belarus for some sort of, you know, gilded exile for a while, I mean, he's lost control of the most valuable thing he's had.

So it's hard to say, I mean, it's hard to disprove that motive, but certainly the facts don't seem to bear that up. What it seems to be is he had in his head that he was going to force a change in the military leadership and how exactly he was going to do that. And this is where I differ with some of the observers who say, you know, this looks like, you know, carefully planned out and well organized. I mean, I was very interested to see when they were on the road to Moscow what they were going to do when they got there. I mean, were they going to assault the Kremlin with a brigade? Or were they going to go to the defense ministry and go looking? Against a military that has an air force.

Right. And, you know, again, they shot down planes and the whole thing. So you can never say never. And, you know, there could have been forces that defected to the Wagner side. And, you know, I mean, these things happen. I mean, you know, people march on capitals and either the forces do nothing or they flip to the rebellious side. So anything's possible. But there didn't seem to be a plan other than we're going to Moscow on this mission of justice, and who knows? So there seemed to be a lot of improvisation to me.

Yeah. Okay. So I want to quote here from Tim Snyder, Timothy Snyder, professor at Yale, historian, another historian like Gotkin, who's sort of a giant in this space, published extensively. He said over the weekend, wars, I'm quoting here, wars end when the domestic political system is under pressure, meaning wars don't necessarily end when one side just shows tremendous strength, superiority, advantage to the other side, although I guess it could end then. But when you really start to see the end of a war is when the domestic political system on one side just says, you know, we're overheating. We can't handle it. And everything you just described, what happened in Rostov, checkpoints, you know, them breezing through checkpoints, you know, no real seeming outrage on the streets against Wagner in the streets of Moscow or anywhere else.

Just a sense that, like, I don't know, there wasn't a sense, at least projected in the media we're following, that the country was rallying to Putin against Wagner, is this an expression or reflection of the fact that Snyder would say the system is just the political system, not the military system. The political system is suddenly under pressure. And by the way, could you have seen that in the speech that Putin gave comparing this to 1917? I mean, isn't that an expression of the political system being under pressure? Yeah, it's definitely under pressure. I don't think it's under so much pressure it's on the verge of cracking. And if you look at, again, the guys who were in security positions,

whether it was key generals, including key generals in the Russian military who were close to Prokhozhin, they all came out and said, essentially, Prokhozhin's a traitor. We don't support the rebellion. We support Putin. The Chechens came out. So other than Prokhozhin, no one came out affirmatively. What I saw in the streets was more apathy than—I mean, yes. When they pulled out of Rostov,

they had people cheering for him. I don't know how many of those people were actually there doing that. And so there's some constituency for Wagner, particularly in a place like Rostov, which is kind of a forward base of operations and planning for the war in Ukraine, so they're quite familiar there, and Wagner had been in that area and all of this. But, you know, you could explain the lack of resistance to Wagner, one, by saying, well, you know, these individual soldiers that could have stopped Wagner decided not to because they were sympathetic to him, or they were just, they weren't loyal to the government, or you could say they just didn't have any orders because nobody in a timely fashion or decided not to because they were sympathetic to them or they weren't loyal to the government. Or you could say they just didn't have orders because nobody in a timely fashion told them what to do about any of this. And I think both are plausible explanations at this point.

I just don't think we know. So, yes, I mean, if you're running a dictatorship, you certainly don't want an army marching to your capital. And so it does show weakness in the political system. But weakness itself is not enough often to bring these things down, if that's what we're speculating about. And the other thing that I think is worth observing is Prokosian has not been calling for an end of the war in Ukraine because it's too costly. He's been saying that we need to fight this more effectively and more brutally than it has been fought before and with less restraint than it has been fought before. So that is different than protests on the streets that believe the price in Russian blood and treasure has gotten unacceptably high and therefore there has to be some kind of change.

That's not what this was. Okay, so I want to just quote one other person here, our friend Michael, Mike McFaul. So for our listeners, McFaul was President Obama's ambassador to Moscow, longtime Putin watcher. He served on the National Security Council for the Obama administration before he was ambassador. We, Richard, you and I will be with Mike in a couple of weeks. But I'm going to draw out Mike here because you disagree with him, so that's good. I want to quote from something he said here over the weekend. He says, since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, analysts and officials have claimed that Putin will never back down, that he needs a face-saving win, example, Ukrainian territory, to end his war.

Events yesterday completely undermined that assumption. Putin has talked tough in his national address. Putin talked tough in his national address. He sounded like someone preparing for a big fight. But when faced with the difficult decision of trying to stop Wagner mercenaries with major force, he backed down. He did not escalate. He did not need a face-saving off-ramp to declare victory. When faced with the possibility of really losing to Wagner mercenaries coming into Moscow, he just capitulated. Instead of doubling down with more force to crush the mutiny, Putin accepted humiliation instead. He was the rat

trapped in the corner that so many Putinologists have told us to fear. But he didn't lash out and go crazy. He negotiated, and with a traitor. The lesson of the war in Ukraine, McFaul goes on, is clear. Putin is more likely to negotiate and end his war if he is losing on the battlefield. Those who have argued that Ukraine must not attack Crimea for fear of triggering escalation

must now reevaluate that hypothesis. The sooner Putin fears he is losing the war, the faster he will negotiate. That's Mike McFaul. What is your reaction? Well, you and I love Mike McFaul for very good reasons. And I actually agree with his conclusion at the end that, you know, when Putin believes that he's losing in Ukraine, only then might he negotiate an end to the war. I don't, though, believe that that's the lesson of what we just saw.

I think that, I mean, some of this is a matter of interpretation, and everything Mike described is, of course, accurate, but you could also say, well, okay, you had the only army that could plausibly revolt, which was the Wagner Group, did so, announced a march on Moscow. Within 24 hours, you had all of the other senior military officials, including the Chechens in this kind of autonomous military of their own, come out and swear fealty to Putin and denounce Prokhorin, what he was trying to do. They came into the country, and in less than a day, without having to use force against Russians in Russia in a major way, you've got Prokosin in exile in Belarus. You've got the Wagner Group agreeing to be absorbed into the Russian military,

and it's over. And who's in the Kremlin? And who's in charge? And Shoigu's still there and Gerasimov's still there. So I mean, Prigogine did not achieve his stated objectives. So I mean, again, some of this is a matter of interpretation. I do think, though, Mike makes an important point at the end, which is that, you know, I think our worries about escalation in Ukraine are real and important, but the worries that this war will go on forever and that a long war will benefit Russia more than Ukraine, I think, is greater still. And so that we should be less restricted in the kind of weapon systems we give to the Ukrainians and the kind of restrictions that we try to impose on them about what they can do in places like Crimea or across the border in Russia itself.

So 1991, there's a coup attempt against Gorbachev. The Gorbachev seems to have secured the situation, but like four, four or five months later, he steps down. Yep. So could we be seeing a version of that now? May not be four months, it could be eight months, it could be four weeks, but, you know, you see the crack, the, the, the crack is, is sealed, you know, and everything is suppressed, and then it incentivizes other down there on the Black Sea where Gorbachev was when the coup went into place, and they've left the sort of office there.

Wow. With his glasses on the desk. Is it still there? Is all that still there, preserved? Yeah. Wow. It was, yeah. I mean, it's now the dacha for the president of Ukraine.

But, well, I would say it was the dacha. When we visited, it was the dacha for the president of Ukraine. Now, presumably, it's being used by some Crimean Russian apparatchik. But it was fascinating to see how this had gone down. And then also, if anybody's read any of the history or is old enough to have seen a little bit of this, the utter incompetence of those coup plotters where they finally go out to give a press conference to announce what they've done to sort of save the Soviet Union, and they're drunk. I mean, they're slurring their speech and, you know, forget not have a plan.

I mean, they couldn't get through a press conference and all of this. So I don't know how causal that was in bringing the end of the Soviet Union and the end of Gorbachev's reign. I mean, if we do the thought experiment and say that that coup had not happened at all, but you still had Russian nationalists as opposed to Soviet nationalists, Boris Yeltsin, agitating on the streets and trying to rally people in a kind of Russian nationalist way. And you still had the same kind of centrifugal forces in all the republics. They were all feeling these nationalist impulses at the same time. And you still had Gorbachev, who was unwilling to spill huge volumes of blood in order to preserve either his own rule or the Soviet Union as a political entity.

So if you didn't have that coup, but you had all those other things, would Gorbachev have lasted longer? Maybe. Maybe. But I don't know. But the real question, of course, is the one you asked, and it's a huge question mark, which is, okay, are we going to look back as this was the beginning of the end of Putin's regime? Or is this going to be more akin to the attempted coup in Turkey where Erdogan came out of this stronger than he did before and he was able to throw anybody he wanted he thought was a potential opposition figure in jail? And here he is to this day, having just been reelected, you know, very recently. I don't know. It's hard to say. I wouldn't bet on anyone

dislodging Putin anytime soon, simply because in order to paint that picture, you have to identify who that person would be and with what force or incentives for those with force, forcible means to defect, are they going to do that? And the guy who was most willing to oppose Putin, at least in broad strokes, was Prigozhin. The guy who had the biggest army that could do this was Prigozhin, and Prigozhin's on his way to Belarus. I think the people around Putin are the outside, you can't see any difference in the bark until somebody punches it and it turns out that it was, you know, hollow on the inside and the whole thing collapses. It's just extremely difficult to predict when that would happen. And if you look over the course of Russian history, I mean, who would have thought that the, you know, the Great Purge and the Ukraine famine that killed 9 million people and the Great Purge in the 1930s and so forth, who would have thought that that would be insufficiently galvanizing for someone to want to remove Joseph Stalin, but the guy died in bed or died in his dacha? Meaning he survived all of that.

He survived it all. Right, right, right. Yeah. Gotcha. Meaning he survived all of that. He survived it all. Right, right, right. Okay, so where was the Ukraine counteroffensive before events of this weekend, and where is it now? The counteroffensive has gotten started a couple of weeks ago. They started a little bit before that with some, as they call them, shaping operations. And they've been trying to make inroads into key areas to sort of probe the Russian lines and see if there's some vulnerability to collapse on those lines. The Ukrainians have said that in the last few days, they've taken a couple of areas, including at least one that was previously under the control of Russian partisans before the 2022 invasion. But that said, the lines

haven't moved a whole lot. The Western train brigades are starting to arrive now. So I think the real test of that counteroffensive is going to be between now and probably the next month or two. The Russians didn't withdraw any troops from the battle lines in Ukraine in order to deal with this uprising. The kind of wild card in all of this is the Wagner Group. So if the Wagner Group really goes away, it's been quite effective on the battlefield, again, for a horribly bloody, cynical, terrible way of fighting. But, you know, it took Bakhmut, and it's taken some other areas, and it's held other areas. So if you don't have that, and you're left only with the ill-performing Russian military,

then does that change anything? And that, I don't know, we'll have to see. And where does this leave the U.S. and NATO in terms of their handling of the situation and more broadly the war? Well, I mean, as they watch this, there was the old Napoleon line, which I guess has been transposed into modern-day politics, which is if your adversary's in the process

of injuring themselves... Get out of the way. You get out of the way, right? So this is the same thing in politics. And they did that, and they just sort of watched this, and other countries did as well. But I think this does a couple of things. I mean, one, from the perspective of the war in Ukraine,

I don't think that much in the NATO, the Western, the U.S. posture has changed. I think still kind of full support, full-throated support in terms of equipment and training and everything else for the Ukrainians. But two, there was worries from time to time about what Russian instability would look like given that the world's biggest nuclear arsenal is held by the Russians. It doesn't appear to anything had changed or nothing moved or there didn't seem to be anything acutely worrisome in the past 24 hours. But, you know, if that's a crack that could appear in this political edifice, then presumably,

despite my sort of pessimism, I guess, that there will be other big cracks to appear anytime soon, it's not to say you can eliminate that prospect. And, you know, we all have a vested interest in making sure that there's an intact nuclear command and control chain and custody of the weapons and authorities and all of that stuff. So I think that will probably get even more attention than it did before the war. All right, Richard.

We will leave it there. I mean, we know we're about, what is it, probably eight months away from the two-year anniversary of this war. Amazing, right? Yeah. And I think that we'll be fighting on that day, unfortunately. So you think this thing bleeds past two years?

Yeah. I mean, from the very beginning, I probably said it on your show when we thought that would be a one-episoder kind of thing, which it wasn't. But I thought from the very beginning that, unfortunately, this was going to be a long war. And, of course, you looked at the war. One could look at the war in the eastern part of Ukraine and the Donbass, that at that point was eight years old, and had killed about 12,000 people, which at the time was a huge number. I mean, we've exceeded those on both sides by just unconscionable numbers. But, you know, it's hard to see the trade space in a negotiation in the foreseeable future between Russia and Ukraine over the things they are in violent disagreement with, unless there's some collapse of the Russian lines somewhere that leads Putin to become more pragmatic and say that he would settle for something that today he clearly is not willing to settle. Even then, you've got problems, right?

Because he could use that time to rearm and regroup and try to do what he has wanted to do all along. But if you have to project forward, unfortunately, I think you project forward more fighting. Before we let you go, there's been lots of speculation what the implications are for Beijing in all of this. Much of the analysis I'm seeing points to this being very bad for Xi and China, the pressure on the regime and what the implications are, even if you say the implications are not as big as we think or some may think. Where do you come out on what this all means for

China or how China will look at this? I think if you look at this in the big kind of global picture, Russia's become, for China, the drunk, embarrassing uncle at the Thanksgiving table, where they're now related to him. They've signed up. They're with the Russians through thick and thin. But the Chinese are trying to portray themselves as worthy of global leadership and presenting a reasonable alternative to a Western-based, Western-led international order and all these other kinds of things. And Russia is, over time, showing itself to be less effective militarily than when China and Russia announced this quasi-alliance right before the war began, less politically coherent than before, less competent than before, poorer than before. And that's not good when you're looking for an ally. You want all those things to be in the other direction. And then from the

narrative perspective, the Russians and the Chinese have liked to point to the democracies, and particularly the Western democracies, as divided, sclerotic, ineffective, not able to deliver to the people the things that those people want, whereas these kind of tech-fueled autocracies are nimble, decisive, undivided, unified, efficient. Where'd you rather live? Right, right. So not in Rostov-on-Don, I will tell you that. Right, right. All right in Rostov on Don, I will tell you that. Right. So. Right.

All right. Well, I will see you in a couple of weeks. I'm sure we will have plenty to talk about then and plenty to talk about the next time we have you on this podcast because to your point, we will probably cruise right into two years of this war and still, sadly, lots to discuss. All right. All right. Thank you, Richard. Until next time. Thank you, Dan.

Talk to you soon. That's our show for today. To keep up with Richard's work, you can go to cnas.org. That's c-n-a-s.org. That is the website for the Center for New American Security. And also you can follow Richard on Twitter. He's at R.H. Fontaine. That's F-O-N-T-A-I-N-E, R.H. Fontaine. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.