Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Cracks in the Kremlin? With Fred Kagan

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Does Putin’s hold on power now look stronger or weaker? What can we learn about where the Russia-Ukraine war is heading? And what is actually happening with the Ukraine counter-offensive? Fred Kagan is the Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. Fred is a former professor of military history at the US Military Academy at West Point. He completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University. The Critical Threats Project – https://www.criticalthreats.org/ Institute for the Study of War – https://understandingwar.org/

I am certain that Putin is suffering from a lot of insomnia, worrying about how to persuade his inner circle and all of the guys with various degrees of force and capability that they need to do what he says and get in line and be loyal, and they need to not be thinking about how to do this right the next time. Does Vladimir Putin's hold on power now look stronger or weaker? On last week's podcast, we had a conversation with Richard Fontaine in which he laid out why he thought that after the Wagner putsch now halted, Putin actually looks stronger. Does he? Well, our guest today, Fred Kagan, disagrees. I was checking in with Fred and he laid out why he thought there were real cracks in the Kremlin right now based on the Wagner mutiny. So where does the Ukraine war head now in light of these possible cracks?

And what is actually happening with the Ukraine counteroffensive? To answer these questions and others, Fred Kagan called me back. As listeners to this podcast know, Fred is a regular on these conversations. He's the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. He's also working closely with the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. By the way, the Institute for the Study of War has almost daily analyses that they distribute that I highly recommend in terms of what's happening in the Russia-Ukraine war. Fred is a former professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and he completed his PhD in Soviet and Russian military history at Yale University.

He is a fluent Russian speaker, and he has a range of sources throughout the Ukraine and Russia. Putin, Prokosian, cracks in the Kremlin, counteroffensive from Ukraine. This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast frequent guest, fan favorite, and certainly someone on the speed dial whenever things are kind of going to hell somewhere in the world, military historian and head of the Critical Threat Center at the American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Fred Kagan. Fred, thanks for joining us.

Dan, thanks so much. It's great to be back with you. You are, as you know, one of the first people I wanted to get in touch with as things were developing or devolving, depending on how you look at it, over the last couple weeks. And so I just want to jump right into it. Do you look at events with the Wagner Group mutiny, the Progozhin Putsch, as we described it in our last episode, even though it's been suppressed, and even though Progozhin appears to have been halted, that he revealed cracks in Putin's reign, cracks that others, if not him, will be able to seize upon. Or, as Richard Fontaine laid out in

our last episode, the larger concern he has is if you look at someone like Prigozhin and the resources available to him in the Wagner Group, there isn't anyone else in Russia who has those kinds of military resources and manpower available to him and who is a legitimate Russian nationalist and would be willing to take on Putin. If he's silenced, who else is there? There's no one else who could marshal those kinds of resources to take on Putin. So where do you come down? Well, first of all, we need to think about who Prigozhin actually is.

And I was never rooting for Prigozhin to win here evil guy who is trying to force Putin to do more evil things in Ukraine than Putin has been willing to do, even though it's hard to conceive of such a thing. So there's not a universe in which itgoshin in the popular press in like a similar category to an alexei navalny or boris nemtsov or you know he's not he's none of those people no this is no this is a guy who um kills people with executes people with sledgehammers right um and then gives sledgehammers around us as presence no i mean this is a brutal vicious war criminal mass murderer responsible for slaughtering as presence no i mean this is a brutal vicious war criminal mass murderer responsible for slaughtering of of children i mean some of these yeah maripopo yeah so no this guy this is a very very very evil man and it would have been a disaster if he had taken over russia

that that would not have been a good thing. So no one should ever have been rooting for him. But that aside, Putin emerges from the armed rebellion, as he has called it, much weakened because Prigozhin was not Putin's enemy. Prigozhin was of the inner circle. He was someone that Putin trusted. That's why he was allowed to have the Wagner Group and the armed force. That's why he was allowed to recruit throughout Russia. That's why he was allowed to recruit in prisons. That didn't happen despite Putin. It happened at Putin's urging because Putin trusted Prigozhin's loyalty. And Prigozhin turned on him. This is the first time that I can think of that someone this close to Putin, this deep in his confidence, turned on him in this way.

And not only turned on him, but attacked him with military force. That's devastating to a dictator whose regime is first of all built on the principle of loyalty, and second of all, whose mantra is weakness is lethal. So let's look at this for a minute, because the details of how this went down, just bear with me for a little bit, because the details of how this went down are very important. So Brigogin had clearly been preparing for this eventuality for some time. And by the way, this armed rebellion was Brigozhin's response to the impending destruction of Wagner at the hands of the Russian MOD. He didn't launch this at a moment of his choosing he launched it because he was facing a july 1

deadline to have fully integrate with the mod which is to say effectively lose his independent army so just just just because it's important so so so the defense minister had said that july 1st that this the russian defense minister had said a july 1st deadline that that wagner would have basically been shut the wagner group would have basically been shut down as an independent force and the and the personnel integrated into the formal MOD and Russian army in some way the requirement was that all of the Wagner personnel signed contracts with the MOD it's a little bit unclear exactly what that would have meant but the bottom line was that yes Putin, Putin had finally, Putin has been balancing Wagner against the MOD and protecting the independence of both. Until this point,

he'd finally said to the MOD, okay, you guys can do this, you can force them to sign contracts with you. But he goes and spent a little bit of time trying to argue that case with Putin and failed. And then, and is this was this was Putin worried worried about clearly i mean because prigogin had jumped the shark in various ways um including starting to make noises like he might you know challenge putin politically they were oblique and they were complicated and he just generally got out of control although i don't think that he ever actually meant, first of all, this was not a putsch intended to overthrow Putin. It was a rebellion intended to force Putin's hand. It was what Putin called it an act of blackmail. And so Prigozhin weirdly thought that he was still sort of being loyal to Putin.

He was just trying to eliminate the Tsar's evil advisors in the Defense Minister Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov. So it's a complicated situation, but the bottom line is that this was, first of all, not an attempt primarily to overthrow Putin. Second of all, not launched because Prigozhin wanted to do this particularly, but because he had lost the battle with the MOD and he wanted to try to do this rather than losing his force entirely. So he seizes the city of Rostov and surrounds the headquarters of the Southern Military District, which is also the overall theater headquarters for the war in Ukraine, although he doesn't take it or disrupt operations. And then he sends a column of maybe about 4,000 guys with some tanks

and armored personnel carriers and importantly, air defense defense assets racing up the road to Moscow. Okay, before we get there, before we get there, I've just seen the reporting and I've watched some of the video and what is most glaring about the about the Wagner presence in Rostov and specifically at the Southern Military Headquarters, is the seeming lack of resistance. Yes. From... Exactly. Okay. Exactly right. Not a shot was fired.

No one resisted him. Why? Were they confused? Could it be that they were just confused as to what was going on? I think it's a complicated series of things because no one resisted him on... No ground forces resisted him on the road to Moscow either and in fact people at checkpoints surrendered to Wagner forces on the way and apparently Russian some Russian pilots shot at the convoy as ordered but others apparently refused

orders to fire with the convoy I think there were a few things going on one was yes everybody was surprised and the Wagner guys shocked everybody second of all and a lot of them a lot of the russian military knew these wagner yes they didn't view them as the enemy right they were russians they'd been fighting now the 10 there were tensions but they they were russians they were fighting and there was not and they're fighting on the same side fighting on the same side against the ukrainians as though and they're all fellow russians there's no enthusiasm in the russian military for shooting at fellow Russians. And so there was that going on.

But there was another thing, and this is incredibly important. Prigozhin's narrative is extremely resonant in the Russian military. His narrative is Shoigu and Gerasimov lied to Putin, lied to the Russian people, lied to the Russian military. They have been incompetent, which is unequivocally true. They are deeply corrupt, unequivocally true. They have led and ordered, they haven't led anybody, they have ordered Russian soldiers to their deaths, true. They haven't supplied them properly. True. They've treated them very badly. True. All of that is true. And everyone in the Russian military knows that. That's the narrative that Prigozhin was carrying with him. And his message was, I'm not trying to remove Putin. I'm not trying to take power.

I'm trying to get these two bad guys who have screwed you all over out. That's not a narrative that wasn't, the resonance of that narrative was apparent in part by the fact that no one was willing to shoot at them. No one was willing to resist them because that's what they were, in part, because that's what they were doing. That's what they claimed that they were doing. And I think it actually is what they would claim to be doing. So that's incredibly bad news for Putin, right? That shows that there was, there's no confidence in him in the Russian military, that the narrative that his picked

and loyal leaders of the Russian military are bad guys and incompetent is deeply resonant in the Russian military. And that even his internal security services were not willing to die for him. That is a calamity for a dictator whose mantra is weakness is lethal. That's weakness. It gets worse, Stan. I am not at all sure that Prigozhin could not have gotten into Moscow if he had continued. I'm not even even for the same reason yeah that he got into russia that he got into the military it wouldn't have been surprised in the same way but i think there was a clear lack of willingness on the part of the russian forces to fight his guys the forces were not present that would have been necessary to stop and you know a mechanized

attack on moscow which is not surprising i mean the russians weren't expecting a mechanized attack on Moscow, which is not surprising. I mean, the Russians weren't expecting a mechanized attack on Moscow. But I think if you look at the first Putin speech in which he addresses this, he's shaking. He was scared and he was right. He had no confidence that he could stop Prigozhin by force. That's a calamity. And just, you're an historian, just to put this in historical perspective, was the last time forces threatening a Russian regime got this close to Moscow? Was that World War II, 1941, Operation Barbarossa?

When else have we seen forces like that, in that much of an organized way, marching on Moscow? They were just like two hours south of Moscow, right? I mean, yeah, I mean, I guess World War II. Look, there's never been anything like this, in truth. This was certainly not since the Soviet, not since the Russian Revolution, not since World War I. And the 1917 analogies are nothing, are inappropriate. They're not like this. This was a sui generis event. And I think we really shouldn't be looking at historical analogies to understand this, because Putin's regime is a unique thing. It's not a normal state. So all of that is

catastrophic for Putin. He manifested weakness. He was weak. Everyone knew that he was weak. And then we have almost the coup de grace in terms of humiliation. Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, a guy who is in command of a country of 8 million people. Okay, I mean, let's everybody let that sink in. Let's understand what Belarus is. Belarus is the end of the tale of the Russian dog. And Lukashenko calls up Prigozhin. We know what Lukashenko did because Lukashenko gave a very long speech in which he detailed exactly what went down, at least from his perspective. And he said, but Igorzhin would not take Putin's call. Think about that.

But he took my call, says Lukashenko. And I was able to intercede with him and help him understand that this was bad, that this was hopeless. And I talked with Putin, and I talked with Prigozhin, and Putin gave us the guarantee that Prigozhin could go to Belarus and that he would be safe. Putin gave him security guarantees. Putin himself admitted that. Putin referred to a promise that he had made.

So think about all of that. Lukashenko is getting up and saying, Putin had lost control of the situation. Okay, but can I just... So the way it's been spun, at least from Russian government propagandists, is that, and you're saying this is nonsense, I guess, but just to represent that Russian propaganda, is that Putin kind of stayed above it

and that Prokosin was such a weak and ultimately subordinate figure to Putin that Putin let another subordinate figure, Lukashenko, kind of deal with it, and Putin stayed above it, that he wasn't going to do something as undignified as reduce himself to having to deal in a bilateral way with Prokosian. Listen, I don't know what happened. I don't have the call logs.

What I know is that Lukashenko made this speech. And I know that what Putin has said about Lukashenko is thank you. So that narrative that Lukashenko has put out there is out there. It was widely circulated. And the Kremlin, look, Kremlin fllax can spin this any way they want to. Everybody knows what went down and they have Lukashenko counting coup on Putin and announcing his ability to mediate within Putin's inner circle. When Putin failed to do that is an incredible humiliation. And that leaves Putin badly

weakened. He's also clearly lost confidence, as he should, in the loyalty of his military. And so we have a lot of reports of various purges that are going on, of witch hunts that are probably, we'll find actual witches in the Russian officer corps, which are a huge distraction for Putin. And he's also apparently given orders to transfer heavy equipment to Roskvateria, the internal security force that has been asking for tanks and other things for a long time, didn't have them and so wasn't able to stop Prigozhin's advance. That means that certain kinds of equipment are now going to be dedicated to preserving Putin's regime from itself rather than available for use elsewhere. All of these things weaken Putin. And as to the point that, you know, Prigozhin was the only guy who had the wherewithal to do this. Yes, Prigozhin was the only guy who had the wherewithal to mount a mechanized attack on Moscow from within the Russian forces,

other than, I suppose, Ramazan Kadyrov. But I don't see Kadyrov doing that. And Kadyrov's forces are smaller anyway. He's the Chechen warlord. Right. Yeah. But look, keep in mind that Prigozhin was not trying to take power. Prigozhin was trying, first of all, to lure elements of the Russian military to defect to him, which didn't happen, but also to force Putin to make changes. If you're talking about, are there other power brokers who have the wherewithal potentially to seize Putin, to do other things, to take power in Moscow? There are other forces out there. Mechanized assault on Moscow is one way to go about it,

and probably not the best. So I am certain that Putin is not sleeping soundly at night, reflecting on the thought that he's destroyed this threat to his rule. I am certain that Putin is suffering from a lot of insomnia, worrying about how to persuade his inner circle and all of the guys with various degrees of force and capability that they need to do what he says and get in line and be loyal, and they need to not be thinking about how to do this right the next time. So another way perhaps to think about this is, and I know you don't like the historical analogies because as you say, this is sort of a sui generis, a unique moment, so this one will be imperfect. But if you think about Yeltsin's final run in office, where there was a long period in the 90s, not when there was open revolt against him or an attempted push against him, but just growing irrelevance. uh russia just started to think of him as um not not as consequential as he'd once been or not as

consequential as the office uh he was holding that it was just you can cut corners you can ignore him you can take shots at him from time to time sure he was still the president but he was not as formidable and he certainly wasn't as intimidating and kind of all-encompassing in his power and that so i think we tend to analyze what's happening these binary terms like is it the end of putin or is it not and there's maybe there's something in between that which is it's not the immediate end of putin but it is sort of like that period of those yeltsin those last couple years of yeltsin where people, he just, various leaders around the country just started to ignore him. Look, I think in many respects, it's more fraught and more dangerous than that, because, look, first of all, Yeltsin was committed to more or less democratic changes in power. I

mean, he handpicked Putin, but Putin did still have to win a relatively free election, which he did, or I guess 2001. So that's one thing. But look, Yeltsin was not a dictator. He had various flaws, but he was not a dictator. And he wasn't relying on force, and he wasn't relying on the aura of invincibility and all-powerfulness, which is what Putin has been relying on. That has been being brought into question over the course of this war, but it's now fully on the table. How much in control is Putin actually? Being forced to do a deal with Prigozhin rather than grabbing him and shooting him in the head,

which would be the normal dictator move here with or without a trial, instead having a promised Lukashenko that Prigozhin could have. This is worse than what you're describing with Yeltsin. This is shaking the core of the Putin mystique. And he is going to, he is certainly working very hard now to repair that as best he can, but it's been badly weakened. I don't think Putin can ever be irrelevant in the way that Yeltsin perhaps was in some areas, except by distraction. And I think that the way that anything like what you're describing happens is that Putin and the inner circle become so focused on the Moscow internal power struggle that they lose track of what's going on around the country. I don't see evidence

that's happening yet, but it's too soon to tell. He can't become irrelevant, but he can become isolated or distracted. But I also think, Dan, it's important. Look, everybody has, not everybody, a lot of people have tended to run to various hyperbolic discussions of all of this. And I think it's very important that we take an even strain here. Could this be the imminent beginning of the end of the Putin regime?

Yes. Could the Putin regime collapse? Yes. Could Russia collapse? Yes, although I think that's a lot less likely than people presenting it as. Could Putin re-solidify power and emerge from this even stronger? Harder to see how that happens, but yes, potentially. Is any of that stuff likely

to happen dramatically over the next couple of weeks? No, it really isn't it could but it's very unlikely and so i think we need we have to keep calm ourselves down here a little bit and understand that yes this was a huge inflection and it was and there's going to be big changes which will become visible but they probably will not become visible for some time and the outcome remains very much uncertain. Saturday, June 24th, Putin gives a speech in the midst of this crisis where he makes all these historical analogies to 1917. I know you're skeptical of all these analogies, especially the 1917 reference,

but I'm not asking if you think it's apt, but Putin clearly thought it was apt. So what is his fixation on 1917? Well, look, I mean, so first of all you have to begin with the Russian military seems to have invented a history for itself in which they were doing fine in 1917

until the revolution came. So the Bolsheviks screwed it up? Well, it wasn't the Bolsheviks it was the the korinsky you know i i i honestly i it was news to me that they've rewritten history for themselves to this degree so i haven't looked into what they're it what happened in their alternate universe but in their alternate universe they had the prusilov offensive and then and then and then they were kind of being straightened out and then they were stabbed in the back in some way and I don't even know, all of which is nonsense. So there's a whole, what Putin's saying about 1917 is all based on a sort of a fictional

historical narrative that they've created about that anyway and I don't know enough about it to engage it. But what he was really trying to do was to conjure the image of the civil war and call on his army not to break and not to engage in what happened in 1917 and then what followed, which was the Russian civil war. So I think all of that was code for, he didn't want to talk a lot about the civil war because Putin saying civil war a lot is not helpful in that circumstance. All of that was code for, hey, everybody, remember how much fun that was? Well, you read about how much fun that was. How about let's not do that? That's really what

he was focusing on, probably with a few stones cast in the direction of, you know, everybody might want to remember that the British and theicans invaded and all that kind of stuff okay i i want to um get to the ukraine counter-offensive uh which was underway before all this happened and talk about where um you know where it stands now in light of all this but before we do just events over the last number of days how do you think beijing is looking at these events i think she has to have been watching this entire war in an increasingly open-mouthed horror um as i was going to say horrified yeah as the as the as the horse that he backed has just stumbled and humiliated himself more and more deeply. The weaker Putin is, the worse it is for Beijing. I know that there are people who are talking about how Russia will become a satellite of China. That's not a thing. This does give Xi, and I'm

sure that Xi will be increasing the prices on everything that he does with Putin because that's why wouldn't you but he wasn't looking to turn to clientize Russia Xi's game here has not been about clientizing Russia Xi's game has been about using Putin to break NATO, to break the West to isolate isolate the United States, to help him destroy the global international order that favors us.

He said that explicitly. So a weakened Putin is bad for him. It's not good for him. At the same time, what's good for us is that the weaker Putin looks and the less like he looks like he's fully in control, the less inclined she is going to be really to lean into helping him because the, the downside risk for she of alienating the Europeans, which he's not willing to do,

um, really just continues to be outweigh more and more any upside risk of helping somebody who just really looks like he's not going to do it okay i want to talk about the uh ukraine counter-offensive can you just it it was not getting that much press attention obviously until the pregogion mutiny kind of brought the press attention back to russia or back to this the russia war where were we in the ukraine counter-offensive how did you think it was going before events of of the recent recent week or so so look i mean as president zelensky and other ukrainians have said it's you know it's been the initial phase of this counteroffensive has been somewhat disappointing.

The Russians had heavily mined their defensive, their frontline defensive positions, and the Ukrainians committed. It's important to note only a portion and I think not the majority of the counteroffensive force that they had prepared. And they struggled. It's difficult to penetrate prepared defensive positions, especially with new units, especially with new units using new equipment. And the Ukrainians were struggling. They were making gains, and that is important. But they were paying a price. It's hard to say how...

We don't track closely how much of a price they were paying because we don't track Ukrainian forces like that. But they were making gains, but not as fast as one would have liked. Certainly not decisive gains. And they were paying a price for it. announced that they, in fact, were going to slow down the tempo of the counteroffensive to reevaluate their tactics and try to respond to some of the challenges that they've discovered. And they seem still to be in that mode, for the most part, of working to address the problems that they have encountered and to be more effective. So that was where things stood when Prigozhin started off on his merry ride. The battlefield was largely unaffected by the armed rebellion.

The ISW team continued to track every day as we have done for going on 500 days now, the war and the fighting on the front lines was virtually unaffected by all of this on both sides. The Ukrainians didn't do anything dramatic. The Russians didn't perform very differently. So we emerge on the other side of this for the moment in a not very changed situation with the Ukrainians still working to adjust themselves while continuing to make some gains, notably around Bakhmut. And notably around Bakhmut, largely, as far as we can tell, with forces that were already there, not with forces that are part of the counteroffensive brigades that were prepared. So let me give you the bottom line. I remain confident that the Ukrainians still have a very good chance of launching another phase of

the counteroffensive that will penetrate Russian lines, and that they will be able to exploit that penetration. I am in how seasonal how seasonally dependent they have time, they have time. Really? Yeah, they have time. I this I think, I'm saying I think I mean, that can that can happen in weeks. I'm not talking about months. And they have they have time to do that. In fact, weirdly, they're benefiting from the delay because a huge amount of land is emerging in the area of the Khovka reservoir after the Russians blew up the dam and that that land is drying out. And that can open some interesting possibilities for various activities. We're already seeing the Ukrainians back on the eastern shore of the Dnipro River in Kherson where they had been before the dam was destroyed.

So I'm confident that the Ukrainians can make a penetration. I don't know that they will, but I'm confident that the Ukrainians can make a penetration. I don't know that they will, but I'm confident that they can. And I'm impressed by the thinness and relative, I think, brittleness of the Russian defenses. Because as the UK Amadeus reported, confirming our own assessment, the Russians don't have operational reserves. Pretty much all of the available Russian forces are committed to the front lines all along that long line that they're now holding and some places trying to attack, which means that if the Ukrainians can make a serious penetration anywhere, the fundamentally engaged in the activity of defending a road that runs from Rostov along the northern Azov Sea coast to Crimea. The Russians have to defend the entire length of that road. The Ukrainians only need to cut it in one place. If they cut it in one place, the Russians will have a huge problem sustaining

defense in other parts of the line, and they will face a real risk of having a larger scale collapse of their line. That means that the Ukrainians really only need to win once here. The Russians need to win all the time. That's the situation that generally favors the Ukrainians. And then when you factor in that Putin is increasingly now going to be focused on internal security, on loyalty, and allocating even resources that he would otherwise. And he's lost a lot of this Wagner personnel. And he's lost Wagner as the kind of force that it had been. Because even whoever signs up with the Russian MOD. I mean, the Russians, Dan, the Russians have shown themselves to be hopelessly stupid. So it's conceivable that they might leave those guys together in units, but that would be unfathomably stupid.

So they will very likely break these guys up, whereupon that Wagner force that was probably the most effective force that the Russians had, will be dispersed and basically lose its effectiveness permanently. And the Russians will not be able to reconstitute a force like that. All of those circumstances favor Ukraine. So although Ukraine is not deriving the kind of benefit from this that some people who were sort of hyperbolizing and hoping that this could go in a certain very dramatic direction were hoping. Nevertheless, these events should give us reason for optimism that the Ukrainians will be able to make significant gains and liberate a significant portion of their people and territory. And this would be a superlative time for the United States

and the West to lean in rapidly to help them have the equipment that they need to carry on with this incredibly important counteroffensive at this time. The, you know, if there is new momentum to the Ukraine counteroffensive or a new phase of it that you say could have more heft and incremental success than the current counteroffensive, and if Putin is actually distracted with internal kind of Kremlinology and internal power fights, and Wagner is not integrated or fighting on behalf of the Russian army the way it had been. If all these things are true, one could argue that Putin is incredibly weak, and that's another reason why Ukraine has some kind of advantage. And as you said, it's asymmetrical in terms of how Ukraine has to be successful relative to how Russia has to be successful in this phase.

That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is Putin is going to become increasingly paranoid and less and less risk averse and cornered, cornered everywhere. And, you know, a leader of a country, of a government that has a nuclear arsenal and still has a vast military, as quote unquote stupid as you say the military may be, a vast military, conventional military at his disposal disposal, and a massive landmass can do a lot of escalatory and very dangerous things. Is that a risk? Is that something you're concerned about? Look, I'm not, I'm relatively, look, I wasn't very concerned that Putin was

likely to escalate vis-a-vis us. I wasn't really concerned about that at all. Putin knows perfectly well that if he gets into a war with NATO, he loses. That was true before the war. The Russians were very clear about that. That's even more true now. He does not want to get into a war with NATO. He does not want to get into a war with NATO.

He is not going to get into a war with NATO. That does not help him. So I really think that the risk of that kind of escalation is extraordinarily low. He is not an apocalyptic thinker. He is not a Hitler in that regard. He is interested in ruling in this world, in this life, and he is not interested in going out in a big ball of thermonuclear fire. So I think if you can look

around leaders who would do the kind of things that he's done and ask, you know, who are least likely to press the button and blow everything up as they're going down, Putin, you'd put Putin in the category of people not likely to do that. It's also important to understand, first of all, I don't think he will become less risk averse. On the contrary, I think he will continue to be even more risk averse. He is not a gambler because he's because he's hanging on for dear life because he's never he isn't. He is risk averse. And because the thing that you need to understand about Putin's personality, if you want to understand any one thing about him, is that he is all about judo. He has a judo mindset. And that has a few forms. One is he's always about using the enemy's strength against him. But it also means he understands that he can be thrown. But his view

was always, okay, if you throw me, then I will get up and then I will throw you So this is not a guy who thinks he can be cornered this is a guy who thinks he can work himself out of any situation and You know, this is look I recognize the dangers of you know, psychoanalyzing a guy At this distance in this way, but we've also seen him in action for more than two decades now. Yeah, something could snap. He could go crazy. He could do various things. It's fascinating that he didn't in this case. He worked through this crisis in a relatively classically Putin fashion. This would have been a crisis where one might have gone nuts if one were inclined he didn't

he's accepted bad defeat here and is now just trying to spin his way he let him basically let himself be thrown here uh rather than trying to escalate against pregogin in any particular way and now he's trying to recover in classic fashion so i think yes of course, it's, this is a very dangerous situation. I don't think it's especially more dangerous in terms of escalation now than it was before. The same risks that are real are there. The Russians could generate a radiological incident to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. It doesn't really help them to do that in any way. It doesn't help them with the constituencies Putin cares about. It doesn't help them with the constituencies Putin cares about. It doesn't help them on the battlefield.

They could do it anyway. It's possible. He could threaten to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. He could use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. This has been a risk all along. There are some scenarios where that might seem to make sense to him. I actually think that the likelihood of him doing that has probably gone down because the basic factor that we think has been restraining him on that is the

risk of devaluing Russia's nuclear threat by using a nuclear weapon and not achieving a decisive effect, which would be catastrophically damaging for him. I think the fact that he's weaker now makes it less likely that he would take a risk like that, but it's possible. But that's been a risk all along. That's the risk, as Ukrainians have been putting this very well. We all collectively absorbed the risk that the Russians might use nuclear weapons in Ukraine the moment the Ukrainians started fighting the invading Russian army. That the risk is inherent in Ukraine defending itself against an invading nuclear power. I don't think that risk is higher now than it has been. And I think we have to... Let me just finish addressing this in this way.

If you are concerned about escalation scenarios of any sort, if you are concerned about scenarios of Russian collapse, and I think those are also overdrawn at the moment right now as well, the best thing to do is to end this war as quickly as possible on terms that are acceptable to Ukraine and the West. The biggest danger for escalation or for Russian collapse is the continued protraction of this war. Those are the ways, the protraction of the war are the ways that you get to very worrisome

escalation scenarios. In other words, I think that frankly, the the administration's approach to managing escalation has been exactly backwards they've been so so prioritized on not doing things to trigger escalation that what they've done is to have the effect of protracting this conflict and i think we need to turn that around so what what exactly does that look like well so we need to lean in to providing the ukrainians with the military equipment that they require including giving them the attack on this longer range precision systems that they've long been asking for and which there's absolutely no reason not to give them rush rush the provision of more tanks and bradleys especially getting m1s onto

the battlefield uh you know and more advanced air defenses giving them f F-16s, giving them the equipment that they need to carry through the successful counteroffensive and doing and understanding that the counteroffensive is going to be a multi-phased undertaking that will probably take many months and have multiple pulses. So it's not just about giving them what they need now. And it's also not just about talking to them about the longer term. It's about making clear that we're going to give them what they need now. We're going to give them what they need for the next phase of the counteroffensive, and they can count on and plan to have what they will need to liberate their territory, which is our state objective for them. And we're not doing that.

Okay, one last question before we wrap, because it's something I've been thinking about, and I actually haven't asked anyone as informed as you. What do you think would have happened had Wagner gotten to Moscow? Like, what was the plan? So, okay. First of all... And I know you're not in Putin's head and I certainly know you're not in Prigozhin's head.

Thank God. There's no room in there amidst all the sledgehammers. Okay. So I think the plan was first of of all pregoshin's plan was that elements of the russian military would defect and join his force so that he would he would enter moscow uh with a larger contingent than he had set out with um and that potentially other units elsewhere would would rally to his banner and seize their facilities.

He clearly intended to get to Moscow. I think he meant to seize and occupy the Ministry of Defense, possibly the general staff. People are saying that he somehow thought that he was going to capture Shoigu Rukadasimov. I don't understand in what universe he imagined that those guys were going to hang around to be captured, but okay. And then what was he going to do? I think at that point, he intended having sort of possessed himself, not only of the Southern Military District headquarters, but also of key facilities in Moscow. I think he intended to go to Putin and say, listen, Vova, here's the deal. I'm not trying to replace you. All I need you to do is fire these traitors. And I want this guy to be minister of defense. And I want that guy to be chief of staff.

And I want this and a bunch of other things for Wagner. Do all of that stuff. And I will turn right around and enthusiastically go back and fighting Russia's enemies. I think that that was his actual plan. Could it have worked? No, it couldn't in the sense that I just can't imagine Putin, even in those circumstances, agreeing to a surrender of that variety. But I think that that's what, I'm pretty sure that that's what was in Prigozhin's mind.

And I think that if either Lukashenko or somebody, or I don't know who, hadn't persuaded him that he really needed that this wasn't going to happen, he could have probably gotten into Moscow and done even more enormous damage to Putin than he actually did. That is amazing to me. I mean, just that it was that possible. We think so. We could be wrong. I mean, it's hard to tell. The notion I'm also having in my mind, and I am alive to the vision of trying to drive armored columns, or not even armored columns, but these sort of truck-mounted motorized columns through the streets of Moscow and not having anybody try to stop.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know. And you are presumably more loyal forces in Moscow at a certain point would have tried to do something. So I don't want to overstate. Yeah, but it would have been chaos. It would have been chaos. And it's not clear that the point is, I think when you read Putin's body language in that

speech, the Saturdayurday speech he was not confident that he could stop pregogin from doing that and that is what matters and and let me just before we let you go do you think there was anyone maybe either in putin's inner circle or maybe a ring or two outside of his inner circle that were egging on, that was egging on Prokosian? Either, you know, even quietly egging him on. In the inner circle? I don't know. Close to the inner circle.

Someone who matters. People that matter. Dan, first of all, we will find out based on who permanently vanishes. Because they will find out. It sounds like they've arrested Sudovikin.

The Air Force. Yeah. Right. The former Air Force. Air Space Forces commander Sudovikin. They sound like they've arrested him. He was very close to Prigozhin. Throughout the rebellion itself he was calling on the wagner guys not to follow uh prigogin and he himself refused to meet with prigogin and in rostov um it now it now seems that he had prior knowledge that this was going to happen and but realized it wasn't going to work. And he was trying to save himself. Looks like that failed. I wouldn't say that he's in the inner circle. Listen, I just

don't know. I don't really think so. I don't think that there was anyone else very close to Putin who was backing this. I think this was Prigozhin's lone play. But listen, all I can say is watch the life patterns, watch the heartbeat of the people in the inner circle, and we'll know the answer to that question. And one final, final question. Just based on your tracking, both what you're doing at AI, critical threats, and also what's being done at isw what's your sense and i know this is sort of a hard question to answer but what's your

sense for what the russian people are being told is going on or what what the is there a consensus among the public based on your on your analysis of the you know public opinion well look i don't know what russians there's, I don't know what Russians, there's no direct ability to measure what Russians are thinking about anything. There are various indirect indicators of that. We do know what they're being told. We know what the Kremlin lines are,

and we also know what the mill bloggers are saying. And the mill bloggers are speaking to the Russian people at this point still uncensored. And so mill bloggers are speaking to the Russian people at this point still uncensored. And so the Russian people are being told that the war is going badly. They are being told about that Gerasimov and Shoigu are crooks and incompetent. They are being given a lot of messages that are very, that things are bad. And so that is known. That is known in Russia.

And Putin hasn't been stopping them, the mill bloggers, from saying that to the Russian people. That's a whole other conversation we could have another time, or better yet, you could have one of our experts who follows that come on and talk about it. But we know that there is a certain amount of truth

that is being told to the Russian people, along with the Kremlin lies. Although even there, interestingly, Putin gave guidance before the counteroffensive began, sorry, by which I mean orders, that Russian media was not to downplay the counteroffensive, that he was trying to reestablish some degree of credibility for Kremlin mouthpieces with the Russian people,

which was a clear recognition that he thinks the Russian people know that this is not going well. How much enthusiasm is there in Russia for this war? Well, there is so much enthusiasm that Putin seems to be unwilling to order another round of reserve mobilization or deeper call-ups or put Russia more heavily on a war footing. That's a kind of an indication that he is not sure what happens if he presses that button. I don't know what Russian public opinion is. He probably has a much better sense. That's my indicator that Russian public opinion is not enthusiastically with him on this. And even, and also the Wagner group troops, the mercenaries were were you know used as basically cannon fodder and so you know to the extent that they are just tired of this of this fight

you know is also a signal well yeah yes um that's right and that they followed pre-cojone doing this uh loyally and of course that no one shot at them tells you how the Russian military or parts of the Russian military feel about this. The silence was deafening from a lot of senior Russian military leaders while this was going on. And that was the best that Putin got. And that was very noteworthy. He didn't get senior Russian generals out there rallying the troops. He didn't get senior Russian generals out there rallying the troops. He didn't get senior Russian generals out there attacking Pyagosian. The best that he got was silence.

That's, again, that's another really bad indicator for him. All right, Fred, we will leave it there. Thank you, as always, for the tutorial, the history lesson, and the rich analysis that you and your colleagues at Critical Threats and at ISW provide. We will post show notes and links to all these resources. I highly recommend listeners use them. I check these sites regularly.

I get these action reports in my inbox all the time. It's really a tremendous service you provide to nobody's like me, but also to people who actually matter, who are working these issues day to day in our national security infrastructure. So Fred, thanks for everything you do, and thanks for coming back on. Thank you so much, Dan. It's been great. That's our show for today. To keep up with Fred, you can track his work down at the Critical Threats Project. That's criticalthreats, one word,.org.

And also the daily analysis and research I highly recommend at the Institute for the Study of War. That's understandingwar.org, one word, understandingwar.org. We'll post those links in the show notes as well. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.