The Decibel - How a mutiny weakened Putin’s strongman image

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Over the weekend, a chaotic 36 hours unfolded in the Kremlin. The Wagner Group, a team of Russian military mercenaries created an uprising to challenge the Russian military, before Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin abruptly aborted the mission.But the damage was done – Russian president Vladimir Putin accused Prigozhin of trying to start a civil war. And for the first time in nearly two decades, Putin’s regime appears to be shaken publicly.Mark MacKinnon, The Globe’s senior international correspondent, talks about Putin’s rise to power and what this sudden mutiny says about his control in Russia.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Yeah, so I'm back in London after a few weeks in Kiev and got invited to a housewarming party for some friends that I used to know long ago when I was living in Moscow. And this is a couple. She's Russian, he's Ukrainian. They were living in Moscow on February 24th, 2022 when the war began. Pretty much every Russia watcher, including the Globe's senior international correspondent, Mark McKinnon, was shocked by what happened earlier this week. So Saturday afternoon, which should have been

a very relaxed and celebratory atmosphere, was just completely taken over with a bunch of Muscovites looking at their phones to fill the latest news, messaging their parents, trying to tell them to move

north of the city or get to the Dutch, go to St. Petersburg, do anything but hang around the city center as this column, which included heavy battle tanks, was heading towards the city. The leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yegivny Progozhin, led a heavily armed charge to Moscow. The Kremlin called it an armed mutiny and an attempt at starting a civil war. But it didn't last very long. After 36 hours, it was over.

On Tuesday, Prokhorin arrived in Belarus to start his exile. That was part of the deal that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin struck to end the rebellion. This is a surprising threat to the Kremlin and particularly to Putin. He spent decades building a strongman image and an iron grip regime. Today, Mark is back on the podcast. He'll tell us how Putin built up so much power around himself and what, if anything, it would take for him to give it up. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. So this armed rebellion that happened over the weekend was a really big deal,

partially because it says a lot about the position Putin is in right now. Can you explain why, Mark? by Boris Yeltsin, and then he was president for most of the last two decades. He's been almost unchallenged. There are elections in Russia, but they're sort of farcical and no one, you know, he seems to have maintained, according to official polls, 70, 80% popularity for 20 years. And there's just, there's no one else really on the political map. And then all of a sudden, one of these characters that sort of was always viewed as, you know, an appendage of the Kremlin, was turning around and pointing his weapons right of the Kremlin, was turning around and pointing his weapons right at the Kremlin. And Yevgeny Brigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary company, said his aim was never to challenge Mr. Putin, it was to challenge the

defense establishment that he said had misled the war in Ukraine, that had bungled the war in Ukraine. But obviously, when you have a column of tanks and troops driving towards the capital of any country, that poses a challenge to the government and power. And it was shocking for a lot of Russians because they're not used to pondering the question of what or who comes after Vladimir Putin. And I don't think anybody was really particularly pleased with the idea of Evgeny Prigozhin, whose reputation, you know, this is a man who was a petty thief in the Soviet era and who later rose to become known as Putin's chef and was famous for meddling in elections in the West and for running this mercenary company that has a horrific human rights record in Africa and the Middle East. No one was happy with him taking power. And now, even though this particular mutiny appears to be over, you know, the question of how long can Vladimir Putin remain in the Kremlin is a live one for the first time in a very long time. Well, I want to stick with Putin and his appearance because, you know, Putin has this

strong man, this tough guy appearance. And you said earlier this week that Putin has, quote, never looked weaker than he did at that point when this mutiny was happening. And you said earlier this week that Putin has, quote, never looked weaker than he did at that point when this mutiny was happening. Can you just talk about that? Like, what did you mean when you say he never looked weaker? Well, first of all, I mean, there was no one rising up to defend his supposedly extremely popular rule. But these Wagner fighters that took over the city of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia were, as far as we can tell, being welcomed by residents who were cheering them as they were challenging the supposedly popular Kremlin. And as they did this long drive, 700 kilometers, I think, they traveled towards Moscow.

I mean, much greater distances than the Russian army has achieved in Ukraine so far over 16 months of warfare. There was no real opposition. There were some helicopters that sort of tried to attack the convoys. They were shot down by Wagner's men. And there were flight tracking software that showed that the private planes usually used by Mr. Putin and his prime minister, Mikhail Mishutin, had taken off and gone north towards St. Petersburg. So it looked like he'd fled the capital, although the Kremlin denies that happened. And it looked like his people were not in his army, were not doing

anything particularly to defend him. So Mr. Putin spent the last 12, 24 hours really trying to reestablish himself and to combat that narrative. First, he went on television Monday night and gave a pretty angry speech in which he referred to the leadership of Wagner, not mentioning Mr. Prigozhin's name, which is something he's famous for doing. He never says Alexei Navalny. Now, apparently, he'll never say Evgeny Prigozhin. But saying, you know, these people are traitors and they were, if not collaborating with the West and with Ukraine,

they were doing what the West and Ukraine would like people to do to split Russia, to divide Russia. And then just a few hours ago here on Tuesday, he gave an unexpected address to soldiers who were mustered inside the Kremlin walls where he's hailed them as heroes for stopping the civil war. So the social compact in Russia has for most of the last two decades essentially been, as long as the economy was growing, as long as there was stability in Russia, Vladimir Putin looked like a safe bet for most of Russia. This morning, yesterday, tomorrow, it's no longer clear that Vladimir Putin represents stability, which is the one thing he could claim to have offered Russians. That's really interesting. And you mentioned these speeches.

I mean, what is Putin's strategy here with making these comments? I mean, first of all, he's putting himself in the center of events. Russians are not used to seeing Vladimir Putin speak three times in four days. He is someone who has an annual question and answer session with journalists and who gives the occasional major address, the Interior Ministry, the National Guard, the Army. He's trying to both claim their loyalty and thank them for loyalty that, frankly, they didn't necessarily show on Saturday. I think he's just trying to assure people it never would have gone any further than it did. They would have been crushed. I'll stress this again.

From the very beginning, all steps were taken to ensure the neutralization of this threat, to defend the constitutional order, the lives and security of our citizens. Armed mutiny would have been suppressed in any case. I chose to avoid bloodshed, is the line he's giving. Because of the loyalty of my men, we didn't need to have a battle for Moscow. What an interesting detail that Russians aren't used to hearing him speak this many times. I mean, that's just fascinating to me. And this is because of this armed rebellion, which may have made him look weak for a moment. But on the whole, and as you kind of are laying out right now, Mark, he is an incredibly powerful man within Russia. And I really want to understand, you know, what that means. So just how powerful is Putin in

Russia? So Putin over the last 20 years has established, very early in his rule, actually, established what he called vertical power. And what that means is he abolished all other power centers. So everybody reported up and eventually that the top of that pyramid was him and him alone. So any major dispute would get eventually resolved at the very top. And he sort of backed off of a lot of the day-to-day governance of Russia and held himself above it. And there was a really crucial turning point in about 2004. There was an infamous sort of takeover of an elementary school by Chechen terrorists

in Southern Russia that year. And hundreds of people were killed. It was an at sort of takeover of an elementary school by Chechen terrorists in southern Russia that year. And hundreds of people were killed. It was an atrocious, the worst thing I've ever had to cover. And what happened in the aftermath though, as Putin, what he said was, this is about chaos. We need to rebuild the system. He abolished the system of local elections so that you no longer had all of Russia's regions individually elected governors. Now, from that moment on, so for the last 19 years, the president of Russia appoints the governor of every single region of Russia. So he took direct control from that moment on, effectively the entire country. In parallel, he was abolishing free press, of course, in Russia.

He has obliterated the opposition. Major opposition figures like Boris Nemtsov were murdered. Others were driven into exile. Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Karamurza sit in prison right now. He re-read the constitution multiple times to effectively make himself president for life at this point. I want to pick up on something you said earlier about Chechnya and what happened in 2004. Would you say that his response to that made him kind of popular or the popular person that he was in those early days? He first came in 1999 as the prime minister. And he was at that point, the man from nowhere, this character that no one had really heard of before. And in the late 90s,

Boris Yeltsin, the president, had gone through a succession of prime ministers in very short order in Russian political structure, the prime minister reports to the president. Suddenly, you had this prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who famously, there was a series of explosions around Moscow in 1999. He said, this was done by Chechnya, which had a sort of a de facto independence after the first Chechen War in the early 1990s. He launched the second Chechen War. He personally famously got onto a fighter jet that flew into Grozny during the early days of that conflict. He just looked like this man of action who was in great contrast to Boris Yeltsin who has problems with alcoholism. There are videos of him staggering around. Here was this healthy, young at the time character who you you know, you could kind of see what you wanted

to see in him. Some people said, oh, he was a deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. He looked to be quite a reformer. Other people were like, well, he's from the KGB backgrounds that he'll be a patriot and ensure security. So yeah, the Chechen war was the crucible of how he came to power in Russia. And that's why there are people who are looking at the latest crisis, the latest threat to Putin's hold on power and wondering how he'll react. When it comes to power, you talked about how he kind of consolidated power. How else did he change things? You mentioned that he now appoints regional governors, but what else did he do to consolidate the power around him? I mean, in the Yeltsin era, there were these characters, the oligarchs, they were known as, they still are known as, these extremely powerful businessmen who effectively had all access passes to the Kremlin, shall we say.

And they controlled the TV stations, they controlled major businesses like the state airline. And there was a collection of maybe a dozen of them that were in many ways as powerful or more powerful than Mr. Yeltsin himself, certainly in the late 1990s. And when Mr. Putin came to power, he sort of destroyed some of these oligarchs and made the ones that remained, it was very obvious to them that the safest thing for them to do is to be extremely loyal to the Kremlin. And so for the last 15, 20 years, they have largely been in lockstep with the Russian leadership. And what does this power structure look like now? How are decisions made in Russia? I remember when Crimea was annexed in 2014.

This was an amazing sort of world-changing moment, the legal seizure of territory for the first time since the Second World War. I met with one of these characters who was quite well-known in Russia as sort of a political strategist. And I said, did you know this was coming? And he told me that the way that decisions get made in Russia is often two or three groups with different points of view are invited in before Vladimir Putin. He says, what do you think should happen here? They'll lay out, seize Crimea, don't seize Crimea, make peace with the West, here are the ways out of this situation. And he sends you out of the room and you have no idea if you've impressed him. You have no idea if he agrees with you, disagrees with you. He just sort of gets people to come in, make an argument and then sends

them out of the room and then makes a decision on his own. Wow. That's how it went in his experience anyways. And the decision to invade Ukraine reportedly caught even, you know, his foreign minister off guard. He didn't believe it happened until the war had already started. We'll be right back. And what about the Russian public? I mean, I know it might be difficult to know this, but what do we know about how they feel about Putin, given all the way he's maintained his power all these years? You know, there are opinion polls. And interestingly, the ones that are done by the state-run Vityom agency and those that are done by the independent Levada Center, which is designated as a foreign agent because it's seen as cooperating with Western interests. They actually sort of agree on the idea that about 70% of Russians, sometimes more than that, still support Vladimir

Putin, consider him the most trustworthy figure in Russian politics. But given the atmosphere in Russia right now, this sort of atmosphere of fear that's been created, the possibility that you can be drafted off the streets, the fact that holding up a blank sign can get you jailed. If a stranger calls you on the phone, and this is how these polls are still conducted, and asks you, do you support the president? You'll probably say yes, just because that's the safe answer for you and your family. So there's not much stake that could be put in those opinion polls. There's something that used to happen in the Soviet era, which is when you're having a conversation that you're really not sure of the safety of the situation you're in, people would go in the kitchen and then turn on the tap. So it would sort of make it difficult for listening devices to pick up. And then you would talk politics.

You know, my last trip there, I actually had that happen a couple of times. People would go in the kitchen and almost had a habit and then they'd sort of like start talking. So, you know, that atmosphere of fear, the fact that you don't quite trust your neighbors, the fact that you don't quite know what's safe to say has returned. And that tells you a lot about the direction the country's heading in. And the fact that people, they'll say out loud, they support the president because that's what you have to do. Just like during the Soviet era, you had to go and sort of wave a banner for Lenin. Okay. Let's talk about Prokofiev and Putin's relationship here.

So Prokofiev said on Monday that this rebellion was never intended to be a challenge to Putin, but to the military leaders of Russia. So what's going on here, Mark? Can you help me understand? What is he trying to accomplish by sort of focusing his intention on the military leaders versus on Putin. I mean, the history of Prigozhin and Putin goes back to the 1990s when Prigozhin, as I mentioned, sort of as petty criminal, started up a catering business in St. Petersburg and somehow became close to the then deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin. And that evolved into this sort of relationship that saw Prigozhin serving meals early in Putin's presidency to the likes of George W. Bush. And then in 2014, when after the annexation of Crimea and the start of this sort of murky proxy war in the eastern Donbass region of Ukraine, the Kremlin needed Russian

fighters to go there and supplement the so-called local separatists. And here was a trustworthy friend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who sort of had some contacts, it seems, from his time in jail. And this private military company, Wagner, named after the codename of one of his most prominent fighters, emerged. And then Wagner grew. And after its relative success in Eastern Ukraine, doing what the Kremlin wanted, which was creating this frozen conflict in Donbass, Wagner started being sent abroad to Africa, to the Middle East, to sort of fight for the Kremlin's interests in a way that the Kremlin could say, well, that's not the government of Russia doing that. He happens to be a Russian citizen. You can't blame us for that. But since the war in Ukraine began, it didn't go the way anyone in Russia expected. This was a failed

invasion, the failed attempt to take Kiev. So Wagner was back into the fight, and most famously around the city of Bakhmut, which took nine months siege for the Russians to capture. And Wagner and Mr. Prigozhin himself, unlike these other Russian leaders who sort of are seen on television looking at maps and giving orders from Moscow or from Rostov, Mr. Prigozhin would film videos of himself in the middle of Bakhmut with his battle armor on and a gun around his shoulder sort of saying, where's the rest of the Russian army? Why aren't they helping us? His criticisms of the Russian military leadership and particularly the Russian defense minister, Sedyagin Shoigu, and the head of the Russian general staff, Valery Gerasimov, were not only irritating to those

characters, they became extremely popular inside Russia. And so he started to develop a support base. He really sort of got himself into the situation where he was just running his mouth off regularly in these videos and these audio recordings and alienating himself from the people that supplied his troops with ammunition and food supplies. This feud escalated to the point where Mr. Shoigu said, that's it. I've had enough of Wagner. You're all going to have to join the regular Russian military signed contract with us, which would have basically cut Mr. Prigozhin out. Mr. Prigozhin would. Mr. Prigozhin would have been the head of nothing in particular. And so what Mr. Prigozhin said this weekend is all

I was trying to do was sort of prevent the dissolution of Wagner. And this is, again, the system that Mr. Putin's created where people are allowed to sort of disagree with each other, and then finally have to go to Mr. Putin for a resolution. I don't think he expected or should be driving into Moscow or had a plan for what he'd do when he got there. And this deal that he has managed to get for himself, in the end of the end of the day, he's going to be in Belarus. But Wagner, today we're hearing it's handing over its heavy weapons to the Russian military. Its fighters are being given the choice of going to Belarus with Mr. Prigozhin or signing a contract with the regular Russian military. So fighters are being given the choice of going to Belarus with Mr. Prigozhin or signing a contract with the regular Russian military. So Mr. Putin today effectively has brought an end

to Wagner or so it seems. Yeah. We've seen in the past what Putin does to opponents or anyone who tests his power, but he has allowed Prigozhin to go to Belarus with immunity and said on Monday that any of the Wagner soldiers involved could also go to Belarus or could join the Russian military or just go home. I don't know, this seems very out of character for Putin. What's going on? You know, this detente, which was brokered by the Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, allows both of them to sort of stand down from a situation they weren't comfortable with. But you're right, this is not how Putin probably wants to treat this. It does send a signal of weakness.

And, you know, Russian social media for the last 48 hours has been filled with memes about, you know, Mr. Prigozhin needing to stay away from windows or avoid drinking tea while he's in Belarus because no one can really foresee, you know, a situation where he feels extremely safe living in a de facto Russian client state while he is seen as sort of the symbol of Vladimir Putin's weakness. Big picture here, Mark. Could what happened mark they fighting for? Who are they fighting for? You know, this leader, you know, Vladimir Putin, who's telling them to take not one step back. I mean, did he get on that plane to St. Petersburg? Did he flee the capital? Why am I standing here? So there's no evidence yet. This is a turning point in the war, but you can

certainly see why there's optimism that if, as we saw last fall in the Kharkiv region, if there's a breakthrough, maybe the Russian troops in that area will melt away faster than you'd expect. But the other worry is that Mr. Putin will look to reassert himself as a tough guy leader by taking some new and dramatic new actions in Ukraine or in the standoff with the West. Mark, thanks so much for talking with me today. Thank you, Cheryl. That's it for today.

I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Michal Stein helped produce this episode. Nagin Nia is our summer producer. Our producers are Madeline White and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.