Reading the text of Vladimir Putin’s televised statement on the mutiny of the Wagner organization, an emotional, apologetic, historical text, written rather with great pressure, we find many elements that highlight the general problematic of today’s “Putin’s” Russia and power structure.
1. Heroes but also Τraitors
First, the main contradiction in Putin’s speech is when he calls the men of the Wagner Organization heroes for their participation in major battles in Ukraine, and then accuses them of “stabbing Russia in the back.” That’s the big problem. When you take a paramilitary group that you have built as a “mercenary” body, to leverage Russian interests in Africa and the Middle East, but without at the same time exposing yourself as a state, this is a common international practice. Disgusting and cynical tactics (the US did the same with mercenary organizations like Blackwater), but at least you keep your distance. But when you elevate the same group to the main point of attack in a “war of survival for the Motherland”, you give it the role of a regular army, without being, without being controlled and with an unsolicited right to judge its military and political administration country, then you open a huge pit.
For the history of modern Russia/USSR it is completely unacceptable and disintegrating, that a paramilitary body enjoys the honor (because it is considered as such) of being the main offensive unit, for many months on a front. In the war tradition of the USSR, military units had a bloody rivalry over who would be the first to attack, the first not to retreat “to one”. To each receive the honorary title of “Of the Guard,” to add stars of honor and decorations to their battle flag.
This competition of courage and loyalty to the Motherland, was not limited only to soldiers, it spread to society which recognized the Armed Forces as a clear, solid, unifying force, “baked in battle”, as a pillar of national security and above all of the national idea. And for the deeply emotional Russian soul, the parade, the local war memorial, the local military unit in which fathers and grandfathers had served, is not something simple, it is a solid element of their everyday life.
So when Putin, or his advisers, decided to upgrade a mercenary, personal unit, to a “center of gravity” in the invasion of Ukraine, they were caught precisely in questioning the historical role of the Armed Forces, in nationwide alienation of the people-Army, but also in cultivating disillusionment within regular troops. They saw that they were being sidelined by a group of criminals, opportunists, “dogs of war”, outcasts, extreme right-wingers and nationalists, who often did not even wave the Russian flag, only their own extreme symbols. But at the same time, since this group demonstrated combat ability, initiative, endurance at the front despite its gigantic losses, it also gained respect within society and the Armed Forces. Thus “striking” political capital, which the extrovert and explosive Prigozhin managed brutally communicatively but with enough cunning.
So Putin, even if Wagner offered him war profits, “managed” to highlight it as a new pole of prestige within Russia, a “war-immersed” military unit with political ambitions, at least of its leaders. Who have no problem turning against the administrative structures of the Armed Forces, accusing them of their obvious incompetence, projecting at the same time a permanent anger and disdain for the “compromised, oligarchs and politicians”, in a slick populism.
Thus, Prigozhin, assuming the role of the loud-mouthed child who shouts “the king is naked”, targeting the top military leadership and Defense Minister Shoigu but also the entire Russian “deep state”, won both in the foreground and above all in the background . Where circles of Russian society and many military men meet through online communication channels, to freely and harshly comment on their leaders, recognizing Prigozhin and his subordinates, the ability to “express the common cause”. And now, Wagner tried in the first hours of the crisis to reap this capital, as society and regular troops appeared unwillingly to block her on the “March to Moscow.”
2. References to the past in the Presidential TV Statement, reached as far as 1917
Putin likened Wagner’s current attitude to that of Russia in 1917, when it was fighting in World War I and received a “stab in the back” that “deprived it of victory”, with “intrigues, politicking behind the backs of the people and the army”. And here a big contradiction, as, after 20 years of Putin’s absolute power, how does he now admit that he does not control the country? And how did he leave unchecked “secret forces”, or even “groups seduced by political opportunism” capable of producing such a collapse, as the one experienced by Tsarist Russia in 1917, to lead to the Revolution?
Here we have a confession by Putin about almost “karmic” repetitions of history, and this from a man who had at the core of his thinking, and duly advertised it within Russia and internationally, that “my great country will not repeat the mistakes of the past ». So Putin unwittingly admits that Russia is losing its cohesion, the perception that it remains united and united “against the Western intrigue that uses Ukraine as a puppet”. Therefore, fatalism and recourse to history reveal internal weakness of management and diffusion of power, which in the long run, or even in the short term, will undermine Putin and his entourage.
3. The “internal enemy” is to blame again
Expanding on the above thought, Putin focuses on the “internal enemy” that “mortally threatens our state, our nation” and pushes towards “anarchy and fratricide”. But here too the return to the past is depressing. Since the invocation of an “internal enemy” is a tool of the first post-revolutionary decades, during the Leninist-Stalinist period, where Russia, the USSR more correctly, had become introverted, looking for the enemy within the walls, in order to attribute to him any delay in achieving the socialist vision.
The result is known, rapid progress of the country in key indicators but an equally rapid dehumanization of its political content, where millions of citizens were baptized “guilty” and sent to gulags for “punishment-reformation” (while many were simply executed). This experience, traumatic for the population of the country, which does not forget it, cannot be “carved” again through war in Ukraine. As it is not convincing but only intimidating. And what will now be the explanation, which we suppose the many apologists of the Russian extravagance will hasten to offer us? That Prigozhin is the “internal enemy”, an instrument of “international capitalism”? In a comical repetition of arguments from the 1930s and the public ones of the “garbage of imperialism”?
4. Promise of punishment
In his speech, Putin concludes that “…as the President of Russia, Head of the Armed Forces and as a citizen of the country, I will do everything to defend it and protect the constitutionally defined order and security and freedom of the citizens. Those who organized and prepared the military stand, who took up arms against their comrades in battle, who betrayed Russia, will apologize for this.”
Perhaps the only expected but also here problematic point of the speech. Since he has declared an internal enemy, since he has described him as “world-forming power, capable of sinking the country”, while recognizing his “first heroism”, then indeed, the only solution is to appear absolute in his fight. And he declares it, saying that the appropriate military measures have been taken.
The Issue; How should he now fulfill what he says. But what will he do? Will he – if he can – imprison Prigozhin and his thousands of supporters? Causing new social unrest and creating yet another “hero”, but this time not from the side of pro-Western Russians, but from his own, that of Russian exceptionalism? Will he proceed with the dissolution of Wagner, while he had allowed it to do even its own recruitment within Russia? Will Kadyrov’s Chechens be mobilized against her, another confession that Russia is ruled by guards and their bodyguards?
Will he perhaps depose those officers who worked with Wagner? Prigozhin proudly declared that “all unit commanders in Ukraine were communicating with me through an online cryptographic application to inform me about what is happening at the front and to report to me the mess of the superior officers.” So what will happen here? Will they all be “beheaded”? And if not, how sure can the Russian President remain, that the seed of doubt will not sprout again? And with what morale will the troops in Ukraine continue to fight?
The revelation and the cover-up
Putin’s speech is thus revealing of a Russia that has been acrobating for a long time in many fields and above all in the search for identity. With theories about “Russian space”, i.e. national space beyond the current borders that must be reconstituted, with a revival of a religious nationalism-pan-Russianism with arguments that move outside of history, in the world of myths and the militarized interpretation of the past, with “gurus” neo-pagans of the Alexander Dugin type and embraced with a deathly fatalism, Russia, a large and difficult country, produces many contradictions.
In this setting Prigozhin is a catalyst. Either he was built by Putin himself as a tool to “control” other poles of power and is now “tuning” him to dismantle them. Either Prigozhin has managed to cut his reins and is now becoming independent. Either he has always been independent and now claims a reason beyond a role.
Whatever happens, the Wagner group and their leader, who are now marching towards Moscow as “liberators-punishers”, can turn a lot around. Perhaps Putin himself (the most dangerous since there is no successor state), perhaps his entourage, perhaps the military leadership that will be “sacrificed” as appeasement to the god of war.
But even if the mutiny ends with a compromise, and we see in a short time a cover-up of the crisis, calm and apparent reunification, even the exemplary punishment of the “Wagnerians”, Russia in the 21st century relives its sweeping revolutionary self, its self-destructive of purgatory questioning, which needs to cause a disaster, before rebuilding a new myth.
