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Tuesday morning, Vladimir Putin summoned all bodies of the Russian state: military units, National Guard, security services, armed forces. Two thousand agents, all uniformed, gathered in the Moscow Cathedral Square awaiting the message from their leader. With forcefulness and a triumphant countenance, Putin went out to do positive balance of a weekend that could have been devastating for the Kremlin: “You have defended the constitutional order, life, security and freedom of our citizens. You have saved our Motherland from convulsion. In fact, you have stopped a civil war“, told them.
Putin speaks as if the Wagner group mutiny had not shaken the Russian command, and the leader of the mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, did not continue to be a threat to Moscow from his exile in Minsk. This is the strategy pursued by the system: to pretend that Wagner’s rebellion has not ruffled the Russian president’s hair, and that the unit remains intact between the different wings of the Kremlin. “A difficult task”says Sam Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London. “At the same time that they claimed that the country was on the brink of civil war, Putin and the state television networks they have insisted that the revolt had no real support and that it was always doomed to fail,” Greene tweeted.
Moscow, which has claimed that Wagner has agreed to hand over its weapons, is trying to strengthen itself. The Kremlin is trying to feed its army with tanks and long range missilesand on Tuesday afternoon he wanted to gain muscle on the Ukrainian front with the attack that has left two dead and 22 wounded in the city of Kramatorsk. Besides, the National Guard [la fuerza militar interna] will be equipped with heavy weapons and tanks,” reported the Russian news agency Ria Novosti. At the same time, Russian diplomacy is receiving advice from China on missile defense. Despite accusations from Washington and other Western allies, Beijing denies providing weapons to Moscow.
Viktor Zolotov, head of the National Guard, awaits Putin’s speech on Tuesday at the Moscow Kremlin.
As Putin retaliates for this weekend’s coup, Russia prepares its reprisals against Prigozhin, who seems unlikely to emerge unscathed from the “march for justice” with which he headed for Moscow. The president has revealed this Tuesday that Russia fully financed the operations of the Wagner groupwhich involved the Ministry of Defense disbursement of 86,000 million rubles (918 million euros) between May 2022 and May 2023. “In addition, Prigozhin’s Concord catering company obtained 80 billion rubles (854 million euros) from state contracts to supply food to the Russian Army,” Putin said at the meeting with the forces of state security, reports Reuters.
“I hope that, in the framework of this work, nobody has stolen anything or, let’s say, has stolen less, but, of course, we will investigate all this,” the Russian president told the two thousand agents. Earlier this year, Prigozhin said that he had always financed Wagner, but that he had sought additional funding after the start of the war in Ukraine. On Monday he declared that he had not tried to overthrow the Russian state, and that he was still a patriot trying to settle scores with the Defense Ministry.
[Putin admite que Rusia ha estado al borde de “una guerra civil” tras el motín del Grupo Wagner]
[Lukashenko: “Nunca hemos estado tan cerca de una guerra mundial. Si Rusia se cae, moriremos”]
[El jefe de Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ya está en Bielorrusia tras haberse rebelado contra Putin]
The White House will promote this week actions against Wagner, as announced on Tuesday by Matt Miller, spokesman for the US State Department. In addition to the attempted coup, the US also condemns the exercises of those from Prigozhin in Africa. “These are actions that we are taking against Wagner not in connection with the events that occurred this weekend, but because of his past activities,” Miller said. On the same day, the US announced a package of $500 million in military aid to Ukraine.
Putin’s strategy
“Putin hopes — through a series of events, such as last night’s security meeting and today’s speech in Cathedral Square — rewrite the narrative of the Prigozhin coup as one of consolidation and consensus. It may be a difficult slope to climb,” Sam Greene said in a tweet on Tuesday. For the academic, the biggest threat to the Russian president after the riot at the weekend is not Prigozhin, but “the possibility that these events break the secrecy of public consensus that there is no alternative to Putin”.
A flag flies in Moscow on Tuesday with the message: “For the homeland, for sovereignty, for Putin.”
During his 23-year rule, support for Putin among the elite has not been ideological: “it is based on his belief that he can, among other things, hold the system together and keep them safe from the people. If that belief falters, they can start looking for a more effective leader. Thus, Putin’s rhetoric addresses both the elite and the masses: “Look,” he says, “everyone is with me, so don’t jump ship.” The question is if the elite believes it. We’ll have to wait and see,” Greene concludes.
An issue that will have to be clarified after the episodes of recent days will be how much support Wagner has among the Russian population. Despite the Kremlin’s insistence that the paramilitaries do not have enough followers in the country, the images that arrived from Rostov-on-Don contradict this version: while the troops prepared their departure for Moscow, the locals showed no problem going out to accompany the mutineers. Whether out of devotion to Prigozhin’s organization or not, the attitudes of Rostov’s residents seem to reflect a fracture — still incipient — of Putin’s absolute leadership.
