Prigozhin’s failed coup
Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner mercenaries marched on Saturday to overthrow Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. And they seemed as hell-bent as Libyan opposition forces were when they marched to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Everyone was rooting for those Wagner mercenaries to succeed. That is, except for the notorious few whose lives depended on hedging their bets. But that’s why everyone is still scratching their heads. We are trying to figure out why they didn’t emulate those Libyan forces, or what their failure to do so portends. Nobody knows.
But that is not stopping experts from appearing all over TV, offering rank speculation as informed analysis. My own suspicion is that Putin somehow convinced Prigozhin that snipers had sights on his wife and daughter and were just waiting for his order to pull the trigger. And that he would issue that order if Prigozhin did not call off his coup.
Still, I suspect Prigozhin and his mercenaries will regret not marching all the way. And that truism Ralph Waldo Emerson famously coined informs my suspicion. He warned that:
When you strike at the King, you must kill him.
That warning is as basic as it is prophetic.
Prigozhin must know about this Emersonian warning. Hell, even Putin himself couldn’t resist alluding to it. He did so when he commandeered his state TV on Saturday morning to condemn the unfolding coup.
Putin clearly feared he would suffer a similar fate. That’s why he could not see the obvious irony in his analogy. After all, he was putting himself in the fateful position of that czar who the Russian people executed. And that’s because they hated Nicholas even more than the Libyan people hated Gaddafi.
Prigozhin becomes Putin’s Frankenstein
Of course, the irony of ironies is that Putin created Prigozhin. In this sense, Karl Marx one-ups Ralph Waldo Emerson. That’s because this attempted coup uprooted a dirty little secret: Putin’s Russia contains the seeds of its own destruction. Indeed, Putin knows better than anyone that Prigozhin is just one of many bad seeds.
No doubt Prigozhin has grown into the thorniest of them all. And even Putin, the former KGB spy, the master manipulator of men, and the grand wizard of political intrigue, never thought Prigozhin would be such a pain in the ass.
After all, Putin took pride in pruning Prigozhin’s growth. That is, from serving as “Putin’s chef” to serving as overseer of his foreign legion. The latter is all Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was supposed to be: an army of mercenaries and trolls creating mischief outside Russia at Putin’s behest.
For example, they fomented civil strife across Africa to extract mineral resources. And they propagated disinformation across America to help Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. They were not supposed to be fighting a war in neighboring Ukraine for obvious reasons. Putin already had his little green men (aka undercover destabilizing forces) doing that. And he could always deploy his vaunted Russian army to back them up if necessary.
Well, Putin got fed up with his little green men. That’s because, for eight years, they did little more in Ukraine than behave like drunken leprechauns. So he deployed his army on February 24, 2022. He touted their mission as a 3-day “Special Military Operation” to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine.
Except that his army then fought like little more than properly uniformed versions of his little green men. And we all know how events have transpired since then. That explains Putin calling on his foreign legion to settle what he framed as just a domestic spat between Slavic brothers.
Wagner mercenaries in Ukraine
Wagner mercenaries take fiendish pride in violating the rules of conventional warfare. They have no compunction about committing war crimes. But international prosecutors had already filed thousands of cases against Putin’s conventional army. They were allegedly committing war crimes long before he called in the Prigozhin cavalry.
Even so, I need only say the name Bakhmut to convey the meat-grinding march of folly Wagner mercenaries found themselves on. Prigozhin was not pleased. But for months, he could only post rants on social media. He ranted about Putin’s generals withholding ammunition, subjecting them to unnecessary risks, taking credit for their small battlefield victories, and even firing on them to make them look like overhyped keystone cops.
That led inevitably to him blaming Putin. And he crossed the Rubicon in this respect just days before launching his coup. He sat calmly, sipping tea as if to convey soundness and sobriety, and told the Russian people that Putin’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine was all a big, costly, and deadly lie.
He informed them that Ukraine never posed any military threat to Mother Russia; that neo-Nazis do not govern it; and that Ukrainian soldiers are killing Russian soldiers like flies, but only in honorable and admirable defense of their country. Prigozhin then telegraphed what any self-respecting military commander like him would do in this case. Then came Saturday.
The military coup that wasn’t
As indicated above, he was executing his coup against Putin with ease. You know, the kind of ease with which Putin was supposed to execute his Special Military Operation against Zelensky. But then Prigozhin suddenly called the whole thing off. It made no sense.
What is clear, though, is that this attempted coup made Prigozhin look just like the bungling, blustering blowhard who created him.
Putin’s fake power
In the opening days of this war, Putin’s dreaded soldiers were marching on Kyiv. Zelensky reacted by rejecting offers to flee and requesting weapons to fight. On Saturday, Prigozhin’s ragtag band of mercenaries were marching on Moscow. Putin reacted by hiding in a bunker and going radio silent.
But nobody should’ve been surprised that this purported strongman turned out to be so weak. After all, Putin has spent the past twenty-three years building his strongman reputation on photo ops and PR stunts. That included:
- judo sessions, where his obliging opponents allowed him to throw them around like rag dolls;
- deep-sea diving, where he discovered ancient Greek urns in the Black Sea that his handlers had planted beforehand;
- safaris, where he saved a TV crew from a wild tiger that was a thoroughly domesticated one zoo keepers sedated for the occasion;
- ice hockey games, where he scored goals at will because other players avoided challenging him as if their lives depended on it; and
- nuclear threats, where he is continually bluffing about using nukes as if he’s the only leader on the planet who has them.
I could go on, but you get the point. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find a politician or pundit who didn’t buy his strongman reputation hook, line, and sinker. That’s why they were all over TV expressing shock at the weakness Putin showed in the face of a threat of his own making.
But I just wish the British prime minister or French president would call his bluff. And all they have to do is say publicly that one of his generals should tell Mr. Putin that we have nukes, too.
In any event, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. That’s because I spent the past twenty years ridiculing those over-the-top photo ops and PR stunts. I refer you in this regard to such commentaries as “Putin’s Photo Op Flop,” October 20, 2010, “Earth to Putin: He-Man Stunts Make You Look Stupid, Not Strong,” August 22, 2015, and “Icy Baptism Exposes’ He-man’ Putin as a Shivering Wimp,” January 22, 2018.
They are laughable. But the joke has been on everyone – from Western leaders and pundits to Russian soldiers and housewives – who thought those photo ops and PR stunts alone made Putin a strong leader.
There is no honor between Putin and his oligarch thieves. So I don’t know why he expected there to be honor between him and his Wagner mercenaries. But every crisis presents an opportunity. And this one presents a pretext for Putin to end the humiliation and death Russians are suffering in Ukraine. Accordingly, he should:
- Use Prigozhin’s criticism to blame his generals for bungling his Special Military Operation and lying to him about it.
- Order the immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops to spare any more unnecessary loss of life, Russian and Ukrainian.
- Claim that this attempted coup makes clear he has bigger fish to fry at home in Russia.
Hey, hope springs eternal.
But seriously, I cannot overstate that Prigozhin is not the only bad seed. And Putin’s life depends on nipping the others in the bud. I published the blog post “The Plot to Kill Putin,” on February 19, 2022, just days before he launched his ill-fated invasion of Ukraine. In it, I warned that there were more than a few Claus von Stauffenbergs in his inner circle lying in wait to strike. Prigozhin has just proved me right…
Biden’s dithering in the face of Putin’s bluster
There’s another reason why I wasn’t surprised that Putin looked so weak in the face of real, not orchestrated, danger. I have spent the past year denouncing Biden’s drip-drip strategy for sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. That’s because it was so clear that the only thing Biden had to fear was Putin’s trademark bluster. Yet Biden decided it was better to let Putin bomb Ukraine to smithereens than risk incurring his fake wrath by sending Zelensky weapons to stop him.
That unfair dynamic has been stupefying to the point of moral outrage. And I have written many commentaries expressing it. But to avoid too many, I told you so’s, I’ll suffice to cite “Biden’s Dithering Over Sending Weapons to Ukraine Will Be the Biggest Blunder of the War,” December 14, 2022.
Yet even now, Biden has NATO leaders bending over backward to avoid incurring Putin’s wrath. They want to ensure Putin knows they had nothing to do with Prigozhin’s coup. Instead, they should be helping Zelensky exploit the uncertainty this caused in the ranks of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
You’d think, by now, Western leaders would know the folly inherent in trying to appease Putin. Because everyone knows he will blame US and NATO anyway. After all, he still blames them for launching his invasion of Ukraine.
That said, there’s one sense in which Putin’s reputation is well deserved. That’s when it comes to exacting revenge on anyone who betrays him. His unassailable record in this regard ranges from stealth poisoning of dissidents in London to brazen defenestration of critics in Moscow. Not to mention killing opposition leaders like Boris Nemtsov and jailing others like Alexei Navalny.
That’s why, deal or no deal, Prigozhin is a dead man walking. Nothing telegraphs his fate quite like reports about him seeking refuge in neighboring Belarus. Because Putin’s puppet Lukashenko will be all too happy to please his master by setting Prigozhin up for the kill.
And Prigozhin clearly fears for his life. Only that explains his don’t-believe-your-lying-eyes plea for forgiveness. It came this morning in the 10-minute audio message. He wants Putin to believe this was just a plaintive protest, not an attempted coup.
The problem is that this unnerved Putin. That’s why he went on TV to warn the Russian people the way he did. And even this gaslighting liar can’t explain how a little, plaintive “protest” posed the greatest risk to Russia since the 1917 revolution.
It’s unforgivable enough that Prigozhin’s attempted coup made Putin look so weak. Now his plea for forgiveness is making Putin look like a fool.
NOTE: Democratic leaders like Biden have too much respect for autocratic leaders like Putin. After all, autocrats repress their people, kill their political opponents, use their police as a crime syndicate to enrich themselves, and deploy their soldiers as cannon fodder for their own vainglory. By contrast, democrats subject themselves to the will of their people and govern for the general welfare.
Most damning of all, though, is that autocratic “strongmen” are deathly afraid of their own people. And that alone should cause democratic smart men to have unbridled contempt for them.