The real “higher goal” of the deal was not what a Kremlin spokesperson suggested.
In announcing the deal purportedly brokered by the Belarusian leader, Aleksandr Lukashenko, that Evgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the short-lived rebellion against Russia’s military leadership, would be permitted to “retire” to Belarus, in exchange for stopping his “March of Justice” to Moscow, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov explained that the deal, “was for the sake of a higher goal—to avoid bloodshed, to avoid internal confrontation, to avoid clashes with unpredictable results.”
That sounds very noble, except that only a few hours earlier, Peskov’s boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, gave a televised address describing Prigozhin’s mutiny as treason and “a betrayal,” that struck at the very heart of Russian statehood. He seemed to be preparing the Russian people for a civil war. So, for Prigozhin to literally fly off into the evening sunset (at least for now), is odd, to put it mildly. It is especially bizarre given that in Putin’s Russia, even teenagers can be jailed for posting anything faintly critical of the “special military operation” (it is illegal to call it a war) that the Russian defense forces have been pursuing in Ukraine since February 23, 2022. The liberal opposition figures Ilya Yashin and Vladimir Kara-Murza received prison sentences of 8.5 and 25 years respectively for their social-media criticisms of the war last year. While their weapons were words, Prigozhin’s were tanks and guns. One would think leading an armed rebellion is significantly more problematic for the regime than some tweets and interviews. So what is the true “higher goal” for which Prigozhin was let off the hook?
Evidently, there was genuine fear in the Kremlin of Prigozhin’s mutiny leading to a wider military rebellion.
