Putin achieved everything that he did not desire.
16 months into Russia’s war with Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of Russia’s now disbanded potent mercenary fighting force and a protégé of Russian President Vladimir, turned his troops on the Russian military and, ostensibly, the Kremlin itself.
Within 24 hours, though, Prigozhin had aborted his march to Moscow and turned his troops around. But the damage to Putin’s strongman image and possibly his plans to subjugate Ukraine by force had been done.
From invasion to mutiny
The war that Putin launched against Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, was unprovoked. NATO presented no immediate threat to Russia. Yet, Putin and his closest advisers believed that a Western-armed-and-allied Ukraine presented an existential threat to Russia’s great power ambitions. And while Ukraine was not yet in NATO, Putin felt NATO was already in Ukraine.
As most pundits and analysts in the West repeatedly state, Putin’s adventure failed in its immediate goal – to overthrow the government in Kyiv and establish some form of Russian control of this huge neighbor.
Instead, Putin achieved everything that he did not desire: a strong, unified NATO response in defense of Ukraine; a coherent, nationally conscious, fiercely anti-Russian Ukrainian response to the invasion; and the catastrophic loss of Russian men and material. Were it not for the Wagner Group, led by one-time Putin confidant Prigozhin, Russia likely would not have even achieved its major 2023 battlefield victory over the city of Bakhmut.
Now, a weekend mutiny by Prigozhin and his mercenary force has further complicated Putin’s pursuit of the war. He looks weaker, and the most competent fighting force in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is no longer in existence to prosecute the war.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, leaves the Southern Military District headquarters on June 24, 2023, in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Anadolu Agency via
Putin – Ukraine’s unlikely unifier
Putin proved to be the greatest contributor to Ukrainian nationalism since the 19th-century Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko. And just as the Russian leader has, in important ways, strengthened Ukraine, he has weakened his own country. Soon after he invaded Ukraine, hundreds of thousands of Russians from different walks of life began to leave Russia.
With the mass exodus, the Kremlin had to shift from persuasion to censorship, false narratives and greater coercion and repression to keep the public from opposing the war.
The brittle, fractured nature of the Russian state was made starkly evident between June 23 and June 24, 2023, when Prigozhin, formerly the Kremlin’s caterer, mutinied and began a march on Moscow to replace the leadership of the regular Russian army.
