By Tiko Okoye
According to the Institute for the Study of War, Rostov – just 100 kilometres from Ukraine’s border with Russia – houses the Command and Control Centre for the Russian Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine as a whole and serves as home base for the Russian southern military district command, whose 58th Combined Arms Army is at the forefront of checkmating Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the south. There certainly would be hell to pay should Wagner’s push to Rostov – occurring at a crucial inflection point just as Ukraine is starting its long-predicted counteroffensive – undermines the confidence and fighting morale of the Russian military.
When rumours started circulating that Putin had fled to a safer location, the Russian president knew that it was imperative to address and reassure his fellow country men and women and supporters around the world that “there is no shaking!” Though not calling him out by name, an obviously rattled Putin accused his erstwhile confidant and bosom friend of ‘betrayal’ and leading ‘an armed rebellion,” vowing to crush everyone involved for exposing Russia to opprobrium.
This reaction rubbed Prigozhin the wrong way, most especially after taking the extra care to exclude Putin from the list of those who failed the nation and reassuring military officials in Rostov that his mercenaries only acted in pre-emptive self-defence and pledging that they won’t interfere with any ongoing military operations in Ukraine. He considered Putin’s denouncement as a betrayal and declared that the Russian had made a “wrong decision.” Determined not to be bottled up in a location where his troops could easily be picked off like sitting ducks, Prigozhin ordered his troops to march on to Moscow.
Prigozhin’s fighting words cast a pall of anxiety and fear on Moscow, culminating in the issuance of a terrorist alert and rapid deployment of soldiers and heavy armaments in the streets, particularly around the Kremlin, the Russian seat of power. It was as well that Russian authorities didn’t take the threats posed by Prigozhin very lightly. Here’s a hard-nosed man with plenty of relevant experiences of coup-making in Africa and military battles around the world.
And then – as the old clichéd saying goes – a twist in the tale soon developed and matters started getting curiouser and curiouser. It was reported that Putin’s soulmate, Lukashenko, had brokered a deal that would see Prigozhin heading to exile in Belarus while officers and men of Wagner “who played no active role in the uprising would be reintegrated into the regular Russian army.”
Less than two hours after Putin’s stentorian address to the nation, the Kremlin announced that all investigations and charges have been dropped and that nobody, including Prigozhin, would be prosecuted. So, virtually within the blink of an eye, Prigozhin went from a hero to a scumbag and zero to something in-between!
But Putin and Russia will never be the same again. If his inability to walk his talk in Ukraine raised question marks over the battle fitness and effectiveness of Russian troops, Prigozhin’s short-lived insurgency, invoking memories of the 1991 coup d’etat attempt against then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, was the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
There’s a long list of nations and their leaders that must be consternated and flummoxed by what happened. Sino-Russian relations have significantly strengthened bilaterally and economically over the past few years with the signing of multiple treaties of ‘friendship and cooperation’ and signed contracts for the construction of crucial gargantuan projects like gas and oil pipelines.
Still, President Xi Jingpin would feel that his hand has been forced by Putin’s underwhelming performance as a reliable partner. He had been hoping that Putin would resolutely keep the goings-on in Ukraine in auto-pilot mode to keep distracting the USA and buy him enough time to crystallize a failure-proof strategy to seize Taiwan by way of a military expedition.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would also be biting his nails. Majority of the six million Jews murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz were from Ukraine. Yet, Netanyahu gave Volodymyr Zelenskyy – himself a Jew – a complete runaround which, although bad enough as it runs counter to the motto of Global Zionism and raises the poser of “When is a Jew not a Jew?” got even worse with his grotesque attempts to stop the West from supplying Ukraine with much needed arms, on the grounds that they were transiting through Iran to end up at the borders of Israel!
The constellation of nations – including China, Brazil, Iran, South Africa and some Middle East countries – that not only refused to comply with the sanctions imposed on Russia but also chose to collaborate with Putin to create a new World Order that would countermand America’s overwhelming influence, must be biting their tongues and gnashing their teeth by now as payback time is imminent – and the price of a failed coup can be very extensive and humongous.
And while it is to be expected that Ukraine would be thrilled at the sudden turn of events and hoping it would improve the odds of executing its counteroffensive, it must also be ruing not expeditiously profiting from the security lapses inside Russia that Prigozhin’s mutiny exposed – and wondering how spies on the ground and spy satellites failed on that score. For crying out loud, Prigozhin with 20,000-40,000 mercenaries went all the way from Bakhmut, on one of the highest-priority highways, M4, through Rostov on to Voronesk – halfway point between Rostov and Moscow and less than 300 kilometres to the latter – without firing a single shot or encountering any Russian military resistance!
During a very rare public display of angst against an air vice marshal, an exasperated MKO Abiola, widely alleged to be a financier of military coups in Nigeria, declared that “Only a mad dog will bite the fingers that fed it.” Having displayed the clear symptoms of a dog ravished by rabies, Putin had no choice but to quickly act to principally save his own skin.
His position would have been more precarious if Western democracies had capitalized on the pervasive uncertainty to rapidly move in special forces and counter-intelligence agents to forment civil unrest and provoke regime change but for the fact that they, while extremely pleased with the further demystification of the much-touted Russian military might, have been unable to identify a more capable successor.
Fearful of what became of nations like Libya after their military intervention, Western powers are very wary of Russia’s awesome nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of dangerous anti-West rogue non-state actors in the absence of a leader with a strong personality.
Prigozhin’s exile to Belarus is hardly the ultimate solution as Putin can ill-afford to have him running amok and endangering his own very survival. If FSB agents could easily fly to London to poison Alexander Litvinenko – a former officer of the FSB and its predecessor, the KGB, irrepressible Russian dissident and fierce Putin critic who went AWOL and fled the country – with polonium – then doing same to Prigozhin in Russia’s satellite state of Belarus would be a walk in the park, now that five more lethal Novichok poison variants are even already in use.
Days after the uprising fizzled out, and he was last seen entering an SUV supposedly en route to Minsk, Prigozhin remains incommunicado and his whereabouts is unknown – except for a 14-minute audio recording he released in which he reiterated that he never considered Putin as a bad leader and that the aborted march to Moscow wasn’t aimed at effecting a regime change as many were saying.
My take is that Wagner would be split into two organisations. The homeland Wagner would come under the authority of the military and continue to play some form of role in the war with Ukraine given the proven prowess and fighting spirit of the battle-hardened veterans among the mercenaries. The international Wagner that would continue to superintend the business of funnelling billions of dollars into Russian coffers from foreign interventions, with majority of the mercenaries in the homeland unit opting to crossover to the international unit if given such an option. I cannot envisage Prigozhin involved in either, and he can only freely move around whenever Putin dies. It is what it is.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether Putin would hearken to the voices of the displeased and vengeance-seeking generals goading him on to handle Prigozhin in a draconian manner, including an assassination, to serve as an effective deterrent to wannabe copycats in the present and future. So, would Putin aim at assassinating Prigozhin at any cost, even if he’s most likely to precipitate his own demise as became the lot of the last Tsar to rule over imperial Russia, Nicholas II, and decimation of his own legacy as happened to the House of Romanov and that former president he viscerally loathes for overseeing – “in traitorous obeisance to the West” the disintegration of the ‘glorious’ Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev? Only time will tell.
