Putin’s War on Ukraine Backfires, Leading to Wagner Uprising at Home
Invasion meant to achieve regime change in Kyiv now threatens the regime in Russia
By Yaroslav Trofimov and Thomas Grove Updated June 24, 2023 4:49 pm ET
Fighters from the Wagner paramilitary group, led by Prigozhin, seized on Saturday two Russian cities and were rolling toward Moscow for a confrontation with the country’s military leadership when a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko between Prigozhin and Putin averted a potential bloodbath in the country’s capital.
The agreement and tentative truce staved off the possibility that anger over the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine, from its flawed planning to its first disastrous days to more recent failures, could spark civil war.
But the very sight of armed men in Russian cities calling for the removal of Moscow’s military command shows how a war that was meant to achieve regime change in Ukraine could threaten the regime in Russia by harnessing deep anger over the failures of the country’s political and military leadership.
“Putin’s biggest miscalculation is that he started a war based on a completely inadequate understanding about the world, about his army, and about Ukraine,” said Russian political scientist Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago. “And then he kept making miscalculations every day, by not stopping the war.”
Prigozhin’s uprising threatened to repeat previous instances of how unsuccessful and bloody foreign adventures trigger unrest and even a revolution—from the 1905 campaign against Japan, to World War I, to the Soviet quagmire in Afghanistan.
As part of the deal Prigozhin will move to Belarus and fighters who took part in the uprising will be amnestied.
By launching the ill-prepared invasion of Ukraine 16 months ago, a war that he expected to conclude with a triumph days later, Putin fell into the same trap.
Social tensions over accumulated losses and military setbacks in Ukraine have fueled the rise of Prigozhin and his Wagner paramilitary group, creating the biggest threat to Putin’s rule since he came to power in 2000.
Wagner’s soldiers were deployed in Africa and in Syria when Russian troops crossed into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. The Kremlin asked Prigozhin to join the war effort only after Russian troops failed to take Ukrainian capital Kyiv and were facing severe losses across northern Ukraine.
While regular Russian forces suffered a series of additional defeats in the fall of last year, Wagner achieved a rare success, capturing the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. That record has given Prigozhin the authority to speak honestly about the ineptitude of the Russian military—something that he did, with growing vitriol, over the past several months.
“Prigozhin is now telling the truth about the military failure and the official pretext for the invasion,” said Fiona Hill, the chancellor-designate of Durham University in Britain who oversaw Russia policy in the Trump White House. “He openly says what a lot of other people are thinking.”
The war, initially waged just by the professional military, now affects the entire Russian society. Russia has had to resort to the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of men to shore up the crumbling front lines, prompting a mass wave of emigration. Ukrainian drone attacks deep inside Russia have become commonplace, puncturing Putin’s carefully nurtured image of strength.
Despite these setbacks, Putin continued to believe that time was on Russia’s side. Western democracies helping Ukraine would eventually tire, the thinking went, while his regime, secured by increasingly draconian laws that eliminated the liberal opposition at home, would endure and eventually win. The Wagner uprising, however, made it obvious that Russia is far less stable than Putin believed it to be.
“The hopes of a part of the Russian elite, including, apparently, the president himself, that a long war is beneficial for Russia…are a dangerous illusion,” said Ruslan Pukhov, director of Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a military-affairs think tank. “Prolongation of the war carries huge domestic political risks for the Russian Federation.”
Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said his country had existed in Russia’s orbit for centuries, affected by the internal crises that had shaken Moscow. “It’s only a matter of time before the next chaotic implosion,” he wrote on Twitter.
Putin himself compared Russia’s current predicament to 1917, when troops tired of the bloodshed of World War I mutinied and overthrew Czar Nicholas II—a revolution that, Putin said Saturday, had stolen a deserved victory from the Russian Empire and led to the loss of vast tracts of land, such as Finland, Poland and the Baltic States.
In 1905, Russia launched what the czar’s interior minister, Vyacheslav von Plehve, dubbed “a little victorious war” against Japan that was meant to deflect attention from domestic problems—just to suffer a humiliating defeat and a revolution. Similarly, the Soviet losses in the decade after invading Afghanistan in 1979 were a key reason for the internal tensions that led to the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky cautioned on Saturday that unrest in Russia will only expand as long as Russian troops remain at war. “The longer Russia will keep its forces and mercenaries on our land,” he said, “the more chaos, pain and problems for itself will it get.”