Last Saturday, the specter of a civil war was apparently so vivid to the Kremlin authorities that most of Russia’s top leadership fled the capital, only to return once the conflict, an armed revolt, was resolved in a parley. 



The troops, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary group Wagner, halted their advance approximately 200 kilometers (125 miles) south of Moscow. The whole affair lasted less than 24 hours. Although the mutiny failed, its significance lies in what it has revealed about the state of Russian power.



What the Mutiny Revealed

It has revealed the following. An armed force of a few thousand men, the exact number unknown, can cross Russia’s border from a war zone in a neighboring country, Ukraine, enter a million-strong city, Rostov-on-Don, Russia’s tenth largest, and take control of it without a single shot fired. 



This force can then proceed to march to the next large city, Voronezh, Russia’s thirteenth largest, and continue on in the direction of Moscow, with only sporadic attempts made to stop it. These attempts resulted in the downing, by the Wagner force, of seven loyal military aircraft, six helicopters, and one airplane, and an estimated loss of thirteen to twenty-two crew members. 



Throughout the entire march, no notable appearances by the political or military leadership were detected. It took the leader of another neighboring country, Belarus, to lead a negotiation effort and persuade the insurrectionists to turn back.



The Question of State Sovereignty

All this is a far cry from the earlier advertised picture of a Russia that can start a major war in Europe, win it, change a regime there, and even affect the global order. The reality is that Russia is now a country whose very sovereignty is in question. 



According to Stephen Krasner, an authority on the subject, sovereignty is equality in international relations; recognition of other countries’ borders; control over one’s own territory; the ability to hold a monopoly on violence; and control over the movement of goods, capital, technology, and data across a country’s borders. 



That the Russian leadership does not control its own territory became clear even before last Saturday. In early June, major excursions by Ukrainian forces into the Russian region of Belgorod proved that groups of 50 to 100 fighters can penetrate the territory of Russia and temporarily seize control of a number of towns in the area. The FSB, the successor to the KGB and the mainstay of Putin’s power, is responsible for control of the country’s borders. 



The fact that the Russian government has control over the movement of goods, capital, and technology is debatable, but to a large extent, corrected for corruption, the government probably does control the movement of goods. 



That the Putin state holds an effective monopoly on violence has been a big question ever since the creation of private military companies that are still, to this day, illegal under Russian law. 



Vladimir Putin has broken with a long-standing tradition and allowed the creation of these mercenary units. This tradition has existed for a reason. 



Unlike countries such as Turkey or Egypt, Russia does not have a history of military coups or the existence of any military agency that is independent of central authorities. Civilian, albeit authoritarian, control over the military was a feature of the Russian state, both in imperial and in Soviet times. 



In the entire 200-year history of modern Russia, three cases of major military insubordination can be identified: the Decembrist revolt of 1825, which attempted to unseat the new czar, Nicholas I; the 1917 revolution, which saw some of the military join the revolutionary forces; and the 1991 attempted coup, during which a special operations force was said to have refused to follow orders to suppress the democratic movement. This last claim is disputed, which probably makes the list of military insurrections in Russia even shorter. 



Fiefdoms and Simulacra: The Dissolution of a State, from Inside Out

Putin, the self-declared champion of state power, has been destroying the very foundations of that power for two decades now. 



Distrusting state institutions and professional officials as insufficiently manageable, he has been creating quasi-oligarchic corporations registered in the name of his friends and former servicemen. Putin’s military has been such a corporation in its own right, a fief run by a close ally, prone to corruption but superbly loyal. 

In that respect, the Wagner group has been typical of other Putin-created corporation simulacra: opaque, corrupt, and led by a crony. 

Putin has even created entire quasi-states, such as the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic.



Those black holes have allowed Putin to enrich his inner circle while keeping its members under control through the threat of prosecution. At the same time he could always disassociate himself from any of those entities at any moment. One of the many clever reasons for creating the Wagner group was the need to maintain plausible deniability. In the past, Putin has used that tool many times at different moments and in different situations. 



All this has now come to haunt Putin and his system. He has been proving helpless at the sight of all those monsters of his own making: a military-industrial complex that is failing, an army that is dysfunctional, a mercenary force that is turning against the regular army. 



Both his allies and his enemies are aware of Putin's helplessness. The Prigozhin revolt, whatever its real goals or the endgame, has already administered a serious, possibly fatal blow to the Russian strongman’s leadership. 

In Search of a Better Putin

As evidenced by many leaked conversations and behavior, the Russian elites hold Putin responsible for the botched war and its inevitable but still unpredictable consequences. They do realize that the whole system he has created is in crisis, that the very tools of the Putin order contain the seeds of its decay. 



But they prefer to publicly praise the outfit of the naked king and make money while they still can. There is an understandable explanation for this, and it is the only one that still allows Putin’s system to stay afloat: at the very moment when the king is finally recognized as naked by everyone, his court hypocrites will also be left without clothes.

None of this means that the moment of truth will arrive tomorrow. The confluence of interests that is holding Putin’s system together is strong. Most of his closest allies are under sanctions that cannot be lifted. They need to be protected in Russia by a functioning security regime. They will keep working to save themselves by saving Putin. This regime will need to take more visible blows before the elites are prompted to install a stronger leader who can provide them with better safety guarantees.

The opinions expressed in this article are those solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the Kennan Institute.