6 July 2023
A Botched Gotterdammerung
Prigozhin misreads Wagner’s score.
By Neil Tidmarsh
On 5th April 1531, a chef was boiled to death at Smithfields, the prime venue for public executions in medieval London. The chef – one Richard Rouse – had been found guilty of murder. He’d tried to poison the Bishop of Rochester but had only managed to accidentally kill two innocent servants with his deadly soup instead. The bishop was a vociferous critic of King Henry VIII so it’s thought that the king himself was behind the plot – and behind the chef’s grizzly fate. Mr Rouse’s botched mission meant that he’d become a threat to the king, a witness who had to be silenced, a danger which had to be removed, a failure who had to be cruelly punished as a discouraging example to anyone else who might be foolish enough to put the king’s position in jeopardy. An eyewitness to the hapless chef’s execution reported that “he roared mighty loud” while being cooked.
President Putin’s chef proved himself to be an even bigger threat to his lord and master than King Henry’s chef. The hot water in which he finds himself might only be of the metaphorical kind, but he must nevertheless be having serious problems recruiting food-tasters and bodyguards now. And no doubt he’s desperately building up a stockpile of the antidote (if there is such a thing) to polonium 19 poisoning over there in Belarus.
He’s also proved himself to be no more efficient than bungling Richard Rouse. That half-hearted ‘march for justice’ was the most dispiriting example of military futility since the Grand Old Duke of York. He had ten thousand men, he marched them half way to Moscow – and then he marched them back again. And now he’s been exiled to Belarus (who dreams of retiring to Lukashenko’s Belarus?) with nothing to show for it. As far as we can see, none of his aims has been accomplished. The Generals Shoigu and Gerasimov have not been removed and the Wagner group is being broken up, its fighters being given the choice of going home, joining the regular army or going into exile with their boss.
If he’d pushed on to Moscow, would he have been successful? All those generals and politicians and oligarchs who sat on the fence waiting to see which way the wind was blowing – would they have come down on his side? If he’d decided to end his march with a bang rather than a whimper, would he have made it to the capital and achieved his aims of unseating incompetent generals and securing Wagner’s survival and independence?
We’ll never know. But it seems unlikely. Putin, through his spokesman Lukashenko, must have pointed out “We have aircraft and you don’t” and “We know where your wives and children live”, two trump cards which Prigozhin should have known about and which meant that he was playing a losing hand. He should also have known that the only way of achieving his aims was to precipitate a conflict which could have overthrown Putin; his reluctance to do so and his insistence that Putin wasn’t a target guaranteed the failure of his aims from the very beginning.
All this – the fizzling out of a doomed enterprise – suggests that Prigozhin and Wagner are commanded by Major Cock-up and General Incompetence just like all the rest of the Russian army. This might surprise us, given that Wagner are the only forces to have made any sort of headway in Ukraine. But it really shouldn’t. Wagner have an appalling reputation for atrocities (trailing accusations of brutality, rape, torture, murder and extortion wherever they go) but they have an indifferent combat record. They’ve been defeated by Islamists in Mozambique and by the forces of the UN-backed Government of National Accord in Libya. Their successes in Ukraine have been limited and of dubious strategic value and achieved only by the death of an estimated 25,000 fighters (an appalling 50% of all Wagner’s soldiers), mostly criminals recruited from prisons, canon-fodder callously thrown at the enemy.
If Wagner’s ‘march for justice’ was a cock-up, so was the regime’s reaction to it. Or rather, its lack of reaction. The mutiny caught the Kremlin completely on the hop. After the event, the security forces claimed to have got wind of it prior to its outbreak, but such claims have been dismissed by Western intelligence (which certainly did get wind of it). Ignorance and incompetence, even more than suspected collaboration, must explain how Wagner managed to seize Rostov on Don and march half way to Moscow unopposed. The Kremlin should have seen it coming. The signs were all there. It had, after all, provoked Wagner beyond all endurance in recent months: according to Prigozhin, the regime had deliberately starved Wagner of weapons and ammunition and even inflicted casualties on it; the opening of a regular Russian military base in the Central African Republic was seen as a deliberate attempt to counter Wagner’s presence and undermine its influence in that country; and the final straw was the declaration that all Wagner fighters would have to sign up as members of the regular army, swearing loyalty to Moscow, within the next month. It wasn’t as if Prigozhin kept his feelings and opinions about all this under his hat. His increasingly outspoken criticism of the regime and his denunciations of individual members of it should have put the Kremlin on the alert at the very least.
Most commentators here have argued that the whole episode has weakened Putin. But that remains to be seen. The fact is that Putin stood firm, denounced the mutineers in the strongest terms and waited for them to blink first. And they did blink first. He won and they lost. None of their demands has been granted. Their leader has been sent into exile, out of the way but still within reach. His military and civil organisations are in disarray. True, Putin hasn’t followed Henry VIII’s lead and had his chef boiled to death in public, but he has successfully de-fanged this snake and he’ll be able to chop it to pieces at his leisure. His contradictory statements about what will happen to those responsible have also been interpreted as signs of weakness and indecision, but they’re more likely to be part of his tried-and-tested policy of confusing his enemies, of keeping them guessing about his intentions, of unsettling them with conflicting signals.
Be that as it may, the only thing that can really be said about this episode is that it was yet another example of the institutionalised incompetence and stupidity which Alexei Navalny has identified as endemic in Putin’s regime and everyone associated with it. It was foolish to nurture the cuckoo Wagner in the state’s nest; it was foolish to provoke the over-grown cuckoo so brazenly; and it was foolish not to anticipate the cuckoo’s reaction. And Wagner was foolish to launch a mutiny without the certainty (or at least the probability) of total victory, and without the audacity to push on for total victory, and without the realisation that anything less than total victory would be the end of them. Moscow4 (see Shaw Sheet issue 323, 5 May 2022) ruled supreme on all sides.
Meanwhile the war continues and it’s difficult to say how this fiasco might affect the conflict. Wagner regrouping in Belarus to strike south to Kiev is a worrying possibility but an unlikely one; the Kremlin, once bitten and no doubt twice shy, would be reluctant to give them such an opportunity for even greater glory and pre-eminence.
The only safe bet about the war is that Russia will continue to wage it with incompetence and stupidity. A report this week said that Russia is considering blowing up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant; a stupid idea in itself, but especially stupid given that the prevailing wind there blows to the south-east, which means that the fallout would engulf the Russian forces occupying Donbass and the Crimea. Another report said that Russia, failing to achieve anything on the battlefield, might now concentrate on destroying Ukraine’s agriculture instead; Russia’s subsequent bombing of a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk (with a dreadful loss of civilian lives) suggests that Russia has indeed seized on this ‘starve them into submission’ strategy – but without the faintest idea of how to go about it tactically.
All this would be hilarious if it wasn’t so horrible. Some humour is just too dark for laughter.
