Yevgeny Prigozkhin of the Wager Group, 2010, creative commons license AT 4,

The Government of the Russian Federation, courtesy of Wikimedia

David Remnick at The New Yorker, an interview with “Mikhail Zygar, one of the most knowledgeable reporters and commentators on Kremlin power” as to what the aborted uprising against Putin portends and how “some of the deepest fissures and anxieties in the Russian leadership had been exposed.”

Excerpt:

In recent years, Vladimir Putin has run much of his Presidency in the most splendid isolation, bunkered away in palaces from the wooded suburbs of Moscow to the shore of the Black Sea. He is often curiously remote from the Russian people and the bureaucracies and the security services over which he presides. Putin emerged on Saturday at 10 a.m., an early hour for him, and let loose a five-minute-long tirade ordering his military to destroy an “armed rebellion” led by one of his former loyalists, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary force known as the Wagner Group. Since taking power a generation ago, Putin had never looked so weak. … By the end of the day, Moscow time, Prigozhin was saying that he had called off his march north to avoid bloodshed, a truce reportedly brokered by Belarus, but, for Putin, there was no avoiding the fact that some of the deepest fissures and anxieties in the Russian leadership had been exposed.

 

Even though Prigozhin has backed off, Russian, Western, and Ukrainian analysts will now struggle to understand the meaning of the conflict with Putin, what it has revealed about the rivalries of power in Moscow, and what it might mean for the war.

 

…

 

There is every possibility that Putin will, at least in the short term, muster the loyalties he needs to eliminate Prigozhin from the picture. However, that does not mean that Putin can be serene about his position in the long term: “Before this rebellion, there were a lot of rumors and theories about different clans supporting Prigozhin. There were rumors that he was supported by siloviki [security-service figures] in business like Igor Sechin [the C.E.O. of the energy conglomerate Rosneft and a former Deputy Prime Minister] and Sergey Chemezov [the C.E.O. of the state-owned defense conglomerate, Rostec].”

 

Zygar went on, “The F.S.B. [a successor to the K.G.B.] and G.R.U. [military intelligence] is not a single clan; it is a mixture of different clans, and we will see how they are going to react. For years, Putin has selected his inner circle with only one criterion: a lack of ambition. They are not the best of the best. They are the worst of the worst. So how will such mediocrities face up to one desperately brave person, or a desperately brave group of terrorists? We will see.”

Glory to Ukraine