Russia on the Brink

In a scratchy phone call to the Sun from the road approaching Kyiv, Russia scholar and occasional contributor David Satter reports that “Russia is on the brink.” That’s the message as Russia’s mercenary army races for Moscow bent on, it says, ousting Russia’s defense minister and as President Putin vows to defend the country against what he is calling treason by the mercenary force. All this while Russian soldiers brace for a Ukrainian offensive on a 600-mile front.The mercenary leader, Yevgehny Prigozhin, insists that his private army of 25,000 troops seeks only to remove Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu. “That’ll change the minute they get to Moscow — if they get to Moscow,” Mr. Satter reckons. Mr. Prigozhin says Russian border guards greeted his men with “hugs.” Yet two Russian generals denounce the “march” as a “coup,” and on Telegram the mercenaries say they have been attacked from the air.The key question at the moment, Mr. Satter tells us, is “Will Russian troops open fire on Prigozhin’s men?” Considering that the Russian army is “totally demoralized,” and Russians are angry about Mr. Putin’s conscription program, “I don’t think so,” Mr. Satter reckons. Mr. Prigozhin’s troops, after all, are the only forces fighting in Ukraine to achieve a “substantial victory,” and just yesterday, Mr. Satter says, Mr. Prigozhin was a “war hero.”The treason Mr. Putin speaks of comes against the backdrop of a much broader unrest that is, our James Brooke reports, rippling through quite a number of Russia’s little known republics. In videos — from places like Buryatia, Sakha, and Tuva — speakers appeal to their countrymen to defect from the Russian Army and to come home and fight for their homelands’ independence. Mr. Brooke calls it a “second front.”So with Mr. Prigozhin’s march, the stage is set for what could be Russia’s most serious political violence in 30 years — since what is known as the October Coup of 1993, a constitutional crisis that pitted Boris Yeltsin against the Duma. There was fighting in the streets. Eventually Yeltsin ordered army tanks to shell the White House, where Duma members had gathered. The tanks prevailed, 147 people died, and the parliamentary revolt failed.Watching from Kyiv today, a Ukrainian presidential advisor, Mykhailo Podolyak, writes on Twitter: “The next 48 hours will define the new status of Russia. Either a full-fledged civil war, or a negotiated transition of power, or a temporary respite before the next phase of the downfall of the Putin regime.” Mr. Putin, for his part, is denouncing Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion as “a stab in the back” and vowing to defend the country.It is too early to say how the revolt will play out. It is not too early, though, to suggest that damage to Russia’s war effort has already been made by Mr. Prigozhin’s statements, which have been carried across the internet. They undercut the justifications for the Kremlin’s 16-month-old war. Careful not to say the Emperor has no clothes, Russia’s road warrior denounces Mr. Putin’s top aides for pulling the Tsar into a war with Ukraine.“The war wasn’t needed to demilitarize or de-nazify Ukraine,” Mr. Prigozhin declared yesterday, contradicting the Kremlin’s core catechism used to justify the invasion that began on February 24 of last year. “The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exult in glory… so that Shoigu could become Marshal … so that he could get a second ‘Hero’ [of Russia] medal,” which is the highest decoration of the Russian Federation.Mr. Prigozhin’s words will come as gut punches to men hunkered down in Russia’s trenches on the frontlines of Ukraine. This is one reason why, Mr. Satter suggests, Mr. Putin could have trouble finding loyal troops among Russia’s million-man army. It could prove, Mr. Satter suggests, that Chechen troops will be the only ones willing to act against Mr. Prigozhin’s men. That itself, Mr. Satter says, would serve to unify Russians against Mr. Putin.

Russia on the Brink

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