As exiled warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin settles into his new Belarusian digs and tries not to wonder why there aren’t locks on the doors, and Cyril Ramaphosa finally gets his breathing under control, admirers of Vladimir Putin seem to have settled on an analysis of the last few days.
Prigozhin’s weekend march on Moscow, they will tell you, was not a mutiny. Instead, it was a brilliant one-two punch against Putin’s enemies, positioning Wagner mercenaries a mere 100km from Kyiv while simultaneously exposing traitors inside Russia.
I can’t refute this claim, having read very little military history myself. It’s entirely possible that there is some seminal treatise by Von Clausewitz or Napoleon on the benefits of redeploying your troops with the maximum possible amount of drama, shooting down some of your own helicopters, and digging large trenches across one of your major highways, before criminally charging or exiling the only fighters who were making any inroads against the country you’ve invaded.
Still, I understand why other commentators preferred a slightly more cynical explanation, pointing to last week’s news that the Pentagon had discovered what it called “accounting errors” that meant it could send Ukraine $6bn more than it expected. Clearly, some grizzled pragmatists insisted, the CIA paid Prigozhin that $6bn to mutiny, and he’d got halfway to Moscow before Putin made him a better offer.
It’s not a bad theory as theories go. Financier and author Bill Browder, a man who tangled with Putin’s oligarchy in the 2000s, estimates the Russian president is worth $200bn. Even if Browder’s arithmetic is skewed by animus and Putin is worth only half that, he could have matched the $6bn, peeled off an extra billion to keep Prigozhin in sweatpants for life, and still be cashing $15m a day in interest from a mediocre savings account down at the Red Square branch of Sberbank.
The bottom line, though, is that we are still weeks if not months away from knowing exactly what happened at the weekend. Still, now that the dust is settling it seems fair to suggest that what looked for a while like an attempted uprising might just have been a very frank argument between senior vice-presidents of a corporation in which people sometimes get killed with sledgehammers.
Certainly, to those who have watched Prigozhin’s increasingly enraged online videos, in which he has regularly poured foul-mouthed abuse over Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu, the Wagner boss’s reluctance to insult Putin openly has been notable.
It’s also clear that the kid gloves have gone both ways. Six weeks ago, when it seemed Prigozhin overstepped by asking in a video “What if it turns out that the grandfather is a real asshole?” (Putin is often called “grandfather” on Russian social media), the Kremlin said it hadn’t seen the clip. Given time to reflect, repent and remember who pays his bills, Prigozhin duly posted a voice note on Telegram asking “Who might be the grandfather?”, before hinting coyly that he might have been talking about one of two senior military officials or a reality TV star.
According to Russian journalist Mikhail Fishman, writing in The Atlantic last month, “Prigozhin is sticking with the lifesaving formula known in Russia as the ‘good tsar surrounded by bad boyars [aristocrats]’.”
That, however, was a month ago, and this weekend’s high jinks may have earned Prigozhin a promotion from murderous pet to bad boyar. Putin still needs him to secure the Wagner group’s burgeoning military-industrial complex in Africa, but I suspect at some point in the near future Prigozhin will be given the standard Kremlin retirement package: a hospital bed on the tenth floor, and an open window.
For our own president, the past weekend would have been very upsetting. First, it usually it takes countries 30 years to fall apart after they’ve been helped by the ANC, and it’s only been a week since Ramaphosa was in Moscow. Second, there is media speculation that Ramaphosa managed to persuade Putin not to come to the Brics summit in SA in August.
Imagine then our president’s horror as he watched Putin’s private jet take off and promptly disappear off radar, and waited with gritted teeth for his phone to ring and Putin to ask for asylum. Imagine his sweaty-palmed dread as he mobilised the ANC’s top number crunchers, all bustling in with their grade 8 maths literacy textbooks, and ordered them to figure out how long it would take for an Ilyushin passenger jet to get to Waterkloof, and whether it was long enough for the top 10 in the ANC to liquidate their assets and charter a fast boat to Mauritius.
Of course, his fear was misplaced. If Ramaphosa wants to keep Putin away from SA he need only remind the Russian that there are thousands of Wagner troops in Africa and that our border fence is a short length of chicken wire. But in such moments it’s hard to stay rational. Prigozhin’s march has all sorts of modern geopolitical repercussions, but its intent and effect were entirely medieval.
It reminded us that the pomp and permanence of nation states is little more than a tenuous agreement. And when ambitious, brutal men decide to renegotiate, dispensing with polite pretence and reaching for the sledgehammer, a ripple of alarm is entirely sensible.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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