How Wagner Almost Toppled Putin (And Failed)

On Friday, June 23, 2023, an event took place in Russia that shook the Kremlin to its core. Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, Russia's notorious mercenary force, mutinied against Vladimir Putin. He led a march that came within 120 miles of Moscow and seized the city of Rostov-on-Don. Putin seemed to disappear over the weekend as the Wagner Group continued heading towards Moscow on its March for Justice. This incident was a long time coming, but how? Why did it come to this and what does it mean for the future of Russia's war effort in Ukraine and for Vladimir Putin personally? Let's take a look at the origins, conduct, and consequences of the June 2023 Wagner Rebellion. Russia's Wagner Group, officially called PMC Wagner, was founded in 2014. Perhaps that year is no coincidence, as it was the year that contained the seeds of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. After the Euromaidan protests, the first Wagner Group mercenaries fought alongside Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine. The mercenary unit also gained combat experience through Russia's intervention in the Syrian Civil War, helping to turn the tide of the worst phase of the conflict in favor of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The group is also known to operate in Venezuela and several African countries, with it suspected of having operations in several more. In one of them, Mali, the Wagner Group has taken over gold mines. The mercenary unit is alleged to have gotten its name from one of its leaders on the battlefield, Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Utkin, who went by the codename Wagner. Trouble signs with Wagner were evident as soon as 2018. Early that year, Wagner mercenaries got into a firefight with American forces in Syria. The confrontation did not end well for Wagner, as they suffered about 10 KIA in American airstrikes. Wagner's activities in the incident had exposed the Russian government to risk and liability, two things which would only escalate dramatically after the invasion of Ukraine. For years, there was debate about the nature of the Wagner Group. Some experts believed it was more of a tacitly acknowledged branch of the formal Russian military than a strictly private military firm. Wagner had played an important role in the covert aspects of Russian foreign policy before the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. It was a type beyond what a typical private military company would do. Technically, private military companies are illegal in Russia. But in April, the Russian State Duma passed a law that granted Wagner personnel official combat veteran status. On June 22, 2023, a day before the Wagner Rebellion, the Moscow Times reported that Defense Minister Shoigu legitimized more than 20 of the volunteer detachments fighting alongside the soldiers of the regular Russian army in Ukraine. This action would be influential in causing Prigozhin to lead Wagner to revolt, but more on that in a moment. The conduct of the war revealed significant splits between the Wagner Group and the regular Russian military. From the beginning of the invasion in February 2022, it was clear that things were not going well for the Russian war effort. The Russians were repulsed in Kiev and on most other fronts, only making good progress in the southern front near Kherson and along the Sea of Azov. Having failed to take Kiev and topple the Ukrainian government, the original pre-war objective, the conflict shifted into a grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine, especially in Donbass. As the war slowed and Ukraine launched its counteroffensive, dissent within the Russian military elite grew. One of the biggest dissidents in Moscow was Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. Prigozhin began publicly criticizing the Russian military, in particular the Defense Minister Sergiy Shoigu, as soon as early October 2022. Then, in the midst of Ukraine's successful Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives, Prigozhin declared that all these bastards, the commanders of the Russian army, ought to be sent to the front barefoot with just a machine gun. Wagner units have proven some of the most effective in the Russian war effort in Ukraine. As the regular Russian army retreated in the face of advancing Russian troops last summer and fall, Wagner plugged the gap in the lines. The once secretive mercenary unit became much more open in its recruiting efforts, using billboards in Russian cities in an attempt to swell its ranks and recruits. Most notoriously, in the fall of 2022 amidst Vladimir Putin's declaration of partial mobilization, Wagner began recruiting personnel from Russian prisons. The prisoners were offered a pardon in exchange for joining the mercenaries in Ukraine. These convict soldiers have been described as bait, according to Ukrainian troops who have fought against them. The former prisoners were poorly trained and equipped. Nevertheless, they kept coming forward in human wave attacks in the winter of 22-23, according to the Ukrainian troops who fought them on the battlefield. Putin has since put a stop to the recruiting of prisoners, but the efforts and criticisms showed that Wagner and its leader Prigozhin had taken a significant degree of autonomy in his actions and built up a power base around himself that could prove a thorn in Putin's side. Prigozhin's criticisms of the Russian Ministry of Defense and its leader continued into late 22 and early 23. As stalemates settled along the front and fighting centered on the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut in Donetsk Oblast, Wagner units took up the forefront of the fighting in the city itself, grinding their way forward in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance there. According to Prigozhin, the Wagner group led Russian forces to advance between 100 and 200 meters per day there, when Russian military doctrine dictates that advances of 30 kilometers, 19 miles, per day are the expected standards. As Wagner slowly moved forward in Bakhmut at the cost of heavy casualties, Prigozhin's criticisms of the Russian Ministry of Defense became heavier. According to him, Wagner mercenaries in Bakhmut came as volunteers and are dying so you can sit like fat cats in your luxury offices. These polemics were directed at Shoigu and Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, in particular. The two men were accused of being responsible for the thousands of casualties that the Wagner group had suffered in the battle to that date. Prigozhin was playing a dangerous game with these criticisms, but in some ways they were a necessary one for the Russian war effort. He was reportedly one of the few people in the Russian elite who dared to tell Putin directly about the mistakes he had made in the war that he began. Prigozhin was also one of the people who cautioned Russia not to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for the mysterious drone attack on the Kremlin on May 3rd, 2023. In response to the strike, which may have come from a Ukrainian intelligence operation or have been a false flag, Prigozhin said, we look like clowns threatening to use nuclear weapons in response to a child's drone. For a dictator who is used to being served by cronies and yes-men, it was all too clear that something would change in the once close relationship between the two. From Putin's perspective, Prigozhin had started to become too big for his breaches. Yet Putin likes to play elite figures in Russia off against one another, so he continued to allow the dissension in the command structure, probably further hampering Russian effectiveness on the battlefield. As the battle for Bakhmut raged on throughout the winter and spring of 23, Prigozhin's alienation with the Kremlin continued to intensify just as strongly as the fighting for the city. On May 5th, Prigozhin accused the Russian authorities of not providing his men with enough ammunition. In a video message, he threatened to pull his troops out of action on May 10th if this supposed supply shortage was not fixed. Two days later, Prigozhin declared that his troops were getting the ammunition they needed. Prigozhin's feud with the Russian elite continued in May when he had a spat with Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov, who had once been an ally of his. Like Prigozhin, Kadyrov had been fiercely critical of the conduct of the Russian war effort in late 22 and early 23, often harshly attacking Shoigu and the Russian Ministry of Defense. However, when Prigozhin declared that Kadyrov's Chechen units could not hold the entirety of the Donetsk Oblast in Ukraine, the alliance between them frayed. At the beginning of June, it appeared that the two had buried the hatchet over a phone call, but following Wagner's uprising at the end of the month, Kadyrov declared his loyalty to Putin, saying that Prigozhin's rebellion was a vile act of betrayal. The tensions between the Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defense began to turn from a simmer to a boil after the Russian capture of Bakhmut at the end of May. The battle took its toll on Wagner, as the United States Department of Defense estimated that the mercenaries had taken 30,000 casualties there, with more than half of them coming after December of 2022. The same analysis estimates that 90% of Wagner's KIAs were the convicts Prigozhin had recruited that autumn. The United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense was equally grim in its estimates, saying that the ex-cons had suffered a 50% casualty rate. The UK MOD said that in general, all of the Russian forces fighting for Bakhmut that winter were not getting proper care and were suffering atrociously from Ukrainian artillery fire. These reports came in February, three months before the city fell. When the Wagner units in Bakhmut were replaced by regular Russian soldiers between May 25th and June 1st, Prigozhin again ruffled some feathers by suggesting that the regular army may be unable to handle the situation and his men would be ready to return if that was the case. On May 27th, the Institute for the Study of War reported that Prigozhin had been accused of planning a coup against the Russian leadership. His accuser, Igor Gerkin, a man who played a key role in the events of 2014 that led to the creation of the Russian-backed separatist republics in Donbass, precisely warned that Prigozhin would mutiny if he maintained his status as the leader of the Wagner group. He also accused Prigozhin of violating Russian censorship laws. Prigozhin denied all of these claims. On June 13th, Putin backed the move by the Ministry of Defense to legitimize mercenary groups. This would be done by having Wagner and other irregular units sign military contracts with the Ministry of Defense, with a deadline of July 1st. Prigozhin refused to adhere to this, not wanting to submit to the authority of Shoigu, but Putin insisted. This appears to have been the straw that broke the camel's back for the Wagner leader. It is notable that Prigozhin's former ally, Ramzan Kadyrov, signed these contracts with his group of Chechen special forces, further isolating the Wagner leader from the center of power in Moscow. Ten days after the contract confrontation, Prigozhin went full rogue against the Kremlin. He declared that the invasion of Ukraine was based on self-serving lies. Though he did not criticize Vladimir Putin himself, he again turned his ire to Defense Minister Shoigu, accusing him of initiating the war for his own benefit, deceiving Putin in the process. On the same day, he showed a video, which he said was the aftermath of a missile strike from the Russian military against his troops. The Institute for the Study of War watching the situation reported that it could not verify the video, and it may have been made for propaganda purposes. Using this as his justification, Prigozhin declared he would march for justice, for those who the Ministry of Defense had done harm. Prigozhin and his men then marched away from the front and into Russia, moving toward the city of Rostov-on-Don. The Wagner group took control of the city with no resistance, and Prigozhin encouraged Russians to join him in his rebellion. He demanded a change in the military leadership, saying that Shoigu and Gerasimov had to go. Meanwhile, the Russian security forces were mobilizing. Prigozhin accused the Russian Ministry of Defense of ordering a helicopter to open fire on a civilian column, and that his men had shut it down. At 10am in Moscow, Vladimir Putin addressed the nation and vowed to crush Prigozhin's rebellion. Some time afterward, the latter again reiterated his loyalty to Russia and did not criticize Putin. After a meeting with Deputy Defense Minister Yunusbek Bevkurov failed to convince him to end his mutiny, Prigozhin and his men moved north toward Moscow. Wagner traveled through the Voronezh region, meeting little resistance as the authorities in the Russian capital began to fortify the approaches to the city. Although Wagner did not have nearly enough troops to actually take Moscow, the mutiny caused a lot of panic in the city. Travel and communication restrictions were put in place as the mercenaries got closer. Then on June 24, Prigozhin called a sudden halt to the march on Moscow, stopping it 120 miles from the city. Putin would not negotiate with Prigozhin. He was, in fact, strangely absent after his national address. Reports circulated that Putin's plane had departed from Moscow sometime on June 24. Putin's absence paved the way for the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to intervene and broker a deal, allegedly at the invitation of both sides. Lukashenko, a personal friend of Prigozhin's, offered to host the Wagner leader in Belarus in exile. Lukashenko's offer allowed Prigozhin to de-escalate the situation while saving face. Meanwhile, the last thing that Lukashenko would have wanted was a destabilized Russia, since he depends on Putin's support to stay in power. Following this agreement, Prigozhin addressed his men. He ordered them to stand down and return to their camps to avoid any bloodshed, bragging that no Wagner fighter was lost during the rebellion. The mercenaries left Rostov-on-Don without resistance, to the cheers of some of the people in the city. Their decision to abandon the city was important, as it is a logistical hub for Crimea and the Russian army's fighting in Ukraine. A dispute over it would have been very bloody indeed, and could have given Prigozhin significant leverage over the Russian leadership. Although Prigozhin bragged about the lack of bloodshed, some blood had been spilled in the rebellion. The Wagner column came within 120 miles of Moscow and shot down several Russian aircraft. Five helicopters went down, as well as an Ilyushin Il-22M Kut aerial command post and radio relay plane. At least 13 members of the Russian military died in these attacks. After the deal with Lukashenko to end the rebellion, Putin reappeared. On June 26th, he offered his Wagner fighters three choices. Sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense or formal law enforcement agencies to legitimize themselves, return home, or go to Belarus in exile. On June 27th, after Putin thanked the Russian military and other law enforcement agencies, Wagner announced it would transfer its heavy weapons to the regular Russian army. Meanwhile, some of the criminal charges against Prigozhin were dropped, as he reportedly landed in Belarus to begin his exile. He is still under investigation for treason. Although the mutiny only lasted two days and both sides were eager to avoid civil strife, it was yet another sign of growing dissent among the Russian elite over the conduct of the war and its consequences. What are the potential long-term ramifications of this aborted uprising against Putin's rule? Prigozhin's exile to Belarus, the looming defense ministry contracts, and the transfer of heavy weapons from Wagner suggests that the group's days as a distinct unit may be numbered. Shoigu appears to have won the long-running feud, although this is still an evolving situation. Shoigu has always been a close ally of Putin, and Russia's dictator is likely keen on keeping him around as dissent within Moscow over the war continues to simmer. Putin had done a lot to establish Prigozhin and Wagner as an instrument of policy. The fact that this unit turned against him will not convince him to be more trusting of others. Loyalty to him, rather than competence, will likely become even more important in his future calculations. Putin, now 70 years old, has also not established a clear line of succession. In some ways, this makes sense, as it helps him to maintain power by not having a figure that dissenters can rally around. On the other hand, it opens the door for chaos as elites in the Kremlin jockey with one another for position. This may have been Prigozhin's aim with his increasingly abrasive behavior over the course of the war. Perhaps he was thinking that had he been able to emerge as a hero, his prospects of succeeding Putin would have grown. Although Putin vowed to punish those involved in the rebellion, the events from June 23rd to 25th demonstrated his weakness. This latest round of chaos in the Russian interior came only a month after the Belgorod raid that saw Russian dissidents seize territory in Russia for two days, with total confusion and Putin seemingly absent thereto. Prigozhin had earlier volunteered to intervene in the Belgorod raid, but this was refused. Instead, Kadyrov's AKHMET unit, essentially his personal militia, was tasked with securing the area. Putin was again humiliated in the Wagner rebellion. For now, figures like Kadyrov remain loyal to Putin, but there is no guarantee that that will remain the same in the future. It has become more and more apparent that Russia is isolated from the global economy and trapped in a costly war seemingly with no objective or exit strategy. Although Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive is not matching the effectiveness seen in its 2022 campaigns, each additional lever of pressure will tighten the screws on Putin. The Ukrainians will be eager to redouble their efforts. As the war is likely to drag on into 2024, when Russia is slated to hold a presidential election, elites within the country may decide that they can no longer support an aging and weak Putin remaining in power, as the war continues to put pressure on the Russian economy and casualties mount. Prigozhin denounced the war before he began his mutiny. Kadyrov has also been fiercely critical as well as self-interested. They are likely not the only two higher-ups who share these feelings. Any further weakening of Putin's authority at home or Ukrainian successes on the battlefield will make him that much more vulnerable. Putin's needing Belarus to defuse the situation probably weakened his image even more than the rebellion itself. His absence and Belarus' intervention may have sent the message that he was incapable of handling the situation. The fact that the crowds in Rostov cheered Wagner troops as they made their exit also does not bode well for Putin's public image. The fact that Prigozhin implied that Putin was easily deceived by his inner circle also raises questions about his fitness for leadership. Geopolitically, the instability in Russia could have grave consequences. Putin reportedly did not get what he wanted out of his meeting with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in March. There, the two leaders reiterated their respective countries' partnership, and China offered a peace proposal that would have ended the war on more favorable terms to Russia. However, Xi refused to provide military aid to Russia, something that Putin very much wanted. While Xi is eager to undermine the US-led international order, he is apparently not so eager to back Russia to the point of losing the connections with the global economy that would follow. This decision revealed much about what he views as the likeliest outcome of the war. More internal weakness in Russia will further convince China to shy away from throwing its full support behind its more and more problematic strategic partner. Publicly, China downplayed the Wagner rebellion as being part of Russia's internal affairs. Privately, China can't be happy with the events that unfolded in Russia at the end of June. Much will depend on the events which take place on the battlefield as Ukraine's counteroffensive slowly goes on. It is also likelier that Ukraine will want to stage more attacks like the Belgorod raid to further destabilize the Russian home front, create more confusion in the Kremlin, and put more pressure on Putin. Will the Ukrainians make another attempt like that seen in May? We will need to wait and see. What is clear is that the Wagner rebellion showed that Putin's grip on power is not what it once was, a fact that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Ukrainian President Zelensky, and other officials around the world were keen to point out. This may cause Putin to get more desperate for something he can sell as a victory in Ukraine. He may be more willing to employ rash measures to achieve that purpose, especially as Russia's 2024 presidential election approaches. Russia may not be an actual democracy, but the coming unfree and unfair election could nevertheless be a useful opportunity for a faction to form that forces Putin out of power. It would not be the first time in Russian history that something similar has happened. A failed coup followed by regime change happened as recently as 1991, in events which led to the end of the Soviet Union, that still personally haunt Putin to this day. The Wagner rebellion must have made him wonder whether he could be next. Time will tell. But what do you think? Will the Wagner rebellion undermine Putin's authority and influence, potentially affecting his ability to remain in power? Let us know in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe for more military analysis from Military Experts.