What Russia’s Whirlwind Crisis Could Mean for Putin
Atlantic writers explain how to make sense of the weekend’s events.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
“A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote yesterday. Today’s newsletter will walk you through our writers’ most urgent and clarifying analysis on the whirlwind events of the past weekend.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
A Permanent Scar
This past Saturday morning, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense. After advancing hundreds of miles toward the capital, Prigozhin announced that a deal had been struck and that his forces were turning back around.
As Atlantic writers reminded us throughout the weekend, Prigozhin’s brief coup was and remains a fast-moving story, and following it requires disentangling complex webs of disinformation. Below is some of our writers’ most useful analysis to help you put Russia’s crisis in context.
The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble.
“We can at this point only speculate about why Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly,” Tom wrote on Saturday, but “this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin.” Tom explains:
The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game.
As for Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader “drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. But Putin may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation,” Tom writes.
The Russian president is caught in his own trap.
Our staff writer Anne Applebaum suggests paying attention to the reactions of the Russian people. When the Wagner Group mercenaries arrived in the city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday morning and declared themselves the new rulers, “they met no resistance,” Anne reported. “One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.” She goes on:
This was the most remarkable aspect of the whole day: Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public. On the contrary, many seemed sorry to see him go.
To understand this response, Anne explains, observers must reckon with the power of apathy. “A certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all.” Through a constant barrage of propaganda, Putin convinces Russian citizens that there is no truth to be found. And if nothing is true, then why protest or engage in politics?
But apathy works both ways: “If no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war,” Anne explains. “Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.”
Why did Prigozhin’s coup fail?
Brian Klaas, who has studied coups around the world, offered some lessons from the history of such uprisings. The most successful coups are those run by a unified military, Klaas writes. “In Thailand, for example, coups are usually executed by the military brass, who announce that they are toppling civilian politicians. With nobody with guns to oppose them, Thai coups almost always succeed … After all, what’s the president or prime minister going to do—shoot back at the army?”
In Russia, however, the coup was carried out by a faction connected to the country’s military sector. In those cases, “the plot will likely succeed less on strength than on perception. The plotters are playing a PR game, in which they’re trying to create the impression that their coup is destined to triumph.”
I recommend reading Klaas’s explainer in full. But if you’re wondering what to look for as you follow this news story, I’ll leave you with his advice:
If you’re watching events and trying to understand the strategic logic of coups and how Putin’s regime might end, look out for whether the loyalists stay loyal or start to peel off toward those challenging him. If important figures begin to abandon the regime en masse, Putin is toast.
What do the weekend’s events mean for Ukraine?
Prigozhin’s loss is Ukraine’s gain, the Atlantic contributing writer Elliot Ackerman argued today. “Although Prigozhin was able to negotiate a safe exit from Russia (at least for now), an early casualty of this coup seems to be the Wagner Group itself; Vladimir Putin is unlikely to keep it intact,” Ackerman explains—which means that “over the course of a single weekend, Prigozhin and Putin have jointly done what the Ukrainian military and its NATO allies have failed to achieve in 18 months of war: They’ve removed Russia’s single most effective fighting force from the battlefield.”
“The question we should all be asking now is how to capitalize on Prigozhin’s success,” Ackerman writes.
Related:
Today’s News
- Fox News announced that Jesse Watters will fill Tucker Carlson’s former prime-time slot, which has been vacant since Carlson’s show was canceled in April.
- The Supreme Court restored a federal ruling on racial gerrymandering, which stated that Louisiana’s congressional lines likely diluted the power of Black voters.
- President Joe Biden announced more than $42 billion in federal funding to expand high-speed internet access across the country.
Evening Read
The Monk Who Thinks the World Is Ending
By Annie Lowrey
The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.
Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance. Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”
Humanity has “exponentially destroyed life on the same curve as we have exponentially increased intelligence,” he tells his congregants. Now the “crazy suicide wizards” of Silicon Valley have ushered in another revolution. They have created artificial intelligence.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Listen. American narratives about “freedom” can make us miss out on the joys of coming together. The newest episode of How to Talk to People teaches us how to not go it alone.
Watch. It’s hard to be mad at Indiana Jones. The action franchise’s fifth installment, in theaters this Friday, doesn’t break new ground, but it does give viewers what they want.
Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.