Comment: Russia’s rival warmongers are scorpions in a bottle

By Leonid Bershidsky / Bloomberg Opinion

Ostensibly, it’s hard to find more implacable enemies than Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s Wagner mercenary army, and Igor Girkin, a.k.a. Strelkov, an ultranationalist who played a prominent role in the initial phase of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. The two have traded the kind of public insults — and, on Prigozhin’s part, open and credible threats — that preclude reconciliation. Yet they share a fear and a hope that bear directly on Russia’s future after Vladimir Putin’s rule is over.

Putin’s Russia hasn’t stamped out every kind of free expression. Those who support the invasion of Ukraine enjoy an ostensible carte blanche to criticize the top commanders of the “special military operation” and in some cases even Putin himself, to complain about battlefield failures and the war’s slow progress. This spectrum of thought includes “angry patriots” around Strelkov, supposed Putin loyalists such as Prigozhin, and everyone in between; a broad span of grim characters. For them, Putin is too tame: a potential traitor to the radicals, regrettably soft-hearted for the aggressive loyalists. Their combined audience on Telegram runs in the millions: Together, Prigozhin’s press service and Strelkov’s personal channel have more than a million subscribers.

Recently, both Prigozhin and Strelkov have shared their apprehension that the war in Ukraine may end in a premature political deal.

In an “Angry Patriots’ Manifesto” published on his Telegram channel, Strelkov wrote:

“In government and big business, there remain those who have transferred their capital and their loyalties to the West. They are ready to sabotage us and make a deal with the enemy, that is, to commit treason. We do not rule out that they might be preparing a pro-Western coup, a capitulation and, therefore, the dismemberment of Russia.”

The Wagner founder, who is said to harbor political ambitions, has published a lengthy article suggesting that both the Kremlin and most Russians would be tempted to end the war right now if Russia could hold on to the territory it has already won. That, he argued, is why the Ukrainian military is not counterattacking, despite having accumulated the necessary resources and trained the required personnel. According to Prigozhin, the U.S. is holding back the Ukrainians so that Russia neither wins nor loses. In the resulting weakened state, its unpatriotic, deeply pro-Western, comfort-loving “deep state” would eventually help U.S. masterminds break up the country, something that they could not achieve by military means.

This “deep state,” Prigozhin wrote, is “ready to join forces with any ally or enemy for the sake of its own interests.”

The sworn enemies aren’t in harmony on other points. In Strelkov’s view, a military defeat in Ukraine could also cause Russia to be “dismembered,” but Prigozhin argues that such a fiasco wouldn’t be lethal because core Russia is still well protected; and because a defeat might actually allow it to “bounce back from the bottom” and deal a fatal blow to the self-interested “deep state”:

Radical national sentiment will rise, like after any military defeat, the Russian defense industry will start working at 10 times the current rate. Economic efficiency will push out the flabby, inefficient state capital. The state will get rid of bureaucracy, its procedures will become transparent, and, step by step, Russia will turn into a Bristling Military Monster that the international community will have to reckon with.

The shared hope of Prigozhin and Strelkov, then, is that continued fighting will reforge Russia and unseat its compromised elite, which has run the country throughout Putin’s almost quarter-century rule, with a more patriotic incarnation; i.e., one that is uncompromisingly anti-Western. Any kind of negotiated ending to the conflict would mean a domestic status quo, and even the thought of that is unbearable to the assorted “patriots” who are hungry for their share, paid in blood. Neither Strelkov nor Prigozhin would accept the other as part of that new elite, but that’s normal for Russian opposition forces: Whether liberal or ultranationalist, they have never been able to agree on how they might divide up power if they ever got their hands on it.

One obvious reason the Putin regime hasn’t yet cracked down on Strelkov or Prigozhin, despite their increasingly public political ambitions, is that their distrust of and contempt for the long-standing regime elite, their fear that it will accept humiliating compromises, is playing into Putin’s hands as he tries to bring his transactional coterie into the new world he has created. As in many times before, the nationalist opposition provides him with propaganda fuel he can burn for free. Putin’s apparatus is busily converting the initial propaganda setting of a blitzkrieg into one of a protracted existential battle against the West. And according to some astute observers, both Russian and Western, the agenda reset is succeeding. Political commentator Andrei Kolesnikov wrote in an essay for the Carnegie Endowment:

The Kremlin has managed to transform the “special operation” into a “people’s war,” a shared task that should unite the nation. Anyone who is against the Kremlin — “national traitors,” in Putin’s words — must be fought against.

There’s more to the reframing than a change of official attitude toward the invasion, an attempt to involve every Russian in the current war. “The current wave of Russian nationalism-cum-imperialism strives to redefine this war as a birth of a new Russian nation; free of any Western influence,” Andrew Michta of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies tweeted recently. “If Russia is indeed at a civilizational inflection point, then there are inherent limitations to any accommodation with Moscow contemplated by our policy elites. Putin wants not just to defeat Ukraine; he is seeking a civilizational win over the West. We should recognize that.”

It would be time for the “angry patriots” and fans of Prigozhin’s soldier-of-fortune style to worry about some kind of traitorous compromise on Putin’s part if he moved to silence them, shutting down Strelkov’s Telegram mutiny and allowing the regular military to take over Prigozhin’s storm troops, as the high command has long wanted to do. Putin the control freak wouldn’t tolerate their agitation if he planned to compromise with the West. As it is, he appears to be digging in and hoping that Russia’s moneyed elite will adapt itself to the new order, as it’s done repeatedly in the past; just give it time.

Putin’s investment in Russia’s “civilizational inflection point,” to use Michta’s expression, is far greater than that of the likes of Prigozhin or Strelkov: He’s staked his enormous power on it, and he’ll only allow even partially dissenting voices if they sing harmony with each other and, ultimately, with him. Only a massive military defeat could, in theory, change that.

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”