 | By Krista Mahr Deputy International Editor, Opinion |
All of us felt the world shift a little last weekend, watching the troops of the Wagner force leader Yevgeny Prigozhin make their way from the southern city of Rostov-on-Don toward Moscow. The sight of a domestic challenge to President Vladimir Putin — and what its success or failure would bring — was as disorienting as it was alarming. |
And then, seemingly as abruptly as it began, it was over, the standoff ending in a hastily brokered deal. Prigozhin called back his convoy and received a hero's send-off in Rostov-on-Don as his private army packed up and left, ending the immediate specter of a civil war and Russia's massive nuclear arsenal potentially falling into the hands of a rogue mercenary leader. |
We may never know exactly what transpired behind the scenes last weekend, but the murky events unearthed critical questions that we at Times Opinion have been grappling with in our coverage this week. |
Among those questions, as editorial board member Serge Schmemann put it, "is whether the failed mutiny will leave President Vladimir Putin weakened, strengthened or vindictive." As Putin seeks to reassert himself, the immediate prognosis for Ukraine looked bleak, he wrote, as Russia sent a swarm of missiles and drones into the country hours after the mutiny. At home, "Mr. Putin has left the field for new repression in Russia wide open, and could similarly begin an even more vicious crackdown on anyone in the Russian elite or leadership who questions him," Schmemann wrote. |
Others stand to benefit from the instability. President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, who reportedly helped broker the deal between Putin and Prigozhin, is seeking to burnish his reputation on the global stage by presenting himself as the man who stopped a bloody uprising, Thomas Graham writes in a guest essay. |
From Moscow, Andrei Kolesnikov wrote about the uneasy silence that settled over the typically lively city as residents watched the convoy inch toward their homes. He argued that the system that Putin built, while easily surviving Prigozhin's revolt, nevertheless suffered a serious blow. The mutiny "poked a hole in the Kremlin's campaign to assure Russians that everything is fine," he wrote. |
The true power of the revolt, Bret Stephens argued, was that it broke through Putin's sustained lies about the war in Ukraine. In a diatribe he posted to Telegram the day before his march on Moscow, Prigozhin said Putin's war was "poorly planned" and cost thousands of Russians their lives. "There's something bracing and refreshing about hearing the truth — even if it comes from the mouth of a self-interested thug," Stephens wrote. |
Prigozhin didn't succeed, of course. He may be silenced, reportedly now in exile in Belarus, and Putin is back in control of his country's narrative. And, as Thomas L. Friedman reminds us, even if Putin is somehow unseated in the near term, the world may not necessarily become a safer place. There are no other more reliable figures waiting in the wings should Putin's system crumble. |
If Russia fails, it will fail spectacularly. In that sense, Friedman writes, "Putin has taken the whole world hostage. If he wins, the Russian people lose. But if he loses and his successor is disorder, the whole world loses." |
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