Staged chaos: Russia’s real deterrent
Prigozhin mutiny creates political fragmentation bomb
Putin blinked. Prigozhin gets to run his neo-colonial crime empire from Belarus. Some generals will be fired. The war goes on. That’s the appearance. But what is the essence?
I’ve been depressed by the incapacity of the Western media to cope with the reality of Russian fascism over the past 24 hours; where the concept of appearance/essence is a vital analytical tool.
What appears to happen, and what’s actually happening are nearly always different: truth is contained within facts, but not presented prima facie. You have to analyse, discern the signal from the noise, dechyper message from signal. Bring historical knowledge to the table.
So what happened? Let’s start at the appearance level.
Prigozhin staged a revolt to topple the leadership of the Russian MoD. It was clearly telegraphed, as was its limited intent. It was executed at speed, using classic coup-de-main tactics on the ground, and managed to dominate the Russian information space.
To defeat it, Putin would have needed to put one army brigade on the Oka river, and used the Russian airforce to bomb Wagner Group’s strung-out column, having first taken out its air defences. But he could not. Nor could his intelligence service, apparently, give adequate warning of the mutiny.
Putin failed because, though the air force tried to stop Wagner, they suffered losses and, reportedly, some pilots refused. There is no record of any serious army mobilisation, and Rosvguardia troops at checkpoints simply let the column pass.
Instead Putin likely fled in a command aircraft to Valdai, along with members of the Moscow elite, and negotiated with Prigozhin, leaving the latter a power broker in what comes next.
Meanwhile numerous internal factions declared their positions: the “Free Russian” groups in Ukraine backed the uprising, as did Navalny; Kadyrov backed the central government; Igor Girkin’s “Club of Angry Patriots” raged at the paralysis. The position of the FSB within yesterday’s events remains unknown.
What we’re left with, at the appearance level, is a weakened authoritarian state which just demonstrated how close to collapse it could become if the dictator, Putin, were to be removed.
Putin’s real deterrent
But here we approach the essence of the events: by staging a 24 hour meltdown, the Russian security elite — either by accident or design, it doesn’t matter — outlined their strategic argument to the West.
Russia is a state that cannot be defeated in Ukraine because, if humiliated, it could collapse into warring factions just like in 1918–19, only this time with nuclear stockpiles in play. This, if you think about it, is a far stronger argument than the one usuall presented by German pacifists: “don’t support Ukraine because Putin he might nuke us”.
It’s also a stronger proposition than the one typically feared by Western intelligence: Putin is ousted by a more effective hard-liner.
Putin is unlikely to use tactical nukes in Ukraine because he has been warned by the Biden administration that, if he did so, the USA would enter the war with conventional means and end the Russian presence in Ukraine, the Black Sea and likely Syria. Any hard-line replacement would face the same issue.
However, the catastrophic breakup of the Russian state — which has become a doom-theme in Putinist and far-right commentary during the Prigozhin revolt — is a real possibility.
I have written here before that the Russian army has a “style of failure” — politicisation and disintegration. So does the Russian state.
Imperial Russia disintegrated during the Civil War: even the White armies consisted of rival territorial and political factions ranging from liberalism to Tsarism to the proto-fascism of Alexander Kolchak.
The Soviet Union itself disintegrated between Christmas and New Year in 1991. Even inside the Russian Federation, authority disintegrated for many years thereafter. Russia’s style of failure is factional disintegration, and we just got treated to a glimpse of its 21st century format.
So the threat Putin can plausibly dangle at Western leaders as of this morning is not: “step back or I nuke Kyiv”; it is step back or a nucelar armed P5 state disintegrates.
All eyes on the nuclear plant
In Kyiv, meanwhile, the government’s mind is on a more immediate threat: the placing of explosives at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. In a detailed interview with Bruno Maçães, of the New Statesman, intelligence chief Kyril Budanov yesterday outlined recent Russian actions at the plant.
They have placed explosive-laden vehicles next to four of the six reactors. And they have mined the cooling pond — which now stands high above the bed of the Dnipro, following the mining of the Nova Kakhovka dam. Maçães reports:
“Without cooling, the nuclear reactors could melt in a period of between ten hours and 14 days. He believes Russia would be able to raise the voltage in the power supply lines to the plant, bringing about a nuclear accident at the lower end of that time frame. As Budanov put it during the interview, ‘Technical means could be used to speed up the catastrophe’.”
To understand Putin’s intent, we need to read the Prigozhin mutiny as part of a sequence of events. I don’t claim to know what Putin is thinking — but he speaks only through actions, so you have to “read” those actions carefully, even if they may have binary intent:
He mobilises the BRICS to present the West with a peace plan, which apparently involves the retention of Crimea and neutrality of Ukraine (his overall objective).
He blows the Nova Kakhovka dam, sentencing both Kherson and Crimea to long-term ecocide.
That leaves the nuclear power plant vulnerable to meltdown if the cooling reservoir is harmed. It has long been rumoured, and even signalled, that Putin’s “escalate to de-escalate” move will involve a staged “terrorist attack” on the plant.
Then comes the Prigozhin mutiny.
It’s possible the whole thing was staged, in the sense of expected and played out within agreed parameters. As I wrote yesterday it was a “Kayfabe coup” — using the kind of performative violence professional wrestlers use, even as they draw real blood from each other.
But even if it wasn’t collaboratively staged, Prigozhin’s last-minute withdrawal persuades me it was a choreographed show of force by different factions.
Who do you think was the desired audience? The Russian people — for sure: they need heroes and now they’ve got one. From here on in, the big business of running the Russian fascist state is a collaborative venture between Evgeny and his old boss Volodya: the business elite can cower and scrape to two masters, never sure of who will finally be in charge.
But we, the West, were the primary audience. “Look what happens if you win”, was the subtext, written in big letters for the geopolitically stupid.
What we’re dealing with here is nihilism. As I wrote in How to Stop Fascism, it is deeply ingrained into all fascisms, but especially the Duginist variety. “What’s the point of the world if Russia is not in it,” as Putin famously asked in 2018, is just a polite iteration of Dugin’s promise to destroy modernity if Russia cannot be a great, ethno-nationalist state.
It will take a while to piece together where the factional faultlines really lie, and what the real deal is with Prigozhin. But whatever the detail, a bigger picture is clear.
Russia as it is cannot maintain its place in a multilateral world order. Its pariah status must be managed long-term. The West needs to invest not just in Ukraine’s victory, but Ukraine’s long-term security. And it needs to find allies in Russia, and make contingency plans — with China if possible — for how to limit the damage to global security should the Russian elite implode for real.
Short term the issue is clear: Putin must be left in no doubt that blowing up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is a red line for the West.
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