Russia will emerge from the turmoil caused by last week’s aborted mutiny “stronger,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
“Russia has always emerged stronger from difficulties,” Moscow’s top diplomat said at a June 30 online press briefing.
“This will be the case this time,” he added. “We already feel that this has begun.”
On June 24, Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of Russia’s Wagner Group, staged an armed insurrection that had briefly appeared to threaten Moscow.
The rebellion failed to gain any traction, however, and within 24 hours, Prigozhin called it off, ordering his fighters back to their base camps.
A private military firm linked to the Kremlin, Prigozhin’s Wagner Group has done much of the fighting in Ukraine since Russia invaded that country in February 2022.
Yet despite the mutiny’s speedy conclusion, Western leaders have seized on the incident as proof that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power is slipping.
“We’ve seen more cracks emerge in the Russian facade,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in televised remarks.
“Could Putin Lose Power?” the New York Times asked in a recent headline.
European leaders, meanwhile, have lined up to voice similar sentiments.
Even former U.S. President Donald Trump, who, if reelected, has pledged to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, weighed in on the issue.
Putin is “still strong,” Trump told Reuters in a June 29 telephone interview.
“But he certainly has been … somewhat weakened [by the mutiny]—at least in the minds of a lot of people,” he added.
Fighters of Wagner private mercenary group pull out of the headquarters of the Southern Military District to return to base, in the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, June 24, 2023. Stringer/REUTERS
Alternative Readings
But almost a week after Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion, an alternative reading has begun to emerge—one that sees Putin’s grip on power as stronger than ever.Now that the dust has settled, commentators are noting that, as the rebellion unfolded, Russian officialdom was unanimous in condemning the mutineers.
Even among the Wagner Group itself, few officers—if any—threw in their lot with Prighozin and his ill-fated march on Moscow.
Prigozhin, for his part, has since been allowed to relocate to Minsk, where he will avoid prosecution under a deal brokered by the leader of Belarus.
But he will remain under the watchful eye of the Belarusian government, a close ally of Moscow, to ensure he doesn’t make any more trouble.
His Wagner Group, meanwhile, is now in the process of being formally integrated into the Russian military.
“The chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army,” veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote on Substack on June 29.
“There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule,” he added.
Hersh goes on to cite one of his trademark U.S. intelligence sources as saying: “Putin is now in a much stronger position.”
It isn’t the first time that Hersh, 86, has challenged mainstream narratives regarding the ongoing showdown between Moscow and the West.
In February, Hersh claimed—based, as usual, on anonymous sources—that U.S. President Joe Biden had ordered last year’s attack on the Nord Stream energy pipelines.
The White House, for its part, has described Hersh’s assertion as “completely false.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Russian government via teleconference in Moscow on March 10, 2022. Mikhail Klimentyev/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images
‘Stubbornly Strong’
But while Hersh was alone in making that claim, he hasn’t been the only one to suggest that last week’s mutiny may have actually strengthened Putin’s hand.In a June 29 opinion piece in British newspaper The Guardian, author Anatol Lieven makes the case that the rebellion showed Putin to be “stubbornly strong.”
According to Lieven, Putin handled the crisis with “determination and resolve,” resulting in a favorable—and relatively bloodless—outcome.
The writer also dismisses Western claims that Prigozhin’s no-prosecution deal was a sign of the Russian leader’s weakness.
Because the rebels found no support among the Russian regular army, Lieven writes, Putin had “nothing to gain by seeking violent revenge … [and] everything to gain by showing magnanimity.”
“He had, after all, won,” adds Lieven, who has written extensively on Russia-Ukraine affairs and currently heads the Eurasia program at the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Nor has the mutiny had a noticeable effect on the ongoing war in Ukraine, where a weeks-long counter-offensive by Kyiv has failed to register significant gains.
A day after Prigozhin’s misadventure, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told Fox News that the goals of the counter-offensive had been “overestimated.”
In his Substack post, Hersh wrote: “I have been told that in the past 10 days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way.”
The Epoch Times was unable to verify the assertion, which contrasts starkly with recent claims by Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister.
“If we talk about the entire frontline, both east and south, we have seized the strategic initiative and are advancing in all directions,” Maliar said on June 30.
Reuters contributed to this report.
