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For more than a year, American officials have quietly asked themselves a question they would not dare raise publicly: Could a failed Russian invasion of Ukraine ultimately lead to the downfall of Russian President Vladimir Putin?
For a few hours of chaotic, head-spinning this weekend, the idea wasn’t far off. But even with the apparent end to the immediate threat posed by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebel mercenary army, the short-lived uprising suggests Putin’s grip on power is more fragile than at any time since he took office more than two decades ago.
The aftermath of an insurrection for US President Joe Biden and American policymakers leaves opportunity and danger at the most turbulent moment since the early days of the invasion of Ukraine. Chaos in Russia could unravel its war effort just as Ukrainian forces step up their long-awaited counter-offensive, but officials in Washington remained concerned about Putin’s unpredictable feel for the nuclear weapon.
said Evelyn Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership and a former Pentagon official. “The main thing we care about is making sure that the military professionals stay in control of all the nuclear facilities.”
The armed standoff on the Road to Moscow represents, for a brief period, the most dramatic power struggle in Russia since the failed 1991 hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and the 1993 showdown between Boris Yeltsin and parliament. Unlike those episodes, Washington was not favored in the conflict. Prigozhin is no more a friend of the United States than Putin is.
Biden responded to the crisis by not responding, choosing caution rather than speaking out, which would risk giving Putin ammunition to claim it was all a foreign plot, which is often the first line in the Kremlin’s playbook whenever domestic problems arise. Biden postponed his departure for Camp David to hold a secure video briefing with senior advisers in the White House Ward Room — a makeshift operating room while the real room is being refurbished — and also spoke with the leaders of Britain, France and Germany.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, canceled a trip to Denmark intended to drum up support for Ukraine so he could accompany Biden to Camp David and hold the planned meeting via videoconference instead. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also canceled visits to Israel and Jordan. But other than reaffirming U.S. support for Ukraine, the administration has kept quiet, letting events unfold while officials pored over the intelligence to get a sense of what was happening.
The administration has been crafting contingency plans for such a scenario for a long time, but was left scrambling on Saturday just like everyone else to get hard information from Russia and interpret what it means, drawing on social media and other Internet sources like conventional intelligence. origins.
US officials have been paying particular attention to Russia’s nuclear arsenal, concerned about instability in a country that has the potential to wipe out most of the planet. But a senior administration official said the government has not detected any change in the way Russia disposes of Russian weapons and has not changed America’s nuclear stance either.
“It’s very fast-moving, so it’s hard to know where we’ll end up, but the two main issues for the United States are command and control of nuclear weapons and the implications for Ukrainian efforts to liberate more territory,” James said. Goldgeier, professor of international relations at American University and specialist in Russia.
Andrea Kendall Taylor, a longtime Russian intelligence analyst who is now at the Center for a New American Security, said the United States has limited ability to influence events there and should focus on preventing the spread of violence and unrest.
“Washington should avoid stoking deep paranoia within Russia that the United States or NATO will seek to exploit the chaos,” she said. “This will be important for preventing an overreaction in Moscow and in the long run if the time comes to stabilize relations with some of Russia in the future.”
Any way they look at it, U.S. officials have seen events on the ground as evidence of Putin’s eroding standing.
For months they watched Prigozhin’s escalating spat with Defense Ministry leadership over the conduct of Ukraine’s war, wondering, as did others, why Putin would tolerate such overt dissent and speculating about whether the Russian president had secretly emboldened it for his own sake. special political purposes.
But by Saturday, there was little doubt in the White House and national security agencies that Prigozhin had caused Putin serious damage. Once a key lieutenant to Putin who orchestrated interference in the 2016 US election, Prigozhin has publicly debunked Putin’s entire rationale for the war, disproving the notion that the invasion was a justifiable response to supposed threats to Russia by Ukraine and NATO.
Moreover, in his address to the nation as the crisis unfolded on Saturday, Putin likened the situation to 1917, when the last tsarist government collapsed in the midst of a war going badly, a comparison that only fueled the image of a leader in the state. The Kremlin is losing its grip on the country. And by striking a deal with Prigozhin just hours after threatening to crush him, Putin has cemented the fact that he no longer has exclusive control over the use of force on Russian soil.
“One thing is very clear: Putin looks very weak,” said Alina Polyakova, head of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. But, she added, a collapse of Putin’s government would pose its own risks. The United States and its allies should “focus on supporting Ukraine while planning for all possible scenarios, including the fall of the Putin regime and its replacement by a hard-right faction that will be more brutal and less conservative when it comes to the war in Ukraine.”
Even assuming he clung to power, policymakers fear Putin could become more of a regular if he feels cornered. “Vulnerability breeds more dangerous behavior on the part of Putin,” said Jon Huntsman Jr., a former ambassador to Russia under President Donald Trump. “There is a new ripple in Putin’s ‘immunity’, which will be exploited from every angle.”
For Ukraine, which is working alongside American arms suppliers and intelligence officials to drive invaders from its territory, Russia’s internal conflict has offered a welcome balm after its long-anticipated counteroffensive got off to a slow start.
The mercenary organization Wagner Group, led by Prigozhin, was seen as Russia’s most effective force on the battlefield, but with its charismatic leader heading into apparent exile in Belarus and the Russian Ministry of Defense absorbing its forces, it may not be. The fierce fighting unit that it was.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, Prigozhin’s rebellion ended before major Russian forces were withdrawn from the front lines to protect Moscow, according to US information. But US officials expect the spat will fuel doubts already plaguing Russian forces about the point of the war and the competence of its leadership. And few people believe that Prigozhin is a spent force who will simply return to selling sausages, as he did as a young man. US officials expect he still has cards to play.
Indeed, Kurt Volcker, a former ambassador to NATO and special envoy for Ukraine, said Prigozhin’s revolution marked the beginning of the end of the war and Putin’s tenure, even with the deal holding Moscow back.
“Don’t trust the other way around,” he said. “This is positioning. Prigozhin wants to be seen as a hero to Russians while amassing more support and making demands. The state will go after him, and that could be a pretext to ‘reluctantly’ defend himself.”
As Volker said, there will be “more shoes to drop.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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