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Just three days earlier, the Wagner mercenary group was advancing on Moscow, and Vladimir Putin’s two-decade rule over Russia seemed under threat. Then, in a startling development, the leader of the uprising, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said he was stopping the rebellion and going into exile.
As the dust settles, here’s a look at what we know about the situation.
As of Tuesday morning, the latest photos released of Prigozhin showed him smiling at onlookers on Saturday as he was driven away from Rostov-on-Don, the city in southwestern Russia that Wagner had claimed control of.
At the time these photos were taken, he was expected to fly to Belarus under a deal announced by that country’s authoritarian leader, President Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Putin.
On Tuesday afternoon, Lukashenko said Prigozhin – The billionaire and himself is once a friend of Putin – He arrived in the country.
However, little is known about Prigozhin’s immediate future, not least where he will live, whether he will be free to travel within or outside Belarus, and how much influence he will be able to wield as a political figure in Russia.
Perhaps most importantly, it is not clear how his relations with Russia – and with Putin – will develop. Some of Putin’s former allies who fell out with him faced the wrath of the Russian security services.
It is also unclear what, if any, role Prigozhin will be allowed to play leader of the Wagner Group, whose fighters were also offered entry to Belarus.
What will happen to Wagner?
Fomenting rebellion is usually fraught with danger in Putin’s Russia, where even modest acts of dissent are punished harshly. But Russian authorities said on Tuesday that charges of “armed rebellion” against Prigozhin and the mercenaries had been dropped as part of the arrangement with Lukashenko.
Russian state media reported on Sunday that Wagner’s forces had returned to their camps in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, which Russia largely occupies and illegally annexed last fall. At the same time, Lukashenko said on Tuesday he was offering the Wagner fighters a base to use in Belarus, though it was not clear on what terms the offer was made, how many mercenaries would accept that offer or what they would do there.
Putin had said before the attempted uprising that all irregular units fighting in Ukraine, including Wagner, would have to sign contracts with Russia’s defense ministry, a move Prigozhin cited over the weekend as a key motivation behind his revolt.
Given this, it is unclear how quickly – or even if – the Russian military can absorb them into its ranks. It calls into question the willingness of the Wagner fighters to serve and possibly die under the new formal structure.
Only when they return to fight in Ukraine will it be possible to assess their continued morale and leadership. They were considered by some Ukrainian forces to be the best equipped, most motivated, and most tactically aggressive of all the Russian forces.
And Ukraine is only part of Wagner’s portfolio. The group operates in the Central African Republic, Mali and Sudan, and in each country has offered military assistance in exchange for payments, in part in terms of access to the country’s natural resources. In Mali, evidence suggests they took part in a massacre of civilians last year, while in the Central African Republic The Sentry, a Washington-based group seeking to expose corruption, accuses them of possible war crimes.
Wagner appears to be working in Africa on behalf of the Kremlin, and it is not clear whether Wagner will move forward with its contracts on the continent or back down.
Is Putin stronger or weaker?
There is no shortage of experts who say Putin is a diminished figure because of the uprising, which may have been the biggest public security threat to his rule in more than two decades. Analysts note that for a leader so eager to project toughness, his pledge on Saturday to bring mercenaries to justice, only to strike a deal in which they would seemingly avoid prosecution, is noteworthy.
But since then, Putin has tried to show unity and strength. On Monday, he called Prigozhin a traitor and said the Russian state had consolidated “at all levels” against the uprising. On Tuesday, Putin thanked the Russian military for “essentially stopping the civil war.”
It is not clear how any potential weakening of Putin’s grip on power might manifest itself, or how quickly and in what form any challenge to his authority might come.
He is being judged in part by Russia’s success, or lack thereof, on the battlefield in Ukraine, and the ability of Russian forces to withstand a Ukrainian counteroffensive that began this month will provide a test of his authority over the military. But Putin’s main audience is domestic.
One analyst, Abbas Galliamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter turned political adviser, said Monday’s speech was “a very poor performance”.
However, after a two-day period during which every hour seemed to deepen Putin’s peril over the weekend, the coming days and weeks could give him opportunities to reassert an aura of stability.
That certainly seemed to be his goal on Tuesday, when he delivered a gorgeously choreographed speech to soldiers and security forces standing intently on the Kremlin grounds — a rare public appearance that included red-carpet arrival.
How will it affect the war in Ukraine?
To say the least, the Wagner Group has had turbulent days. And for the Ukrainian army, whose counterattack is gaining strength, this cannot hurt.
The question is to what extent Ukraine can benefit from any signs of wavering in the Wagner Group’s sentiment. The fact that some of Wagner’s soldiers will come under Russian military command from 1 July could destabilize the organization, at least in the short term.
Then there is the question of what happens to the strength of Wagner fighters on the battlefield. The mercenaries led the way for Russia in months of fighting for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, claiming tens of thousands of casualties along the way.
It remains to be seen if this can be reproduced within Russia’s armed forces, which are generally paid less than mercenary fighters.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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