Did Vladimir Putin’s former cook, now head of the Wagner Group and protagonist of the war in Ukraine, launch a coup attempt in Russia? “Ready to die”, Evguéni Prigojine affirms this Saturday to have entered Russia with his “25,000 men” to “liberate the Russian people”. “We will destroy anything that gets in our way.” “We continue, we will go to the end”, launched the militia leader, threatening to march on Moscow if the Russian Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and General Valéri Guérassimov, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, do not not come to meet him.
A few hours after this event with uncertain consequences, Le Figaro invites you to discover the first reactions of experts from Russia.
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“To the long list of Kremlin failures, it is therefore appropriate to add the management of the” Prigojine case “”, wrote on Twitter Arnaud Dubien, the director of the Franco-Russian Observatory. “Prigozhin was playing a dangerous game. Not sure that he can backtrack and be allowed to fall into line after the events – troubles incidentally – of this evening. Nights of the long knives for Wagner?”, deciphers the analyst who evokes “the political execution of Prigojine”, but still raises the question of possible “negotiations in progress”.
“Since Putin opposes Wagner head-on and Wagner persists, we can consider that this is an attempt to overthrow power,” IFRI researcher Dmitri Minic, a specialist in the Russian army. “And to think that Wagner was designed to subvert foreign states,” notes the author of a noted book, Russian Strategic Thought and Culture, from Circumventing Armed Struggle to War in Ukraine.
“Prigozhin’s rivalry (with the Russian army) caused him to lock himself up. His bet seems like a desperate act to me, although it will all depend on whether Prigozhin acts alone or other important people join him, writes on Twitter the American military analyst Michael Kofman, director of the Russian studies program at the Center for Naval Analysis and member of the Center for a New American Security. I’m skeptical if it ends well for him or Wagner (…) The Russian security services are clearly taking the threat from Prigozhin seriously. I would wait to see if Wagner mobilizes, deploys, and if someone important joins him. The weekend promises to be interesting”.
“We could very well see Moscow make a deal with Prigozhin – maybe give him more power and see how the war is fought –. They clearly don’t want to fight him, he has now made his point and also reduced the aggressiveness of his tone,” suggests Dmitry Alperovitch, president of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a geopolitical think tank in Washington. “There is a precedent in modern Russia. Kadyrov (and his father) were originally on the side of the rebels during the Second Chechen War (and had killed many Russian soldiers), but were then convinced to switch sides and all was forgiven,” says the analyst American born in Moscow.
“Prigozhin’s threat to take his 25,000 men on the march (towards Moscow?) to hold the Ministry of Defense to account is difficult to implement without the support of the Russian military and possibly the security services. So it sounds more like a rhetorical threat or an actual plan. If there is a broader mutiny in the Russian army, its chances could improve”, analyzes on Twitter Sergey Radchenko, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
“It will be interesting to see how this development will affect the Ukrainian counteroffensive. We’ll see that soon enough, no doubt. Putin will find it difficult to remain imperturbable, in the clouds. In recent days, he has sided with the Ministry of Defense. But make no mistake: Russia could descend into an outright civil war. The likelihood of a military coup has also increased. We haven’t seen such a moment since 1991″, warns the historian specializing in the Cold War, who nevertheless qualifies: “But this is not 1991. Certainly, the system is rotten, but the internal capacity of violence is far from being exhausted”. As a bonus, the academic identifies several areas of concern for Westerners: “the security and proliferation of Russian nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons; regional instability and possible ripple effects (particularly in the Caucasus); refugee flows”.
