Timothy Snyder sobre dois GANGSTERS russos: a marcha de Prigozyn contra Putin

 

Prigozhin's March on Moscow

Ten lessons from a mutiny

TIMOTHY SNYDER JUN 26

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How to understand Yevgeny Prigozhin's march on Moscow and its sudden end?  Often there are plots without a coup; this seemed like a coup without a plot.  Yet weird as the mercenary chief’s mutiny was, we can draw some conclusions from its course and from its conclusion.

1.  Putin is not popular.  All the opinion polling we have takes place in an environment where his power is seen as more or less inevitable and where answering the question he wrong way seems risky.  But when his power was lifted, as when Rostov-on-Don was seized by Wagner, no one seemed to mind.  Reacting to Prigozhin's mutiny, some Russians were euphoric, and most seemed apathetic.  What was not to be seen was anyone in any Russian city spontaneously expressing their personal support for Putin, or let alone anyone taking any sort of personal risk on behalf of his regime.  The euphoria suggests to me that some Russians are ready to be ruled by a different exploitative regime.  The apathy indicates that most Russians at this point just take for granted that they will be ruled by the gangster with the most guns, and will just go on with their daily lives regardless of who that gangster happens to be. 

2.  Prigozhin was a threat to Putin, because he does much the same things that Putin does, and leverages Putin's own assets.  Both the Russian state itself and Prigozhin's mercenary firm Wagner are extractive regimes with large public relations and military arms.  The Putin regime exists, and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are relatively wealthy, thanks to the colonial exploitation of hydrocarbon resources in Siberia.  The wealth is held by a very few people, and the Russian population is treated to a regular spectacle of otherwise pointless war -- Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again -- to distract attention from this basic state of affairs, and to convince them that there is some kind of external enemy that justifies it (hint: there really isn't).  Wagner functioned as a kind of intensification of the Russian state, doing the dirtiest work beyond Russia, not only in Syria and Ukraine but also in Africa.  It was subsidized by the Russian state, but made its real money by extracting mineral resources on its own, especially in Africa.  Unlike most of its other ventures, Wagner's war in Ukraine was a losing proposition.  Prigozhin leveraged the desperation of Russia's propaganda for a victory by taking credit for victory at Bakhmut.  That minor city was completely destroyed and abandoned by the time Wagner took it, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives.  But because it was the only gain in Russia's horrifyingly costly but strategically senseless 2023 offensive, it had to be portrayed by Putin's media as some kind of Stalingrad or Berlin.  Prigozhin was able to direct the false glory to himself even as he then withdrew Wagner from Ukraine.  Meanwhile he criticized the military commanders of the Russian Federation in increasingly vulgar terms, thereby preventing the Russian state (and Putin) from gaining much from the bloody spectacle of invaded Ukraine.  In sum: Wagner was able to make the Putin regime work for it.

3.  Prigozhin told the truth about the war.  This has to be treated as a kind of self-serving accident: Prigozhin is a flamboyant and skilled liar and propagandist.  But his pose in the days before his march on Moscow made the truth helpful to him.  He wanted to occupy this position in Russian public opinion: the man who fought loyally for Russia and won Russia's only meaningful victory in 2023, in the teeth of the incompetence of the regime and the senselessness of the war itself.  I'm not sure enough attention has been paid to what Prigozhin said about Putin's motives for war: that it had nothing to do with NATO enlargement or Ukrainian aggression, and was simply a matter of wishing to dominate Ukraine, replace its regime with a Moscow-friendly politician (Viktor Medvedchuk), and then seize its resources and to satisfy the Russian elite.  Given the way the Russian political system actually works, that has the ring of plausibility.  Putin's various rationales are dramatically inconsistent with the way the Russian political system actually works.

4.  Russia is far less secure than it was before invading Ukraine.  This is a rather obvious point that many people aside from myself have been making, going all the way back the first invasion of 2014.  There was never any reason to believe, from that point at the latest, that Putin cared about Russian national interests.  If he had, he would never have begun a conflict that forced Russia to become subordinate to China, which is the only real threat on its borders.  Any realist in Moscow concerned about the Russian state would seek to balance China and the West, rather than pursue a policy which had to alienate the West.  Putin was concerned that Ukraine might serve as a model.  Unlike Russians, Ukrainians could vote and enjoyed freedom of speech and association.  That was no threat to Russia, but it was to Putin's own power.  Putin certainly saw Ukraine as an opportunity to generate a spectacle that would distract from his own regime's intense corruption, and to consolidate his own reputation as a leader who could gather in what he falsely portrayed as "Russian" lands.  But none of this has anything to do with the security of Russia as a state or the wellbeing of Russians as a people.  The Putin of 2022 (much more than the Putin of 2014) seems to have believed his own propaganda, overestimating Russian power while dismissing the reality of the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian civil society -- something no realist would do.  That meant that the second invasion failed, and that meant (as I wrote back in February 2022) that it would give an opportunity to a rival warlord.  Prigozhin was that warlord and he took that opportunity.  This might have all seemed abstract until he led his forces on a march to Moscow, downing six Russian helicopters and one plane, and stopping without ever having met meaningful resistance.  To be sure, Wagner had many advantages, such as being seen as Russian by locals and knowing how local infrastructure worked.  Nevertheless, Prigozhin's march shows that a small force would have little trouble reaching Moscow.  That was not the case before most of the Russian armed forces were committed in Ukraine, where many of the best units essentially ceased to exist.

5.  When backed into a corner, Putin saves himself.  In the West, we have worry about Putin's feelings.  What might he do if he feels threatened?  Might he do something terrible to us?  Putin encourages this line of thinking with constant bluster about "escalation" and the like.  On Saturday Putin gave another speech full of threats, this time directed against Prigozhin and Wagner.  Then he got into a plane and flew away to another city.  And then he made a deal with Prigozhin.  And then all legal charges against Prigozhin were dropped.  And then Putin's propagandists explained that all of this was perfectly normal.  

So long as Putin is in power, this is what he will do.  He will threaten and hope that those threats will change the behaviour of his enemies.  When that fails, he will change the story.  His regime rests on propaganda, and in the end the spectacle generated by the military is there to serve the propaganda.  Even when that spectacle is as humiliating as can be possibly be imagined, as it was on Saturday when Russian rebels marched on Moscow and Putin fled, his response will be to try to change he subject.  

It is worth emphasizing that on Saturday the threat to him personally and to his regime was real.  Both the risk and the humiliation were incomparably greater than anything that could happen in Ukraine.  Compared to power in Russia, power in Ukraine is unimportant.  After what we have just seen, no one should be arguing that Putin might be backed into a corner in Ukraine and take some terrible decision.  He cannot be backed into a corner in Ukraine.  He can only be backed into a corner in Russia.  And now we know what he does when that happens: record a speech and run away.

(And most likely write a check.  A note of speculation.  No one yet knows what the deal between Putin and Prigozhin was.  There are rumblings in Russia that Sergei Shoigu, Prigozhin's main target, will be forced to resign after accusations of some kind of corruption or another.  There are reports that Prigozhin was given reason to be concerned about the lives of his own familymembers and those of other Wagner leaders.  I imagine, personally, that one element was money.  On 1 July, Wagner was going to cease to exist as a separate entity, at least formally speaking.  It like all private armies was required to subordinate itself to the ministry of defense, which is to say to Shoigu.  This helps to explain, I think, the timing of the mutiny.  Were Wagner to cease to function as before, Prigozhin would have lost a lot of money.  It is not unreasonable to suppose that he marched on Moscow at a moment when we still had the firepower to generate one last payout.  Mafia metaphors can help here, not least because they are barely metaphors.  You can think of the Russian state as a protection racket.  No one is really safe, but everyone has to accept "protection" in the knowledge that this is less risky than rebellion.  A protection racket is always vulnerable to another protection racket.  In marching from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Prigozhin was breaking one protection racket and proposing another.  On this logic, we can imagine Prigozhin's proposal to Putin as follows: I am deploying the greater force, and I am now demanding protection money from you.  If you want to continue your own protection racket, pay me off before I reach Moscow.)

6.  The top participants were fascists, and fascists can feud.  We don't use the term “fascist” much, since the Russians (especially Russian fascists) use it for their enemies, which is confusing; and since it seems somehow politically incorrect to use it.  And for another reason: unlike the Italians, the Romanians, and the Germans of the 1930s, the Putin regime has had the use of tremendous profits from hydrocarbons, which it has used to influence western public opinion.  All the same, if Russia today is not a fascist regime, it is really difficult to know what regime would be fascist.  It is more clearly fascist than Mussolini's Italy, which invented the term.  Russian fascists have been in the forefront of both invasions on Ukraine, both on the battlefield and in propaganda.  Putin himself has used fascist language at every turn, and has pursued the fascist goal of genocide in Ukraine.  

Prigozhin has been however the more effective fascist propagandist during this war, strategically using symbols of violence (a sledgehammer) and images of death (cemeteries, actual corpses) to solidify his position.  Wagner includes a very large number of openly fascist fighters.  Wagner's conflict with Shogun has racist overtones, undertones, and throughtones -- on pro-Wagner Telegram channels he is referred to as "the Tuva degenerate" and similar.  

That said, the difference between fascists can seem very meaningful when that is all that is on offer, and it is absolutely clear that many Russians were deeply affected by the clash of the two fascist camps.  That said, it is important to specify a difference between Putin and Prigozhin's fascism and that of the 1930s.  The two men are both very concerned with money, which the first generation of fascists in general were not.  They are oligarchical fascists -- a breed worth watching here in the US as well.

7.  The division in Russia was real, and will likely endure.  Some Russians celebrated when Wagner shot down Russian helicopters, and others were astonished that they could do so.  Some Russians wanted action, others could not imagine change.  Most Russians probably do not care much, but those who do are not of the same opinion.  Putin's regime will try to change the subject, as always, but now it lacks offensive power in Ukraine (without Wagner) and so the ability to create much of a spectacle. Russian propaganda has already turned against Wagner, who were of course yesterday's heroes. The leading Russian propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, recruited for Wagner. The son of Putin's spokesman supposedly served in Wagner. Although this was almost certainly a lie, it reveals that Wagner was once the site of prestige. 

It might prove hard for Russian propagandists to find any heroes in the story, since for the most part no one resisted Wagner's march on Moscow.  If Wagner was so horrible, why did everyone just let it go forward?  If the Russian ministry of defense is so effective, why did it do so little?  If Putin is in charge, why did he run away, and leave even the negotiating to Lukashenko of Belarus?  If Lukashenko is the hero of the story, what does that say about Putin?

It is also not clear what will happen now to Wagner.  The Kremlin claims that its men will be integrated into the Russian armed forces, but it is hard to see why they would accept that.  They are used to being treated with greater respect (and getting paid better).  If Wagner remains intact in some form, it is hard to see how it could be trusted, in Ukraine or anywhere else.  More broadly, Putin now faces a bad choice between toleration and purges.  If he tolerates the rebellion, he looks weak.  If he purges his regime, he risks another rebellion.

8.  One of Putin's crimes against Russia is his treatment of the opposition.  This might seem to be a tangent: what does the imprisoned or exiled opposition have to do with Prigozhin's mutiny?  The point is that their imprisonment and exile meant that they could do little to advance their own ideas for Russia's future on what would otherwise have been an excellent occasion to do so.  The Putin regime is obviously worn out, but there is no one around to say so, and to propose something better than another aging fascist.  

I think of this by contrast to 1991.  During the coup attempt that August against Gorbachev, Russians rallied in Moscow.  They might or might not have been supporters of Gorbachev, but they could see the threat a military coup posed for their own futures.  The resistance to the coup gave Russia a chance for a new beginning, a chance that has now been wasted.  There was no resistance to this coup, in part because of the systematic political degeneration of the Putin regime, in part because the kinds of courageous Russians who went to the streets in 1991 are no behind bars or in exile.  This means that Russians in general have been denied a chance to think of political futures. 

9.  This was a preview of how the war in Ukraine ends.  When there is meaningful conflict in Russia, Russians will forget about Ukraine and pay attention to their own country.  That has no happened once, and it can happen again.  When such a conflict lasts longer than this one (just one day), Russian troops will be withdrawn from Ukraine.  In this case, Wagner withdrew itself from Ukraine, and then the troops of Ramzan Kadyrov (Akhmat) departed Ukraine to fight Wagner (which they predictably failed to do, which is another story).  In a more sustained conflict, regular soldiers would also depart.  It will be impossible to defend Moscow and its elites otherwise.  Moscow elites who think ahead should want those troops withdrawn now. On its present trajectory, Russia is likely to face an internal power struggle sooner rather than later.  That is how wars end: when the pressure is felt inside the political system.  Those who want this war to end should help Ukrainians exert that pressure.

10.  Events in Russia (like events in Ukraine) are in large measure determined by the choices of Russians (or Ukrainians).  In the US we have the imperialist habit of denying agency to both parties in this conflict.  Far too many people seem to think that Ukrainians are fighting because of the US or NATO, when in fact the situation is entirely the opposite: it was Ukrainian resistance that persuaded other nations to help.  Far too many people still think the US or NATO had something to do with Putin's personal decision to invade Ukraine, when in fact the character of the Russian system (and Putin's own words) provide us with more than enough explanation. 

Some of those people are now claiming that Prigozhin's putsch was planned by the Americans, which is silly.  The Biden administration has quite consistently worked against Wagner.  Prigozhin's main American connection was his hard work, as head of Russia's Internet Research Agency, to get Trump elected in 2016.  Others are scrambling to explain Prigozhin's march on Moscow and its end as some kind of complex political theater, in which the goal was to move Prigozhin and Wagner to Belarus to organize a strike on Ukraine from the north.  This is ludicrous.  If Prigozhin actually does go to Belarus, there is no telling what he might improvise there. But the idea of such a plan makes no sense. If Putin and Prigozhin were on cooperative terms, they could have simply agreed on such a move in a way that would not have damaged both of their reputations (and left Russia weaker).  

Putin choose to invade Ukraine for reasons that made sense to him inside the system he built.  Prigozhin resisted Putin for reasons that made sense to him as someone who had profited from that system from the inside.  The mutiny was a choice within Putin's war of choice, and it exemplifies the disaster Putin has brought to his country.

Timothy Snyder on Russian politics and military: Russia's Politics

A mais recente postagem sobre a guerra de agressão da Rússia contra a Ucrânia, do professor Timothy Snyder, desta vez tratando mais da poítica interna, e militar, da Rússia de Putin. 

Politics returns to Russia

The broader consequences of the Ukrainian counter-offensive

TIMOTHY SNYDER JUN 6

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Wars are won and lost as politics.  Ukraine wins its war when the Russian system bends. But where is the politics in Russia? 

In the series of brilliant lectures that brought me into east European history, my teacher Thomas W. Simons, Jr. spoke of "the return of politics" in late communism as the beginning of the end.  In communist regimes, as in the Putin regime today, there was not supposed to be politics, in the sense of multiple groups contesting power.  Communist parties, like Putin, did a good job of suppressing the reality and the appearance of politics until very near the end. 

The Putin system has an origin and a logic.  When Vladimir Putin was anointed by Boris Yeltsin as his successor to lead the Russian Federation at the turn of the century, he inherited a state in which politics was visible and loud.  Russia still had a number of political parties, a vibrant media scene, and impressive civil society organizations.  The idea of democracy had been undermined, however, by inequalities of wealth, and by the flaunting of power of the oligarchs around the Yeltsin administration.

Under Putin, Russian oligarchs were tamed, but not by a neutral state.  Putin himself became the head oligarch, the boss of bosses.  His party became an instrument of his power, and others lost their significance.  Democracy was discredited in a different way.  By faking elections openly, the Putin regime educated Russian citizens to be accomplices in an administrative ritual.  Russian media is today dominated by state television propaganda senders.  Civil society has been defined as foreign influence and non-governmental organizations have lost their ability to function.

The message of the Putin regime shifted from "corruption is temporary" to "corruption is a fixed principle of the universe."  The initial rationale for the coercive use of state power was to correct the abuses of the Yeltsin period.  Today the state, however arbitrary and dysfunctional, is presented as simply the way things must be.  There are no alternatives.  The West is not really an alternative (goes the claim): its democracy and its rule of law are entirely fake, and people in the West are hypocrites or fools for speaking of such things.  With corruption thus normalized, Russians find themselves facing a frozen future. 

For the last decade, Putin has kept the regime going by foreign spectacle.  Politics was displaced from politics home to abroad, as martial spectacle.  Since February 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, the Putin regime has justified itself by telegenic combat.  In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine when its neighbor was in chaos, and ended up controlling far less territory than planned.  In 2015 the subject of Russian propaganda shifted to Syria, where its armed forces and mercenaries intervened to keep Putin's fellow dictator Assad in power.  Meanwhile Russia kept up its illegal occupation and low-intensity warfare in Ukraine, until undertaking a second (and full-scale) invasion in February 2022 with the goal of destroying its government and taking control of the country.

Putin invaded while claiming that Ukraine did not exist; in fact, the problem posed by Ukraine to his system is that it was all too full of politics, ever more characterized by generations who took variety and choice for granted.  Putin claimed that he had to protect speakers of Russian in Ukraine; the real problem was that speakers of Russian in Ukraine were free to say what they wanted.  The war was never about their liberation, but about their suppression, and of course the suppression of Ukraine as such.  Ukraine never posed a threat to Russia in any conventional sense; but for a dictator who depended on the absence of politics, it was an intolerable neighbor. 

By attacking Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in bringing Ukraine far more deeply into Russian politics than it every otherwise could have been.  Precisely because Ukraine has resisted, it has become an unavoidable subject in Russia.  Russian propagandists are forced to insist that Ukraine, despite all appearances, does not exist; the more loudly they do so, the more obviously they are obsessed with their neighbor.  Russian propaganda about Ukraine has been genocidal since the beginning of the war, but the increasing intensity of exterminationist rhetoric reflects the frustrated desire to create a world in which only Putin matters, in which there are no other actors and no real politics.

By this stage of the war, Ukraine can directly intervene in Russian conversations, not just by the actions of resisting Ukrainians but by its own public relations.  Ukrainian propaganda clips appeared on television in Russian-occupied Crimea.  Today, Russian television and radio in regions bordering Ukraine featured a short broadcast of Putin announcing a Ukrainian offensive inside Russia and ordering a general mobilization.  This deepfake was presumably the work of Ukrainians.  It was presumably meant to generate panic, but perhaps also to create uncertainty around Putin's next media appearance.  If the state no longer controls its media and the appearance of its leader, something has been lost.

The initiation of major war opened the way to violent politics inside Russia.  The invasion gave Putin his occasion to totally suppress peaceful protest inside Russia.  Yet when there is no voice and no vote, politics will take violent forms.  For more than a year, people inside Russia have attacked recruitment offices, set fire to installations associated with the war, and blown up oil tanks and the like.  Until the recent drone attacks inside Russia, this has been a story without a storyline throughout the war.  Very possibly some of the people carrying out these actions have connections to Ukrainian military intelligence.  Even so, whoever they are, some of them likely have their own Russian motives.

Ukrainian resistance has also altered the politics of the non-violent Russian opposition.  Had Putin easily won this war, some Russian liberals (I use this term broadly) would have found it difficult to criticize it, just as they found it difficult to take a clear stand on the last invasion of Ukraine.  Imperialism was (and remains) a problem within Russian liberalism.  Since the war began, Ukrainians have in general boycotted Russians, including Russian liberals, which has brought them some criticism.  The cold shoulder has helped some Russian oppositionists to see Ukrainians as agents of their own history and to rethink their own positions.  (In fairness, one also has to recall Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison just for speaking the truth about the war in Ukraine.  Russians still protest the war, knowing that they will face consequences.)  Leading Russian oppositionists have now issued statements opposing Russian imperialism and endorsing Russia's legal borders. 

Ukrainian victory would discredit the Putin regime in a way that Russian oppositionists could never manage on their own.  Thanks to Ukrainian resistance, they just might have a chance to gain power and and set Russia on a different course.  The clarification of their position might serve them well in the future.  Liberal imperialists would always lose out to illiberal imperialists; liberals who have moved beyond imperialism can blame the war on Putin and try to set a new course.  Many things would have to fall into place for that scenario to be realized.  In the coming days and weeks, the Russian politics to watch is something much more immediate and brutal: "militarist pluralism," or open strife among groups bearing arms for Russia.

From the beginning, the invasion of Ukraine was carried out by not one but several Russian armed forces.  The largest are the state's army, navy, and air force, under the supervision of the Russian ministry of defense (I will hereafter call them "MoD").  These are analogous to other armed forces.  The Russian minister of defense is Sergei Shoigu, who wears a uniform and has a military rank but whose background is in civil defense (where he was best known for his public relations skills).  The commander of the Russian armed forces is Valery Gerasimov. 

Two other major groups, Wagner and Akhmat, are difficult to describe. They share responsibility with the MoD for Russia's countless atrocities in Ukraine.  But the differences among the three groups are significant.  (There are still more groups, but these three are the most important.)

Wagner is a mercenary company with connections to the Russian state.  It is hard to say where the Russian state ends and Wagner begins; well-informed people have different views about this.  Wagner has been present not only in Ukraine but in Syria and around the world, typically involved in violent suppression of opposition and physical control of mineral resources.  Its founder and director, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is an adventurer in the style of the nineteenth-century imperialist race for Africa (where Wagner is very active).  Prigozhin was one of the central figures in Putin's 2016 campaign for Donald Trump.  He promotes his brand in high fascist style, taking credit for atrocities, and posing in front of burial mounds and corpses.  A man of undoubted intelligence and political skill, he has been close to Putin for decades.  Wagner seems to have been the most successful Russian military formation in Ukraine.  On Prigozhin's account, Wagner has now been withdrawn from Ukraine, after taking the city of Bakhmut.  This means that Wagner troops are regrouping in Russia.

Akhmat, a Chechen armed force, exists in a kind of feudal relationship to Putin.  It is in effect the personal guard of Ramzan Kadyrov, who rules Chechnya for Putin as a personal fiefdom.  Kadyrov repeatedly pledges his personal loyalty to Putin, and ostentatiously repeats that his troops are at Putin's service.  Formally Akhmat is part of the Rosgvardiya, internal troops whose main purpose is to suppress dissent.  Akhmat was deployed to Ukraine, where its main tasks seem mainly to have been to oversee occupied territories and, according to Ukrainian sources, serving as barrier troops (shooting Russian soldiers who retreat).  It had little direct military impact, and was withdrawn.  Like Prigozhin, Kadyrov is very concerned about his personal image, and works social media hard. 

In the last few weeks, and especially in the last few days, the strife among these three Russian armed forces has been extraordinary.  One way to understand it would be as the absence of prizes to share.  The entire Russian offensive of 2023 yielded little more than the ruins of Bakhmut.  This small Donbas city looms very large in the Russian imagination.  (Strategically speaking, it probably made no sense for Russia to take the city at all, but that is another question.)  Bakhmut is a prestige object; Wagner did much of the work; Prigozhin has claimed the prestige and taken his men out of the city.  He does not gloat about his victory over Ukrainian armed forces, of which he speaks with respect.  He did and does express himself in brutal and contemptuous terms when addressing the Russian MoD.

Prigozhin had complained for months that MoD did not supply him with artillery, and mocked Gerasimov and Shoigu for their incompetence.  Prigozhin claimed that the Ukrainians did not try to hinder his withdrawal from Bakhmut, but that MoD (whom he called "the other side") mined the road from Bakhmut in an attempt to destroy Wagner and that MoD troops fired on Wagner men.  Prigozhin then announced that Wagner has taken prisoner the commander of the MoD unit present at Bakhmut (72nd Brigade), and released a confession video in which that the man appears to have been tortured.  Today Prigozhin mocked the MoD claim to have halted the Ukrainian counter-offensive, and sarcastically called into question all Russian claims about Ukrainian losses: "we just destroyed planet Earth five times."

Prigozhin asked last month that Akhmat be sent to relieve Wagner in Bakhmut, and Kadyrov agreed.  It is strange of course that such a military decision would be made by people beyond the MoD and in public.  Most likely this decision had already been made by Putin.  But Bakhmut this summer looks like a loyalty test at best or a death trap at worst.  Last fall Wagner and Akhmat took a common stand against the MoD, asking for more ammunition to be sent more quickly to Wagner fighters in Bakhmut.  It might be that Kadyrov and Akhmat are now paying the price for this.

Kadyrov has little to gain from taking such an assignment.  It made political sense for Wagner to stay there, because Prigozhin can now position himself as the only Russian commander with a recent battlefield victory.  Unlike Prigozhin, however, Kadyrov does not visit battlefields in Ukraine.  Thus far Akhmat seems to be in the Donbas region, but not in the city of Bakhmut.  If Akhmat does in fact reach Bakhmut, it will face difficulties.  Ukraine has already retaken control of some of the heights around the city. 

Akhmat and Wagner are now feuding.  Prigozhin said that it was difficult to see what Akhmat was doing in the Donbas, and suggested that its fighters were not really soldiers -- a barb that stung.  The Akhmat rejoinder was that Wagner took tens of thousands of casualties for Bakhmut, and that Prigozhin was therefore incompetent.  Prominent figures on each side published videos or statements suggesting that a personal meeting -- ie combat -- might be the best way to resolve things.  Kadyrov then found a good occasion to change the subject, suggesting publicly that his men from Akhmat should be sent to Russia's Belgorod region as a response to -- yet more Russian armed formations.

The militarist pluralism goes deeper than this.  While the MoD, Wagner, and Akhmat were quarrelling, Ukraine dispatched two small armed groups of Russians from its territory to Russia.  The Ukrainian state denies any role in these actions, which is deliberate trolling: Kyiv is imitating, and thereby mocking, Putin's tactic in 2014, when he denied responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine.  One of these groups, the Freedom for Russian Legion, seems to be made up of captured Russian soldiers who chose to fight against the Putin regime.  The other, the Russian Volunteer Corps, is composed of Russian emigrants to Ukraine, including known fascists, one of whom was arrested for far-right activities in Ukraine.  Ukraine is fighting Russia with the Russians it has to hand.  The fact that these men are in fact Russians poses a problem for Russian propaganda.  The far-right affiliation is also problematic for Moscow.  Russian claimed it needed to invade Ukraine to fight Nazis; now Russian Nazis are raiding Russia from Ukraine.  That is not an easy situation for Russian propagandists, and they have not navigated it well.  In general they have chosen to portray the Russians as Ukrainians, on the logic that admitting a Ukrainian capacity to enter Russia is less objectionable than admitting the existence of an armed Russian opposition.

Russian fighters from Ukraine are now in contact with other Russian armed groups.  They have been engaging MoD in combat, and claim to have killed an MoD commander and taken prisoners.  The commander of the Freedom for Russian Legion even recorded a video for Prigozhin, in which he offered a prisoner exchange: to swap his own MoD prisoners for the MoD officer held by Wagner, the commander of the MoD 72nd Brigade.  So while Russia is fighting what its propagandists insist is a war of existence in Ukraine, Russian MoD soldiers and officers are being taken prisoner by both a Russian mercenary firm and by Russian expatriate soldiers, who then calmly film videos.  (Kadyrov and his Akhmat are only aspirationally in the picture here: it seems obvious that he would like to have his men sent to Belgorod rather than Bakhmut.  But it can be taken for granted that the panicked inhabitants of Russia's border regions would be soothed by the arrival of armed Chechens.)

The Russian state has lost control of some of its territories.  Russian fighters from Ukraine have now crossed the border multiple times, and have caused tremendous chaos in and around the Russian city of Shebekino.  They have forced the MoD to divert troops.  Given the way MoD fights, its attempt to combat Russian fighters from Ukraine has inevitably caused damage to civilian structures.  After fifteen months, Russians in this area now seem to grasp that an actual war is going on, in which they are somehow involved.  As a result, some Russians begin to think politically, at least in a rudimentary way: to ask why there is combat inside Russia; to ask why Putin seems distant and ineffectual; to request weapons to defend themselves.  In the Putin system, this is a beginning.  It may be both the beginning and the end. 

Moscow, 19 August 1991

When you try to generate a system without politics, any politics at all feels like a challenge to the legitimacy of the state.  The war in Ukraine has restarted Russian politics: not necessarily in ways that are pleasant to watch, but following a dynamic that will be difficult to stop.  Ukrainian resistance has revealed the weaknesses of the Putinist attempt to make politics halt.  The denial that Ukraine was a real country created a situation in which Ukraine is now all too real inside Russia itself.  A Foreign wars are only spectacle when the other side cannot resist.  A Russian political order built on propaganda generated propagandists who can make their fights public on social media.  And a dictatorship built on managing rivalries begins to look fragile when the rivals are loud and armed. 

TS 5 June 2023

P.S. My prediction for the counter-offensive itself? Ukraine will keep doing things that surprise Moscow (and us).

Timothy Snyder on the democratic revolution in Ukraine

Maidan and Self-Understanding (lecture)

Making of Modern Ukraine 20

TIMOTHY SNYDER MAY 21, 2023

 Maidan and Self-Understanding (lecture)

We are nearing the end of my open course on Ukrainian history, “The Making of Modern Ukraine.” The 2013-2014 Ukrainian protest movement remembered as “Maidan” was one of the turning points, thus far, of the twenty-first century. 

Obscured as it was (like so much in the 2010s!) by propaganda, the Maidan never received quite the attention it deserved. If it was noticed, this tended to be as some kind of exotic and spectacular event, worthy of splashy photographs but to be quickly forgotten. 

The Maidan was a reckoning with digital and post-modern politics, a call to the corporeal politics of physical protest to defend basic ideas of truth and decency. It began as an attempt to protect Ukraine’s path to the European Union, and ended with Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. 

In my view, the Maidan and the Russian response are an integral part of a larger story that includes Russian encouragement of Brexit and support of Donald Trump in 2016 — I set out the connections in Road to Unfreedom.

Those wishing to understand both the moral and organizational bases of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022 should start with these events of 2013-2014— presented here in Professor Shore’s guest lecture in the class, as well as in her book, Ukrainian Night.

The video of the lecture is here and the podcast version is here or here.The links are the same for all of the lectures: feel free to bookmark or share

here

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-making-of-modern-ukraine/id1653131950?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Timothy Snyder: Oligarchies in Russia and Ukraine post 1991

 Oligarchies in Ukraine and Russia

Ukraine lectures 19

May 21, 2023

https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=310897&post_id=122067026&utm_source=post-email-title&isFreemail=true&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNDQ3NjY0NiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTIyMDY3MDI2LCJpYXQiOjE2ODQ1ODY2OTIsImV4cCI6MTY4NzE3ODY5MiwiaXNzIjoicHViLTMxMDg5NyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.ykXFkUePRdX9_o3dZHhTH5G323azXQguDjwfYg2QrkQ

Apologies: I took a weekend off from posting my Making of Modern Ukraine lectures because I had a couple of other important pieces published: the one on “War and Politics” here as well as the one on nuclear propaganda in the New York Times.

The purpose of this lecture is to evaluate the Ukrainian and Russian states as they emerged after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. I begin though with an excursus into postwar Polish history. It is very important to establish how the Polish factor changed, such that Russia became the most important “other” in Ukrainian history. The efforts of Polish thinkers and then Polish diplomats to create a new paradigm in Polish-Ukrainian relations bore fruit in the 1990s; this success was one reason why Poland was able to join NATO and the EU. Ironically, the very absence of of Polish-Ukrainian conflict made it difficult to remember just how important the Polish factor had always been. 

Russia and Ukraine both emerge from the Soviet Union, but diverge in their domestic politics. Both suffered from the problem of oligarchy: concentration of wealth and associated political power. In Ukraine this led to a certain pluralism; in Russia, one person eventually became the boss of bosses. By the 2010s, the state and societies were more different than (I think) the people in question sometimes realized; this became apparent during Ukrainian protests for democracy and for European integration, which are subjects of lectures to come.

The video is here and the podcast version is hereor here. Sorry I forgot to post the links last time! They are always the same, so if you are following these lectures, you could just bookmark them. 

Lviv, Market Square. These statues are currently stored to preserve them from Russian bomb and missile attacks, and the square is full of sandbags.

Readings:

Plokhy, Gates of Europe, chapter 26.

Serhy Yekelchyk, The Conflict in Ukraine, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, chapter 4.

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, New York: Public Affairs, 2014, Act 1: Reality Show Russia, 1-77.

War and politics Why what happens in Bakhmut matters in Russia - Timothy Snyder

Putin está perdendo na Ucrânia, e pode perder na Rússia.

War and politics

Why what happens in Bakhmut matters in Russia

TIMOTHY SNYDER MAY 12

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War is the continuation of politics by other means, says Clausewitz in On War.  To an aggressor, war can seem like a direct way to alter the domestic politics of another country.  When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine seeking "denazification and demilitarization," he meant killing Ukraine's leaders, purging its society, changing its regime, and transforming it into a colonial appendage of Russia.  But wartime politics often continues in a way the aggressor does not foresee.  It was not foreseen that President Volodymyr Zelens'kyi would remain in Kyiv, that the Ukrainian state would function well, that Ukrainian civil society would resist.

Russian propagandists work hard to instruct us that there is no politics in Russia: the leader is beyond question, always right, opposed by external diabolic forces, etc.  Night after night, they give us a furious panoply of genocidal images of Ukrainians: as vermin, as pestilence, as pigs to be killed by the million.  The visual accumulation of evil is perhaps also a desperate attempt to draw attention away from a basic reality.  Even as we see that the Putin regime is more criminal than we had realized, we don't doubt that it is durable and strong.  In that sense, perhaps, Russian wartime propaganda succeeds.

But we should be suspicious.  Russian history abounds in examples of war bringing an unexpected continuation of politics.  Defeat in Crimea (1856) brought attempts at reform.  Defeat to Japan brought a Russian revolution (1905).  The First World War brought down both the tsar, then the regime that replaced the tsar, in the Bolshevik revolution (1917).  Brezhnev's choice to invade Afghanistan (1979) was one source of the end of the Soviet Union (1991).

And now a leading Putinist propagandist brings a note of discord to Putinism.  Yevgeny Prigozhin is often called "Putin's chef," in reference to his Kremlin-adjacent catering company.  More significantly, Prigozhin ran the Internet Research Agency, which in 2016 generated and spread social media content to get Donald Trump elected.  Prigozhin also directs Wagner, a mercenary company.  Its soldiers have been responsible for carrying out public atrocities, such a beheading a live prisoner.  For Prigozhin, such war crimes are public relations: fascism is presented as effective. 

In recent propaganda videos, however, Prigozhin has been complaining about the Russian military effort.  He has even taken the unusual step of mocking Putin (without mentioning his name).  You can get a very useful guide to the atmospherics here.

This is politics where there is supposed to be none.  It is Russian domestic politics, boomeranging back from Ukraine.  Christo Grozev believes that Prigozhin has been profiling himself as a rival or successor to Putin from the beginning of this war.  Prigozhin has been putting his own image forward on billboards and Telegram videos with relentless regularity.  Wagner has in general been more successful than the regular Russian army in gaining territory.  And Prigozhin has not hesitated to make loud public claims on state resources on this logic.

It is a logic that might have run its course in Bakhmut.  Russia has been trying to take this minor city in the Donbas for about a year, at huge cost in lives.  The area has some economic significance in mines and minerals.  But in the Russian official mind it seems to function like Stalingrad (a turning point in the Second World War): a battle that must be won for the honor of the leader.  Bakhmut was clearly supposed to be taken by 9 May, so that Putin would have something of which to boast in his Victory Day speech.  This did not happen.  What happened instead was politics

Near Bakhmut, 3 May

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The days before and after 9 May were full of discord.  First, Prigozhin announced that he would pull Wagner from Bakhmut because the Russian military had failed to supply artillery shells.  Then he proclaimed that his blackmail had succeeded: the shells were coming, so Wagner would remain in Bakhmut.  Then he said that the shells had not come after all.  Then he began to narrate Ukrainian counter-attacks around Bakhmut, claiming that Russian soldiers (as opposed to Wagner men) were fleeing.  As I write, local Ukrainian counterattacks persist.  Russian gained only a few square miles in the months and months of its entire 2023 offensive, at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties.  And now it seems to be losing that.

It is hard to interpret both Russian politics and battlefield realities, and smart people take opposing sides all the time.  So let me offer, with that proviso, a personal interpretation of the politics of Bakhmut.  I think it possible that Wagner, at this point, is meant to lose in Bakhmut.  If what Prigozhin says was broadly true (a very big if, I accept), then he has been tricked by the Russian command into not withdrawing, and has not been armed the way that he wished to be, right before a Ukrainian attack.  A trap. If that is the case, the motives of his rivals would not be far to seek.  Prigozhin has been mocking the Russian military leadership for months.  He has now criticized Putin directly.  His prestige rests on on the image if Wagner as vicious and successful.  If Wagner fails in Bakhmut, that image is tarnished, and his position is weaker.

Western analysts spend a lot of time plunging the depths of Putin's mind, often to explain to us that his psychological commitments are such that he cannot lose in Ukraine.  I agree that he cares about Ukraine to an unhealthy degree; I was writing about this long ago, and his misunderstanding of the country has indeed brought hubris, catastrophe, nemesis.  But the fixation on Ukraine is connected to something deeper: the idea that tyranny is forever, a personal obsession with losing power. 

Putin’s obsession with eternal personal power was one of the forces that led him to try to suppress Ukraine by military force: a neighboring country where people made their wishes known, where elections worked, where protest was commonplace.  Ukraine was a dangerous model for Russia, at least as Putin understands Russia.  His idea of "rescuing" Russian-speaking people in Ukraine always meant conquering them, humiliating them, taming them.  Remember, Zelens'kyi himself is one of those people!  Ukraine is the country in the world where more people say what they want in the Russian language than anywhere else.  It was that freedom, expressed in Russian, that threatened Putinism.  Now Ukraine threatens Putinism in other ways, which can bring other reactions.

I might be wrong about Bakhmut; it's risky to analyze while a battle is underway, especially on the basis of limited sources.  But if I am right, or something like right, I hope we can think about this war as the continuation of politics by other means, where the continuation is unpredictable, and forces adaptation.  Putin is not fighting the war he imagined, nor should we be.  He is now embedded in a politics he did not anticipate.  

Putin initially connected Ukraine to a dream of posthumous glory.  But now he has no choice but to connect Ukraine to earthly politics, since he cares about retaining power to the end.  To keep power, Putin must control all Russian armed forces, which is not the same thing as keeping them in Ukraine.  Those two things might well contradict: the recent spectacle of disunity around Bakhmut shows how.  The better Ukraine does on the battlefield, the more they will contradict.  More broadly, keeping power is not the same thing as pushing for victory in Ukraine.  If Ukraine seems likely to win, Putin will seek another story of power.  His propagandists are good at changing the subject.

We in democracies sometimes get a bit enraptured by dictators, and particularly dictators at war.  We can get a little carried away by the notion that they can do what they want.  If I am right, though, that Russian politics has continued in an unexpected war thanks to the war, it is easier to see its end.  Putin will not want to see challenges to his rule begin abroad.

War brings political pressure, and not necessarily where the aggressor intended.  Pressure forces choices.  Putin can afford to lose in Ukraine, but he cannot afford to lose in Russia.  He must face that choice if this war is to be brought to an end. 

TS 12 May 2023