Kremlin disarray means opportunity for Ukraine — if the West acts

Watching the attempted coup in Russia roll out on TV on Saturday was like viewing a war movie that stopped halfway through without revealing the ending.

On the surface, the coup leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a bizarre ex-convict who started out as Vladimir Putin’s “chef,” lost his nerve as his Wagner mercenary force was advancing on Moscow. He supposedly agreed to go into exile in the neighboring country of Belarus. If anyone believes that is the whole plot, I have a handsome Russian Orthodox church in Red Square I’m willing to sell you for 1,000 rubles.

Neither I, nor anyone at this point, seems to know the real story of how Prigozhin thought he could oust the Russian Army chief of staff and the minister of defense, whom he blames for Russia’s disastrous losses in Ukraine. Nobody knows if he had covert coconspirators within the Kremlin who had second thoughts. Nor does anyone know what fears forced Putin to “pardon” Prigozhin on Saturday afternoon after calling him a “traitor” Saturday morning.

But one thing is clear: This drama — with its incomplete ending — openly displays the growing debate and disarray within the Kremlin. It also offers the United States, and its NATO allies, a singular opportunity to take advantage of the confusion and finally send the long-range missiles and planes that could enable Kyiv to succeed in its counteroffensive.

For the Biden team to waste the chance to immediately take advantage of Moscow’s mess would be a crime against Ukraine — and could help Putin survive without losing his power.

» READ MORE: As Kyiv’s counteroffensive gears up, U.S. must fully commit to a Ukrainian victory over Russian forces | Trudy Rubin

To understand how this drama might end, one must know something about the cast of characters, and the story so far. Only then can we speculate about a denouement.

The lead character, Prigozhin, started as a hot dog vendor in St. Petersburg after serving nearly a decade in prison for robbery. After the Soviet Union fell, he entered the business world and met Putin when the latter dined at Prigozhin’s high-end restaurant. The two bonded, and the ex-convict became rich from Kremlin contracts to cater meals for the Russian army.

In the early 2000s, Prigozhin started the Wagner group, a mercenary paramilitary organization that fought in Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and subsequently promoted Russian interests in Africa and the Middle East (where U.S. forces killed around 100 Wagner forces that attacked American troops on an anti-ISIS base on the Syrian border).

Prigozhin continued doing Putin’s dirty work by running the Internet Research Agency, which famously spread disinformation in the United States during the 2016 election.

But his starring role — at least before last week’s coup attempt — was in Ukraine, where his Wagner forces, beefed up by an infusion of tens of thousands of Russian convicts who were paroled to fight, won the only major Russian victory in months, taking the city of Bakhmut. Tens of thousands of them died.

Here, the plot thickens.

Prigozhin doesn’t want Russia to lose in Ukraine. But he openly despises the Russian military chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, and Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, who allowed Putin’s “special military operation” to turn into a quagmire.

“All these bastards ought to be sent to the front barefoot with just a submachine gun,” Prigozhin complained last October.

Putin had allowed the open warfare between Prigozhin and Shoigu to rage on, perhaps because he hadn’t decided which side to support openly.

But apparently by last Friday, Prigozhin had had enough. His Wagner forces marched from Ukraine, took over the city of Rostov-on-Don — a major military headquarters in southern Russia. He proclaimed in a video that they would “block off Rostov and head to Moscow” unless Shoigu and Gerasimov were turned over to him.

And, in an astonishing monologue posted to social media, he demolished Putin’s arguments for invading Ukraine. He claimed the war had been launched not because of NATO’s threats, but to make corrupt generals richer.

Putin, he argued, had been kept in the dark by Shoigu about what a bad state the army was in and how funds for military reform had been stolen. Yet an out-of-touch Shoigu and Gerasimov — whom he called “psychotic bastards” — went along with Putin’s secret plans. They sent tens of thousands of young Russian soldiers into the meat grinder because they had no idea of the situation on the ground and wanted to keep their posts.

Clearly, Prigozhin had finally crossed a Putin red line by sending troops towards Moscow. But here is where the script went awry.

Surely, Putin knows that his chef’s critique of his top security leadership is correct. His five-minute prerecorded video on Saturday morning slammed Prigozhin’s “mutiny.” It probably reflected the Russian leader’s real fear that some Russian army ground commanders might join the uprising, along with some of his top security officials who have remained silent. (Unlike his normally poker-faced self, Putin looked shaky and nervous in the video and had failed to color his hair).

But why then, by Saturday afternoon, did Putin’s spokesman put out the absurd tale that the president of Belarus had “mediated” a deal whereby Prigozhin could retreat to the neighboring country? Everyone knows that President Aleksandr Lukashenko is Putin’s puppet.

And why did the mutineer agree to pull his troops out? Can he really permit his Wagner forces to be disbanded? Moreover, Putin has proclaimed in the past that traitors must be killed.

This leads me to offer a hypothetical scenario for this drama’s last act.

The scene opens: Prigozhin’s coconspirators in the Kremlin lost their nerve at the last minute, so Wagner stood down. But within the Kremlin, Putin’s scared reaction and retraction indicate he is losing his nerve. He knows Prigozhin is correct about Shoigu and corruption, and that he still needs Wagner in Ukraine. Yet he is afraid of his former ally’s growing power. Until now, he has tried to delay the final decision to have him killed.

I see three alternative possibilities for a conclusion.

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One: Putin fires Shoigu and Gerasimov, because he knows they botched the war. But he also has Prigozhin killed because he fears him. This Shakespearean bloodshed doesn’t radically change the course of the Ukraine war, but the Russian dictator survives, seated on a golden throne surrounded by his countrymen’s blood.

Two: The Kremlin coconspirators regain their nerve, while Wagner forces regroup and join rebellious military units. Putin falls or is murdered (the screen is too murky to make out whether another war criminal replaces him on the bloody throne).

Three: The Biden team plus NATO allies take advantage of the Kremlin’s turmoil and immediately give the Ukrainians the long-range missiles and expedited F-16s that can end this war. The movie ends with an ebullient Volodymyr Zelensky thanking his brave people and hugging Joe Biden in Kyiv.

Whatever happens over the next few days, the show is far from over. Tune in for new episodes in the coming weeks.