Prigozhin's Plane Crash Exposes The Dysfunction of the Putin System
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Prigozhin's Plane Crash Exposes The Dysfunction of the Putin System
Russia has no strategy to win in Ukraine. Can the West come up with one?
The plane of Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed on Aug. 23, killing all 10 passengers aboard, and according to the Russian aviation agency, Rosaviatsiya, his name was on the manifest. Wagner-linked Telegram channel Grey Zone reported him as dead "as a result of the actions of traitors to Russia." The crash happened exactly two months after the warlord launched a failed mutiny on Moscow. Earlier in the day, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, known as General Armageddon for his brutal tactics in Syria, Chechnya, and recently in Ukraine, was removed from his post as head of Aerospace forces, although he remains technically a Ministry of Defense employee. (U.S. intelligence officials leaked to the New York Times that they believe that Surovikin had prior knowledge of Prigozhin's mutiny, but do not know whether he participated.)
In Russia, the most effective but brutal officials in Ukraine have been sidelined, demoted, and reported killed. This is no strategy to win a war. Why does Vladimir Putin's autocracy punish those who fight effectively for the leader's goals? There are two reasons. The first is that by acting effectively, it is a threat to the leader: if the general is so good at fighting, then the question becomes why isn't he the leader? The second is that the competent official gains threatening power relative to other officials who were promoted for their loyalty, not their intelligence. This is exactly what happened to Gen. Surovikin, who gained too much power relative to Putin's preferred military leaders, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, who are far less competent but loyal. In autocracies, leaders become more paranoid over time due to a variety of factors: increasing isolation leaves only a select few advisers who are yes-men, there aren't elections measuring popularity, and repression makes public opinion meaningless.
The plane crash, which looks like an assassination, is also a symptom of how dysfunctional Putin's autocracy has become under the strain of a disastrous war. A democracy could survive this strain, but it's not clear that Putin's autocracy can. With this in mind, it's worth making a comparison to the United States, and how it handled its last major foreign policy failure in Iraq.
The Ukraine war is a disastrous war launched by Putin, who has failed to depose democratically-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and to take Kyiv and Kharkiv but has managed to brutally occupy about a fifth of a sovereign European country. The Ukraine war plan was a page out of the U.S. playbook in Iraq: a shock-and-awe campaign to depose a leader followed by very little planning on what came next. (The U.S. managed to depose Saddam Hussein as Iraq's dictator but had no plan for what to do afterwards.)
However, the U.S. was able to mostly recover from this disaster -- the biggest foreign policy failure since Vietnam -- because it is an imperfect democracy. George W. Bush was term-limited by the Constitution and could not run for president in 2008. Democrats won control of the presidency in 2008 with a candidate, Barack Obama, who won the primary against Hillary Clinton on a platform of opposing the Iraq War from the start. After he was elected, Obama kept competent technocrats like Robert Gates and David Petraeus in their military posts.
In constitutional republics like the United States, leaders come and go. But in Russia, which has been an autocracy with small interludes of weak democracy, the leader becomes the state. In a pattern that existed under the Russian autocracy and the Soviet Union (with a few exceptions), the leader conflates his destiny with that of the state.
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Prigozhin launched his June 23 mutiny after his paramilitary, the Wagner Group, had been ordered to be placed under Ministry of Defense control. Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenka did intervene at the last moment to engineer an exile for Prigozhin in Minsk, giving Putin and Prigozhin an out. However, this scheme was a last-minute fig leaf, not proof that the system could handle conflict. However imperfectly, democracies have the rule of law and democratic levers to settle disputes like campaigns and elections. (Meanwhile, Donald Trump is severely testing the democratic system in the United States.) Russia, and by extension Prigozhin, have no such levers -- he could never challenge Putin through elections, because they don't exist in any meaningful way.
It's not clear how Putin will handle the mistake of invading Ukraine other than to muddle through and characterize it as an existential fight against the West. When the news broke of Prigozhin's plane, news programs on Russian television showed long segments about state-of-the-art American tanks being destroyed in the counteroffensive and the "Kiev propaganda machine" but just brief announcements without commentary about the plane crash. For now, fighting the West in Ukraine to cause Russians to rally around the regime seems to be the strategy. It may work okay to keep the regime in power for a while. But it is not an effective military strategy. Even though Putin has no winning strategy in Ukraine, that doesn't mean that Ukraine with Western help is set to win -- it will take ongoing Western arms, materiel, and patience for Ukraine to persevere against a still-destructive army run by a dysfunctional political system.