Putin's Purges
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Putin's Purges
In the wake of Prigozhin's mutiny, Putin sees Russian nationalists as a threat
By now, the crackdown of Western-leaning critics of Russian leader Vladimir Putin is a familiar story. In 2020, Alexei Navalny was poisoned and nearly died, medevaced to Germany, and jailed in 2021 attempting to return to Russia; he remains in prison in ill health. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, critics like Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin were given long prison sentences. Russian authorities then started arresting ordinary citizens for signs of dissent, like a single father whose daughter drew a pro-Ukrainian picture at school. There are virtually no dissidents inside the country; they have been all jailed, exiled, or killed.
From the nationalist right, Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin's aborted coup on June 24 came closer to challenging Putin's rule than any of these critics did. By rolling his tanks into the southern city of Rostov with no opposition and posing for selfies with onlookers, he revealed that there is no enthusiasm to defend Putin's regime and potentially an opening for someone else to lead the country.
While the Kremlin has eliminated the threat from liberal dissidents, Prigozhin or someone like him still poses a threat. In the month following the aborted coup, Putin has started purging his nationalist critics, as well as anyone accused of having sympathies to Prigozhin. Notably, this purge currently excludes Prigozhin himself: he has met with Putin at least once since the mutiny and appears free to travel in and out of Russia from Belarus, where he was purportedly exiled following the coup attempt. Prigozhin may be seen by Putin as being too big a threat to jail or kill.
On July 21, former Russian officer and ultranationalist Igor Girkin, also known by his nom de guerre Strelkov, was arrested in Moscow on extremism charges. Girkin had served in the FSB and led irregular Russian forces in the statelet of Donetsk. In November, a Dutch court convicted Girkin in absentia of mass murder for the deaths of all 298 passengers aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which Russian rebels shot down over Ukraine in 2014. After the full-scale invasion, he had turned into a critic of Putin's conduct of the war: recently, he said on his Telegram channel that Putin was a “non-entity” and a "cowardly mediocrity" who managed to “throw dust in the eyes” of Russians. The Russian charges have nothing to do with his killing of innocent civilians aboard an airplane, they are for so-called extremism: a nebulous tool for repression leveled against extremists and non-extremists alike.
Tatiana Stanovaya, head and founder of the Russian political analysis firm R.Politik, wrote on Telegram that his arrest was a "direct outcome" of Prigozhin's mutiny. The France-based analyst added that "mass repressions" against nationalists were unlikely, "but the most vehement dissenters may face prosecution, serving as a cautionary tale for others." Other military figures suspected of having loyalties to Prigozhin -- or sharing his criticisms of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov -- have been removed from their posts.
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The most notable of these figures is Gen. Sergei Surovikin. In January, Surovikin was removed from his post leading the war, purportedly for gaining too much internal power relative to Shoigu and Gerasimov. He has not been seen in public since the mutiny and appears to have been detained; one Russian lawmaker said that he was "taking a rest." 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. (During the mutiny, Surovikin released a video urging Prigozhin to stop.)
Surovikin's apparent detention has implications for the War in Ukraine. Known as "General Armageddon" for leading brutal campaigns in Chechnya and Syria, he appears to have stymied Ukraine's counteroffensive. He directed the building of a series of defensive lines in Southern Ukraine with scores of booby traps and mines. These lines pose serious risks to Ukrainian soldiers: according to a frontline medic quoted by the Times, mines now surpass artillery as the leading cause of wounds. They are one of the main reasons why the counteroffensive is going so slowly: Ukrainians have to do dangerous, painstaking work to clear these obstacles that maim and kill with regularity. Western help also seems slow: a senior Ukrainian official told the Washington Post in a July 15 story that less than 15 percent of the demining and engineering materiel it had asked for had arrived.
With the more brutal general sidelined and nationalist critics purged, is that good news for Ukraine? Yes and no. It may make it less likely that Putin will escalate given that he is distracted at home. But Russia's stale strategy is causing a lot of damage already. A case in point is Russia's exiting the Black Sea grain deal last week, causing price hikes and risking food shortages in the Global South. Russian missiles have pounded civilian targets and grain infrastructure of the port city of Odesa; White House officials warned last week that Russia may try to sink a civilian ship and blame it on Ukraine. The Black Sea deal exit appears to be a familiar coercion strategy, articulated last July by Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simyonyan. "The famine will start now and [the West] will lift the sanctions and be friends with us, because they will realize that it’s necessary," she said.
With only the most sycophantic loyalists left around the leader, autocrats often see enemies everywhere and paranoia sets in. This was the case for dictators like Stalin and Hitler and appears to have happened to Putin's regime: because he surrounded himself with yes-men, he got poor information on Ukraine and decided to invade. It's also a recipe for stagnation: the people who rise to the top are favored for their loyalty rather than their smarts. However, mediocre people can still cause plenty of misery and destruction before they implode; it's up to Western governments to provide the tools to Ukrainians to fight them on the battlefield.