Many are watching to see if Vladimir Putin sacks his military leadership — and if Yevgeniy Prigozhin remains quietly in exile.
As the dust settled on the most serious challenge in decades to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority, Washington and its allies struggled to make sense of a head-spinning series of historic events that saw mercenary forces race up a highway to within 120 miles of Moscow on Saturday, then abruptly turn back after their leader, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, agreed to stand down and go to Belarus for an uncertain exile.
High on the list of questions policymakers are now putting to their intelligence analysts is whether Prigozhin has managed to shake the foundations of the Kremlin so strongly that Putin will feel compelled to sack top generals or ministers leading the war, as Prigozhin has repeatedly demanded.More immediately, though, there’s another question: What just happened? One minute, Prigozhin had taken over a key military headquarters in the south running Russia’s war machine in Ukraine.
Watching the Wagner column head toward Moscow on Saturday, the official had predicted that Russian troops were unlikely to put up much resistance if they had been persuaded by his arguments that military leaders were to blame for the disastrous war. Prigozhin had said on social media thatabout the setbacks in Ukraine, including about the extraordinarily high number of dead Russian troops. U.S. military figures have estimated casualties in the hundreds of thousands.
A Ukrainian intelligence official, who was likewise unsure why Prigozhin had stood down, saw signs that the mercenary leader may not have been confident in his prospects. especially with respect to any next steps in the stalemate on the Ukraine war front. The diplomat joked that even as Ukraine’s Western backers raced to decipher what had occurred, Russian intelligence probably did not have much of a head start.
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