Vladimir Putin pulled coup strings, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin danced to fool West

A dramatic video surfaced on social media on 24 June. The ‘actors’ played their role brilliantly, reflecting the ‘ominous’ situation that had ‘engulfed’ Russia and ‘challenged’ and ‘weakened’ its imperium, Vladimir Putin. Shot in Rostov-on-Don, Russia’s Southern Military District’s headquarters (HQ), the day after the Wagner coup facade, the footage shows the city’s ‘captor’ Yevgeny Prigozhin flanked by Russian deputy defence minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and military intelligence GRU’s deputy chief Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev on a bench.

At the base of the Russian Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine, from where the 58th Combined Arms Army is countering Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Prigozhin brazenly challenges and humiliates Yevkurov and Alekseyev. “They [Russian Air Force] shoot at us, we shoot them down,” he tells Alekseyev. “A third one [too]. And we will bring down all of them if you keep sending them…,” Prigozhin throws the gauntlet to Yevkurov, who exhales in apparent helplessness. “We want to get the head of the General Staff [General Valery Gerasimov] and [defence minister Sergei] Shoigu. So long as they are not here, we remain here, blocking the city of Rostov—and we will head for Moscow,” he tells Alekseyev while refusing to ‘release’ regular soldiers apparently held inside the HQ when Yevkurov asks. And the farce continues only to end in burlesque the next day—Prigozhin orders his men, who are around 200 km from Moscow, to march back and agrees to an ‘exile’ in Belarus in a ‘deal’ brokered by its President and Putin’s vassal Alexander Lukashenko. So-called strategic/military experts, global media outlets and the West cried “Coup!” and hastily concluded that Putin had been debilitated after the chink in his armour. Fake coup Putin  staged the coup . Prigozhin is not a fool to risk his status and friendship with Putin. The Russian military would have decimated his mercenaries in a day. Traitors in Russia are either poisoned or jump/pushed down to death from buildings, not allowed to relocate to neighbouring nations. Putin never named Prigozhin during the national TV speech mentioning the “stab in the back”. Wagner marching into two cities unhindered “without firing a shot” and capturing them, with the 58th Combined Arms Army, the Rosgvardiya, the Federal Protective Service (FSO) and the brutal Chechen leader Ramazan Kadyrov not bothering to act, was comical. Social media was flooded with pictures and videos of Wagner battling the Russian Army. However, German broadcaster DW busted them as computer games like Arma 3 or Call of Duty. For example, a photo  from a security camera showing a Wagner assault on a Moscow international airport was shared more than 600,000 times on Twitter. However, DW discovered that it was a  blog entry  describing a scene in the 2009 shooting game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The Russian media also claimed that the air force has targeted Wagner on the M4 highway, linking Moscow and Rostov-on-Don.  A video  showing the attack was viewed more than half-a-million times—but it was an Arma 3 clip. Did Putin use Maskirovka, the centuries-old and time-tested Russian art of masking, denial and deception used in the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and before the Cuban Missile Crisis, to bamboozle the West and appeal to ordinary Russians to be steadfast in foiling a ‘foreign plot’ hatched to disintegrate their fatherland? Each day post-‘coup’ is a revelation showing how the Kremlin scripted the drama. There are three reasons why Putin chose to helm the thriller. Russian front north of Ukraine  Belying the initial predictions of a Russian cakewalk during the invasion, Ukrainians, assisted by Western arms and ammunition, have become a formidable challenge. Instead of occupying new territories, the mighty Russian military has lost a few and is reduced to defending the remaining with a staggering loss of troops and equipment. Russia controls only 17 per cent, or 103,600 sq km [in south and east viz. Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk], of Ukraine’s 595,697 sq km of land compared to 132,000 sq km last year, according to the Institute for the Study of War. A US intelligence estimate from the  Discord leaks  in April showed that Russia has lost 189,500-223,000 troops, 2,048 tanks and 3,900 APCs—and the grinding war could last beyond 2023. In such a scenario, Putin has no option but to change his military tactics or open a new front to divert the Ukrainian counteroffensive’s attention in the south and southeast and prevent further ignominy of loss of men, equipment and territories. What Lukashenko and Putin portrayed as an exile deal with Prigozhin was merely for public consumption. The Russian President fooled the media and strategic/military experts into believing that Prigozhin was exiled and Wagner would be disbanded. What seemed a relief could turn out to be a horror with the presence of Wagner in Belarus, which already has tactical Russian nukes. Ukraine and NATO members Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are already alarmed. First, the Belarusian strongman invited Wagner to train his military. Europe’s last dictator doesn’t brook dissent—a private army would increase his clout and make him stronger. “Unfortunately, they [Wagner mercenaries] are not here. And if their instructors, as I already told them, come and pass on combat experience to us, we will accept this experience,” he said and boasted of his 20-year friendship with Prigozhin in a speech dedicated to Belarus’s Independence Day, state news agency Belta reported. The  presence of the US Patriot missile system in Poland  has always riled Russia and Belarus. Likening Poland to Ukraine, Lukashenko said that America is turning its neighbour into Ukraine-like hotspot. Second,  high-resolution satellite imagery obtained by BBC Verify  shows more than 300 tents were set up in Belarus’s Osipovichi city, 230 km north of the Ukrainian border. Independent Russian news portal Verstka reported that the tents are meant for 8,000 Wagner men who were part of the staged rebellion. The tents show that the fake coup was planned and staged with perfection. Third,  Russia has recently increased missile strikes on northern Ukraine from Belarus . On June 21, towns and cities in Sumy, Chernihiv and Kharkiv were attacked with mortar and artillery, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. On June 25,  Chernihiv and Sumy were attacked  with 120 mm mortars 21 and 13 times, respectively, The Kyiv Independent reported. Fourth, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has ordered top military commanders  to fortify the north . “The decision … is for Commander-in-Chief [General Valeriy] Zaluzhnyi and North commander [General Serhiy] Naev to implement a set of measures to strengthen this direction,” he said on Telegram on June 30. Ukraine’s counteroffensive is concentrated on the south and southeast. Considering Wagner’s success in Bakhmut, there is a high possibility of Putin using the mercenaries to reopen the north front, throwing the counteroffensive into disarray with Kyiv rushing to defend its northern border. Estonia, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are also concerned about the situation in the eastern borders of NATO and EU becoming “ even more precarious ”. “The emergence of the Wagner mercenary group in Belarus could make the security situation on the eastern borders of NATO and the EU even more precarious,” Parliament speakers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania said in a statement urging the EU to brand Wagner a terrorist organisation. “This move needs to be assessed from a different security point of view. We have seen the capabilities of those mercenaries,” Latvian foreign minister Edgars Rinkevics said. After meeting seven NATO members, the bloc’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg said, “We have already increased our military presence in the eastern part of the alliance.” Moreover,  Lukashenko has banned “unfriendly foreign media . It is not a coincidence. With no ‘hostile’ reporters present in Belarus, Wagner can operate freely without the risk of being either reported or exposed. Putin needs Wagner The Ukraine war has exposed the incapability of Russian top military brass, which was unaware of the calibre of Ukrainian forces and the Russian military’s weaknesses. Their plans were not implemented cohesively by the middle rung. Putin needs Wagner all the more now. The best example was Bakhmut—when the military failed, Putin called the mercenaries, who won the battle. Besides, Putin cannot afford to lose control in the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan and Mali, where Wagner deals in diamonds and gold. Most interestingly,  Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov  told the media on June 25 that some Wagner members, “if they wish to do so, can later ink contracts with the defence ministry”, signalling that the group could be subsumed. However,  Wagner continues to recruit fighters  across Russia. The BBC called more than a dozen recruitment centres using a Russian phone number and found that Wagner is still recruiting fighters for Ukraine. In fact, fighters are signing contracts with Wagner, not the defence ministry. Putin cements ‘unifier’ image further  With the protracted and agonising war looking to either end in a pyrrhic victory or cessation/peace and eight months to the national election, Putin needs public support—though elections under him are neither free nor fair. Surveys conducted confidentially  by political managers and experts on the invasion in the last half of 2022 and accessed by The Moscow Times revealed that the number of Russians who believed Putin was right by attacking Ukraine had dropped from 70 per cent to 60 per cent nine months after the war. Now, it has been 17 months. Putin urgently needs a deflection from the misadventure. What could be a better way to divert the public’s attention from battlefield losses by using government information machinery and social media to create the phantom of a coup and the West trying to dislodge the government? As Adolf Hitler writes in Mein Kampf: “In the primitive simplicity of their minds they [the masses] are more easily victimised by a large than by a small lie … An untruth of that sort would never come into their heads, and they cannot believe that others would indulge in so vast an impudence as gross distortion.” Hitler further writes that the masses “will long continue to doubt and waver” despite “being enlightened”. “[They] will still believe there must be some truth behind it somewhere. For this reason, some part of even the boldest lie is sure to stick.” Dictators/autocrats often use this chapter in their authoritarian playbooks to drum up support and mislead the public: create a domestic problem to divert attention from an external crisis and vice-versa. Putin adopted the same tactic. Amid the mayhem triggered by the coup, ‘Papa’ appeared as the unifier and saviour junking his pandemic-induced three-year seclusion. Putin addressed the nation, gave another speech extolling soldiers on the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square, allowed a crowd to mob him in Dagestan’s Derbent city and got a standing ovation and doodled on an interactive whiteboard at a business conference on Russian brands in Moscow. Divide and rule to maintain grip Dictators/autocrats frequently use the divide-and-rule principle to maintain their iron grip. Hitler protected and enhanced his powers by pitting different groups against each other. “The Nazi state has been depicted as a chaotic competition of power blocks—those Nazi and non-Nazi groups with influence: the SS, the Nazi party, the Army, the conservative elites and Germany’s powerful industrialists,” Martin Collier and Philip Pedley write in their book Hitler and the Nazi State. The authors found “a coherence to this chaos: all competing groups and institutions were attempting to create policy in the Fuhrer’s name, according to what they believed to be the Fuhrer’s will”. When the invasion started faltering in the last few months of 2022,  Putin sacked  Eastern Military District Commander Colonel-General Alexander Chaiko and his Western Military District counterpart Colonel-General Alexander Zhuravlyov in October. In the same month Air Force General Sergei Surovikin, aka General Armageddon—Prigozhin’s friend and  Wagner’s secret VIP member — was named the overall Commander  of Russian forces fighting in Ukraine. In the next three months, as  Russia lost Kherson , Surovikin was replaced with Gerasimov. Last week, The Moscow Times cited two sources close to the defence ministry saying that  Surovikin was arrested  for supporting Prigozhin. Contrarily, it was reported initially that he had tried to convince Prigozhin not to ‘rebel’. Neither the ministry nor the Kremlin confirmed his arrest. According to some sources, Surovikin, not seen since the ‘coup’, had only been questioned and then released. None of the reports could be confirmed. Suroviki’s Wagner membership might appear a bombshell but Wagner primarily comprises former Russian Army personnel and Spetsnaz members. In fact, the group was founded by Lieutenant Colonel Dmitry Utkin, who had commanded the 2nd Spetsnaz Brigade. Wagner’s main base is in Molkino, in the Krasnodar district, and is jointly operated by the 10th Separate Special Purpose Brigade of Russia’s GRU, where Utkin once served. It’s impossible even to imagine that a former GRU member would be part of a coup. It would be incredulous to believe that the GRU, FSB and SVR spies were ignorant of the ‘coup’. The New York Times  reported  citing unnamed American officials that Surovikin knew about the ‘coup’. The Kremlin, which uses surveillance and forced disappearances to control the masses and eliminates its enemies or detractors in a jiffy, would have sniffed the coup before it was plotted. All this while, Putin conveniently overlooked Prigozhin’s public rantings against Shoigu and Gerasimov. Obviously, the Wagner boss was acting at the behest of Putin, who wanted to target the duo for failing him in the battlefield. Besides, the President never fulfilled Prigozhin’s demand to replace Shoigu and Gerasimov. Clearly, it was a tactic to pit Prigozhin against the duo to name and shame it for their failures. The writer is a freelance journalist with two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .