Who Is Protecting Yevgeniy Prigozhin? Speaking of Successors.... Moscow Preparing for the Country’s Disintegration?
What We Are Reading, Hearing, and Watching -- June 2023
Who Is Protecting Yevgeniy Prigozhin?
In a previous report we spoke of the ongoing drama involving Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the propagandist and and leader of the Wagner mercenary army, other rival factions, and the Russian Defense Ministry. How does Prigozhin get away with his outrageous statements, underhanded deals, and even apparent criticism of Putin himself? In a series of interviews, various reputable analysts have tried to explain it.
On May 16, 2023, US-funded news source Radio Liberty interviewed Russian journalist Andrey Zakharov and former Russian politician Maksim Reznik, both in exile, and Ukrainian publicist Leonid Shvets. Quotes from their statements appear in the English-language report “Is Wagner Chief Prigozhin 'A Special Operation Inside A Special Operation'?,'“ and the full interview, published in Russian as “’Kiriyenko Stands Behind Him, and the Kovalchuks Stand Behind Kiriyenko’,” provides more detail. Given Russia’s political landscape of squabbling “clans” and the strict limits on speech, everyone assumes Prigozhin has a krysha (protector), but they differ on who that is and how long Prigozhin can enjoy this protection.
Hypotheses about who could serve as krysha for Prigozhin include the following:
Sergey Kiriyenko [also spelled “Kirienko”], a former prime minister who now oversees Ukraine policy and whom some analysts view as a potential successor to Putin. In turn, Girkin claimed that Mikhail and Yuriy Kovalchuk, two brothers who are Putin’s long-time friends and judo partners, supported Kiriyenko. This hypothesis comes from pro-war Russian blogger Igor Girkin (a.k.a. Strelkov). The three interviewees in the Radio Liberty article assessed, however, that the Kovalchuks’ support for Prigozhin has waned.
Putin himself, according to Zakharov, who views Prigozhin as “Putin’s executor of special assignments for a particular time period.” Zakharov referred to Prigozhin’s use of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a so-called “troll factory,” to influence politics in various countries, then of the Wagner mercenary army to fight in Syria and Ukraine. Zakharov noted that the IRA will be useful for attempting to influence the US elections of 2024.
Putin himself, but for a different reason, according to Shvets: “It is a special operation within the special operation” to “bite at the legs” of the Defense Ministry. In addition, according to Shvets, Prigozhin provides Putin with information that the military and intelligence agencies FSB fail to provide.
Viktor Zolotov — a former Putin bodyguard who now heads the Russian Guard — and Aleksey Dyumin — another former bodyguard and deputy defense minister who now serves as governor of Russia’s Tula region — according to the Russian independent publication Meduza. (Some pundits have named Dyumin as a potential successor to Putin).
Russian intelligence services, according to Reznik, who said Prigozhin can “play a good role in the sense of defining who is guilty for Russia’s losses,” i.e. to scapegoat the military rather than the FSB for Russia’s poor performance in the war.
Another interpretation comes from Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. She told the New Yorker, “One of Putin’s main features…is his sincere belief in his historical ‘mission’.” Putin does not always act based on crass “political maneuvering,” she said. Rather, “Putin sees [imprisoned opposition politician Aleksey] Navalny as a betrayer and Prigozhin as a genuine patriot....[Putin] sees [Prigozhin] as a genuine hero who is sometimes clumsy and goes too far, and needs to be reined in due to his often-emotional outbursts. But he is not an enemy, and deserves to have his own place in the system….” In addition, Stanovaya agrees that the factional infighting between Prigozhin, the military, and the intelligence services ensures that Putin receives more information than his cautious inner circle would ordinarily provide.
An additional possible reason why Putin allows Prigozhin and other nationalists to criticize the war effort is that they can serve as “bad cops,” proposing extreme measures, so that then Putin can enact less-extreme measures and look reasonable. For example, in a May 23 interview, Prigozhin said Russia needs to act like North Korea for awhile: to ban emigration and mobilize the population to fight at the front or to work making ammunition. Prigozhin also warned that popular anger at elites whose children sit out the war will spill over into a St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre with pitchforks, or a 1917-style revolution.
Prigozhin’s promotion of North Korean- or Stalin-style extreme regimentation of the population appears to have had little resonance in Putin administration policies, which have avoided alienating the Russian population with all-out mobilization. (A video purporting to show Putin declaring a general mobilization has been widely dismissed as a “deepfake”). However, numerous Russian political figures have called for Stalin-style measures, such an increasingly regimented media, and the atmosphere has come to resemble the Stalin era in that neighbors denounce neighbors as traitors. Prigozhin’s rhetoric has not likely caused such developments but could be used to justify them.
Speaking of Successors…..
Pundits continue to debate who might succeed Putin if he ever leaves office. Our report “Russia After Putin” discussed some of these possible successors. A June 5, 2023 article by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, DC-based think tank, said that if an orderly succession took place in Russia, a number of next-generation technocrats who currently serve in the Russian bureaucracy could be viable candidates. The article identified about a dozen such people who “come from inside the political system, are young enough to become symbols of renewal, do not have toxic pasts and represent potential compromise figures for the Russian elites, including the hawkish wing.”
In addition to these, in November 2022 cybersecurity firm Recorded Future named former prime minister Sergey Kiriyenko and former bodyguard Aleksey Dyumin, mentioned directly above, as well as FSB First Deputy Director Sergey Korolev, and Igor Sechin, Putin’s longtime friend who currently heads Russian state oil company Rosneft, as possible successors. Less likely candidates, according to Recorded Future, were former president Dmitry Medvedev, parliamentary leader Vyacheslav Volodin, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Fast-moving events make any prediction risky. As our “Russia After Putin” article illustrated and the Jamestown article pointed out, “Succession is only one of a number of scenarios for leadership in post-Putin Russia.” The possibility of a coup, civil war, or state disintegration cannot be ruled out.
Moscow Preparing for the Country’s Disintegration?
In a June 6 2023 posting entitled “Moscow Reorganizing Russian Military for Offensive War and to Protect Putin Regime,” analyst Paul Goble comments on a military reorganization plan that the Russian General Staff announced on June 2. Undoing a decade of military reforms, the plan restores military districts around Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Goble cites a provocative statement by Russian blogger “El Murid,” a Kremlin critic, that the Kremlin “already understands that it will be problematic for it to keep the entire country and is preparing for disintegration—or at least rapid regionalization and partial collapse along the periphery.” This obvious preference for the capital cities at the expense of the periphery could, in itself, hasten the disintegration scenarios that we discussed in our piece “Russia After Putin.”
Subtitle updated June 27 2023.