Military briefing: Will the Wagner insurrection affect the Ukraine war?

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The aborted insurrection of warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin saves Russia from a possible civil war, regime change and the collapse of its war effort — the 1917 revolution scenario conjured up by President Vladimir Putin on Saturday morning.

But the drama in Russia still brings benefits and potential advantages for Ukraine as it seeks to push Russian forces out of the south and east of the country.

“The morale of Ukrainian troops is very strong and we are closely watching this situation in Russia with our popcorn,” Vitaly Markiv, a Ukrainian national guard officer serving on the front lines, told the Financial Times on Saturday.

Prigozhin’s threatened putsch came at an opportune moment for Kyiv, whose counter-offensive has made only small territorial gains since it began earlier this month. Disappointment on the battlefield has raised concerns about the ability of Ukraine’s army to smash through heavily fortified Russian positions. 

Prigozhin’s mutiny laid bare Putin’s vulnerability and turned the spotlight on the divisions with Russia’s military machine and possible disloyalty.

Ukrainian officials said the power struggle in Russia brought no dramatic changes at the frontline but created opportunities to exploit the distraction and damaged morale of their enemy. 

“We will of course exploit this to the maximum,” said Andriy Chernyak, an official from Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate. “We will use it to our advantage in the political sphere, informational sphere, militarily.” 

Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar said that Kyiv’s troops had “launched an offensive in several directions at the same time” on Saturday. “There is progress in all directions.”

There were also unconfirmed reports that Ukrainian troops had crossed the Antonivskiy bridge near Kherson, in southern Ukraine, into Russian held territory on the left bank of the Dnipro river.

A senior EU official said Russian infighting was the “best counteroffensive we could all have hoped for. Meanwhile Ukraine can assess and use Russian broken morale to its advantage.”

Had Prigozhin sustained his rebellion, it could have forced the Kremlin to pull some of its best troops away from the Ukrainian front lines to counter Wagner’s battle-hardened fighters. That will no longer be necessary. Prigozhin is being sent into exile in Belarus and his troops are returning to their bases. 

But what happens to Wagner is unclear. Wagner officers who did not take part in the mutiny will be offered regular military contracts. But many others who did revolt will be barred and may remain loyal to Prigozhin. Putin may feel he still has to keep more troops closer to home if Wagner — or other such militias — are still deemed a potential threat. 

If Wagner is disbanded it would deprive Russia of its most effective military force in Ukraine. It was Wagner fighters who did much of the heavy fighting in Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, Russian’s only significant territorial gain since July.

“Wagner was the only successful element of the Russian invasion for a year,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister. “And its success was very limited and focused on one small city and its tactics were barbaric even for Wagner personnel. But they at least achieved something. The Russian army couldn’t.”

Wagner’s demise and Prigozhin’s exile in Belarus would also close down criticism of corruption, incompetence and bureaucracy in Russia’s armed forces, easing pressure on the military establishment to address its greatest weaknesses, Zagorodnyuk said.

“Thus chances of the Russian military system changing are almost none.”

Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, doubted the sidelining of Prigozhin’s army would have much impact. It had already withdrawn from Ukrainian operations and is an offensive force when the Russian army is now in defensive mode and performing relatively well. But Moscow might use Wagner’s rebellion to explain away future losses. 

“We’re still waiting for Ukraine to start committing its reserves and that might happen this week. The Russian military will almost certainly blame any loss of territory this week on what Wagner did, and it might be a somewhat effective kind of PR line to blame Wagner.”

Still, Prigozhin’s capture of a command centre in Rostov-on-Don with no apparent resistance from Russian troops or the fact that his forces advanced, unhindered, for several hundred kilometres towards Moscow in just a day will also raise questions about Russian force cohesion and the fealty of parts of the army.

“This is an army of militias and it is becoming more and more evident,” said Omar Ashour, a professor of military studies at the Doha Institute. “It makes unity of command very difficult.”

Lastly there is the possibility that this weekend’s turmoil undermines support for Russia’s war both at the frontline and among civilians. Prigozhin, who has considerable influence through his Telegram channels, punctured two of Putin’s narratives with his rebellion.

On Friday, he claimed Russia had gone to war on a lie, thereby directly challenging Putin’s justification for the invasion as a mission to protect Russian speakers. And on Saturday he showed Putin’s hold on power was more fragile than anybody had thought.

“The big consequence is that the image of the stable system doesn’t exist anymore, even if the coup is not successful,” said Mariia Zolkina, of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a think-tank in Kyiv. “The chaotic reaction of the state shows the real weakness of an authoritarian system. Putin has become a hostage of his own game.”

Additional reporting by Henry Foy in Brussels and Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv