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Give Me the Gun Big Guy

June 29, 2023
Notes
Transcript

Eric welcomes back Eliot to host Stephen Sestanovich, the George F. Kennan Senior Fellow for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations and Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor at the School of International Political Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University to discuss the short-lived semi-farcical mutiny in Russia led by Evgeniy Prigozhin, the proprietor of the Wagner Group private military company. They discuss the backstory of Wagner and the legal limbo in which it operates, how its business model benefits members of Putin’s kleptocratic elite, whether Putin has emerged weaker or stronger from this affair and the impact that Prigozhin’s actions may have on the stability of Russia and the ongoing war effort on Ukraine.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/three-logics-russias-prigozhin-putsch/674538/

https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110854/witnesses/HHRG-116-FA14-Wstate-MartenK-20200707.pdf

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Email us with your feedback at [email protected]

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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:06

    Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by the Bulwark on the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two that strong and balanced foreign policy is the indispensable shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman Counseler at the Center for strategic and budgetary assessments of Bullworth contributor and a nonresident fellow at the Miller Center, and I am rejoined By my wandering partner in this enterprise, Elliott Cohen, the Robert EOS Good professor of Strategy at the Johns and School of Advanced International Studies and the Arleigh Burke chair and Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Elliott welcome back from your wanderings.
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:50

    Well, thank you. I’ll I’ll be a little bit mysterious about it other than to say, I was eating lots of pierogi, Platchki, and Charlie Sykes. But more about that later.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:01

    More about that later. Our special guest today is an old friend and colleague Steve Sistanovich. Full disclosure. He is my Cornell classmate, but also has a PhD from Harvard, so he’s connected to both me and Elliott. He is the George F Cannon senior fellow for Russia and Eurasian studies at the Center for the Council and Foreign Relations and Shelby Colum Davis professor at SIPA at Columbia University.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:30

    He has a distinguished government career as a member of the policy planning staff during the Reagan Administration, a senior director at the NSC into Reagan Administration, and the Ambassador at large for the NIS and the former state former Soviet Union in the Clint Administration and is the author of the excellent book Maximum America in the World from Truman to Obama, Steve Welcome to Shield of the Republic. It’s a pleasure. So we are gathering the three of us in the aftermath of one of the odd events in recent Russian history, which is the Trogosin mutiny, the forty eight hour mutiny that appeared on the verge of creating a huge crisis perhaps a civil war in Russia but then ended with a whimper So Steve, what the hell happened?
  • Speaker 3
    0:02:21

    Well, one of the stranger episodes is your description and probably an understatement, what happened is that the leader of a paramilitary group, a private military company called Vogner in Russia, who was an old associate of Putin’s and somebody who had made a large contribution to war effort against Ukraine decided that his feud with the general staff was something he couldn’t abide any longer and decided to go nuclear so to speak. He announced that he was rejecting the pressures that had been put on him by the generals to essentially disband his group and was calling for as he had in the past for them to be drawn and quartered in Red Square. What followed from this was a couple of days that your listeners have surely got sort of vaguely in mind in which this the leader of Wagner, mister PREgozian, launched what seemed like it was going to be an attack on Moscow. And then in the course of Saturday, called it off after Putin denounced him as a traitor and after President Lukashenko and Byelarus, cooked up a deal that allowed him to bring some of his people to Belarus for a kind of gracious exile.
  • Speaker 3
    0:04:14

    Since then, all parties have been sort of standing down in the sense that Putin has apparently dismissed the idea of pressing charges against Progyny. His people are going to be welcome in Byeloruz. President Lukashenko has made that clear today. And Progosian himself has been softening some of the critiques that he made of the war effort including some pretty broad swipes at Putin himself. Now who came out ahead in this?
  • Speaker 3
    0:04:55

    I would say, PREGogen was the big loser. He had a lot going for him at the start of this. He had a pretty strong hand in many respects. He’s a rich insider had a loyal army at his command an international presence through the activities of the vibrant group through the Middle East and Africa, he has some claim to military heroics, He’s useful to Putin and in the start of this what he added were some interesting populist cards He said the war was based on lies that Ukraine was not and NATO were not threatening Russia. The army was corrupt, Putin was manipulated by Ukrainian and other oligarchs and so forth.
  • Speaker 3
    0:05:51

    So he kind of took an ardent militant nationalism and combined it with Navalny reformism and could have made, I think quite a lot out of that, but he moved way too quickly let himself get caught up in a very, very rapid pace on Saturday at just a moment where he should have been slowing down. Should not have been racing to Moscow but should instead been making Putin sweat, trying to collect allies, trying to see how he could turn this novel situation and all the attention that he was getting and all the influence that he had to his advantage. Putin by contrast, I think what was pretty effective in slowing things down, he had a fast moving crisis, his big goal had to be to keep it from turning into violence. He wanted to avoid the shooting that would signal the start of civil war with unforeseeable consequences. And in the course of of Saturday, he negotiated this off ramp for prenegotian.
  • Speaker 3
    0:07:18

    I mean his approach all day on Saturday was Give me the gun, big guy, and that seems to have diffused the situation. We can talk a lot about where Russia may be headed, Putin’s power position and so forth, but on Saturday he was kinda staring down the barrel of a gun. And he got past it. So I think we have to say Putin managed to manage the pace of events better than pregon, manage to come out still able to present himself as the leader of the country with lots and lots of problems. That’s a long answer to your question, Eric.
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:13

    No. It’s a great answer, but I got a lot of questions. I I suspect Elliot does too. Sure. Just to fill in a little bit of backstory.
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:20

    So Wagner is what we in the, you know, in the United States would call a private military company. Something a little bit on the order of black water in the sense that it recruits former Russian military, particularly special forces, but not exclusively. But unlike in the United States, it exists in a kind of legal vacuum because it’s not registered in Russia as a legal entity. There’s a lot of confusion in the constitution and the laws of Russia about their laws against mercenaries in Russia, but somehow, Wagner has not fallen afoul of that. And by the way, I wanna say, you know, everything I know about Wagner, I learned from your Columbia University, colleague Kimberly Martin, who’s written extensively about this, it lives in this sort of legal vacuum and it appears to have at least in its origin, have had some sponsorship or patronage from the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service?
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:32

    Sorry for interrupting, but
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:33

    — Sure. —
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:33

    Putin has now openly said that they were on the payroll of the Russian government, and, you know, the Vogner training camps were right next to the Petsnaz — Right.
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:47

  • Speaker 2
    0:09:47

    training camps which which are part of GRU. So I mean, it was it was always kind of a a fraud that this wasn’t sort of a deniable arm of the Russian government?
  • Speaker 3
    0:09:58

    This is the business model. You’re not describing some secret. This is how Pregosian got rich, getting the Russian state to pay him a lot of money,
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:09

    right,
  • Speaker 3
    0:10:09

    or services that Putinin and others found convenient and the fact that it was in a legal vacuum I hope this won’t shock you too much. It does not make it stand out in Russia today. The many legal vacuums exist in Russian political economy and in institutions of the deep state because they serve a purpose as seen by the leadership. And this arrangement between Vogner people and regular military was one that had all sorts of irritations for the general staff. But Putin until now has been prepared to say, you guys work it out and that was before it became unmanageable.
  • Speaker 3
    0:11:14

    Now what is it that made it unmanageable? It was that Putin basically gave the green light to the general staff to go after Wagner and to try to regularize the relationship with it and to say, you guys have to sign up you can’t get the extra pay that we’ve been giving you for all of these years. As a contractor, yeah, you’re gonna have to, you know, you’re gonna have to be on the payroll and you’re gonna answer to us. And that was a big decision for Putin. And it may or may not have been the right one, it certainly blew up in his face in a way that He didn’t expect when he said essentially to the generals, okay, you can crack down on Wagner.
  • Speaker 3
    0:12:01

    We don’t need them right now.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:03

    So just to before we dig into the winners and losers and all of that, so Vogner existed in this legal vacuum. And it kind of served two purposes, right? One was an instrument of the state with quote, plausible deniability in places like Syria, the Don boss, Libya, elsewhere, where it could be used to extend Russian influence in places where maybe they would not wanna have the hand of the Russian government totally visible I think we could say that plausible deniability for Vogner is now no longer really an option henceforth, but it raises the question of of the second part, which is it also was a kind of cash cow for pregosian, but people presumably connected to pregosian, because a lot of Wagner’s operations in other places were funded by access to, you know, valuable raw materials of diamonds and coal and other extractable raw materials in sub Saharan Africa and oil in Syria and other things. Presumably, other cronies not just pregosin were getting this and there was this episode where they rated one of the Wagner offices in Saint Petersburg and found all these buses stuffed with cash, etcetera.
  • Speaker 3
    0:13:37

    And those passports, can you believe this?
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:41

    Imagine. But so, like what happens to the Wagner operations now in Africa and all of this money? I mean, presumably someone’s still gonna be wanting to make that money. Is it gonna be progression operating this out of Belarus or you know, is it only the guys in Ukraine who are gonna come under the MOD? Or is it the whole thing?
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:03

    I mean what do we know?
  • Speaker 3
    0:14:04

    Well, we don’t know enough. That’s true of almost any question that you could ask about this entire affair, on this question of the future of Wagner in Africa, Sergail of Roth commented on this, the foreign minister that they’ve been doing extremely good work there. And so we wanna have them continue. Whether it will be some Wagner two point zero, which retains the name but under new management, we don’t know. The basic business model that you scribe though is one that is that the Russians are certainly gonna try to preserve, which is they provide palace security, propaganda, consultations, various kinds of services of one sort or another, and these states in exchange for that help give them access to raw materials that pay off all kinds of people back home.
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:20

    I’d be amazed if that set of relationships just disappeared because Progyny is denied access to the safe with his passports and all the cash, in Saint Petersburg, somebody is gonna continue to oversee that part of Wagner activity.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:38

    You know, I I would assume that’s correct, but I I mean, I take a somewhat darker view of Putin’s prospects in all this and and only slightly more optimistic read from Progyny’s point of view. I think, you know, one thing is progression has a a genuine following because of the way he’s run it that, you know, this is a guy who does visit the the wounded in the hospitals. He does pay people. He pays the families and that sort of thing. And then, you know, it it’s also the case that this was I think it’s a mistake to think of this as simply a spur of the moment kind of thing.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:14

    I mean, it and in fact, I think the principles have all said enough to make you think that what’s happened to what happened was they were planning this for quite some time. There have been these reports of American intelligence sought coming I think the Ukrainian saw this coming. Clearly, the guy who probably founded Wagner, what’s his name? Uttkin, me to Sure was part of this. I mean, they so you have a whole bunch of senior commanders and, you know, the the challenge for the regime you know, do you try to get rid of promotion?
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:44

    Do you try if you get rid of promotion, do you have to then get rid of the senior commanders? If you do that, do you still have much of an organization left? I think it gets very squarely pretty quickly, particularly because it’s not entirely clear to me that Lukashenko will really be able to control a progression who apparently is now already in Belarus. It’s not entirely clear to me that he he will want to since he may have his his own game. So I you know, I would have if if you would ask me, what would happen if Progressive tried something like this, it would have been that he would be dead within, you know, by by the Monday after the Saturday coup attempt.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:25

    And I actually wonder if he’s gonna be able to survive this for some time. And and this leads I think to more substantive question about this, which is do we think he would have attempted this if he hadn’t thought there was at least gonna be tacit support from some people in the security establishment, particularly the FSP, but maybe people in the military as Will Saletan that, of course, is last thing I’ll say, that’s one of the things everybody noticed about this, that they faced no opposition except from the Russian Air Force. And there are even reports of units going over to them or at least standing aside. So it seems to me it’s gonna be a challenge for Putin to keep the goodness, if I can use that word, a Wagner from the point of view of the Russian state, while, you know, rubbing out a guy for whom he undoubtedly has considerable distaste.
  • Speaker 3
    0:18:27

    Yeah, look, about how long this has been in the works, I think it’s when Putin basically said he was backing the generals the defense minister and the chief of the general staff in their effort to bring Wagner under their normal regulatory control. And at that point, PREGosian knew that something basic in his relationship with all of these characters had changed. That was two weeks ago. I am a little more skeptical than you Elliott of the reports of how they managed to bring people over to their side. You know, Putin wanted at all cost to avoid open warfare on Saturday.
  • Speaker 3
    0:19:30

    So I don’t think anybody gave the order to stop him. The idea that he was just winning over people and russed off that they were, you know, that essentially the southern military district headquarters had been taken by him seems to me not right. Essentially people in the military at lower levels were waiting for the command from Moscow as to how to behave and I think that in all likelihood orders were, play it cool, we’re trying to work this out in a way that doesn’t come to shooting because at that point you’re right, nobody knew whose side anybody was going to be on. But that to my mind shows that maybe a little more discipline than we have tended to think. It is possible that the entire national security establishment is coming unraveled but I think the events of the past couple of days don’t by themselves show that.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:53

    So let me just offer two two bits of counter evidence to that. One is it well, first and foremost, Somebody did try to use violence, and there’s a reason why half a dozen helicopters and an airborne command and control plane got shot down. I mean, they, you know, and they were probably attacking that column and somebody gave the order for that.
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:15

    They shot down more helicopters than than the Ukrainians have in their three week counter offensive.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:20

    Yeah. And so there’s that strikes me as significant. The other thing that strikes me as significant is that by all accounts, it seems as though Putin fled Moscow. And that tells me that he must have been really quite quite fearful. And I suppose the last thing, the third thing perhaps is, the way I interpret having to use Lukashenko, who is certainly a subordinate figure.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:51

    He’s not quite a puppet, but he’s something close to it. And then if actually, if you listen to Lukashenko’s speech that he just gave is amazing, where he’s basically describing himself as kinda holding Putin’s hand saying, they’re there, Vladimir Vlad Maravich, you know, everything will be okay. Just trust me to handle this. I mean, it’s a as as who should say, for somebody who is a client to talk that way to a patron, particularly in that system. So all those make me think that the system was maybe not unraveling completely, but it was really showing very some very serious cracks.
  • Speaker 3
    0:22:33

    I think what you saw was definitely a moment of great strain. And I don’t think Putin is eager to relive that day or to have too many of the details of what happened come out, because in in lots of the ways that you suggest, it isn’t gonna make him look entirely good. My only argument is he had an overriding goal which is to keep this from completely blowing up. And he achieved that goal. And that is the main thing that he has got to boast of Who knows where he was hiding himself in the course of all of this.
  • Speaker 3
    0:23:33

    But I think the idea that because Oh, even a few helicopters were shot down that this was a system that was showing the potential for complete breakdown I think that’s maybe a little too strong and there may be sort of also some signs of resilience in this. The fact that as people say, there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the memo, there’s no doubt that this is a big, big watershed for Putin because his regime has been shown not to offer the stability that he’s always advertised for it. That’s his claim. That he has brought prosperity that’s mostly in the past. He’s brought a certain kind of national pride.
  • Speaker 3
    0:24:52

    That isn’t so confirmed by results on the battlefield but above all he’s kind of kept the system together at home and now that looks bad too. How bad and what his ability to rebuild is we don’t know and whether the rebuilding will include him I mean, he may lose out in this process, but I think he has some things still sort of going for him alas.
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:26

    I wanna pull on a couple of threads that both of you have raised here. You see? And I wanna get into one of the more perplexing parts of the story. So on Saturday morning, we were treated to the site of two videos, which had all the appurtenances of kind of hostage videos of general Sorta vegan and general Alexeief. So Rubikin, who was a favored commander of pregoscience, and had been the architect of actually one of the brighter military moments of this entire special military operation, which was the very well organized and orchestrated retrograde of Russian forces out of Kerson, last fall, and generalized Saf, who is a deputy in the GRU, who presumably has had some kind of patronage role with prenegotian.
  • Speaker 1
    0:26:25

    Both of them made videos that had the look of being somewhat under duress, they were in the same place, for instance, it appears that they must have been in Rostov at the Southern military district headquarters, asking him to lay down arms. Yet later, when Pringotian shows up in Rostov, he’s got video, amiably chatting with Alex AF in in which he is busy bad mouthing, his two favorite, targets, minister of defense, Shoyguu and and chief of the general staff general Valerie Garasimov, and Alex Zap says point Bulwark, yeah, you could take those guys. We don’t we don’t you know care for them at all. So am I wrong, Steve, that Putin now at a minimum phase is a very difficult set of choices. Does he now purge all the military leaders who have had ties to Progyny in the past because they are now gonna be suspect, in some way or some shape or form, does he replace gerasimov and and Shuegu, who have been shown to be relatively on popular with the Russian troops themselves, and who’ve been total failures.
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:43

    I mean, they have been the architects of this military catastrophe for for Putin, or is he now because of this kind of forced to stand with him for a while, You know, I’m sort of reminded a little bit of President George w Bush, who I think very much wanted to replace in the spring of two thousand Ron DeSantis Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but because of the so called revolt of the generals who came out and attacked Rumsfeld felt they’d had to keep him on for at least four or five months before replacing him after the midterm elections in two thousand and six. So where where are we in in all this, and what are the implications for kind of the stability of of the regime, and I guess the final question is, you know, the famous Viberian definition of legitimate government is one that maintains a monopoly of violence in the state. Now you’ve had someone who has executed some violence without the, you know, authority of the state and has done it with some impunity. Does What’s the demonstration of effect for that for others? I mean, pregozion may have miscalculated, but are there others out there who are saying, well, I’m not stupid enough to think I could take Moscow with five thousand guys, but I could do it better.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:02

    So I just throw all that out there for you.
  • Speaker 3
    0:29:05

    In any discussion of Putin like this, I generally quote a Russian friend of mine who’s dealt with Putin a lot over the years and he says, you westerners who think Putin is very decisive or completely wrong. Putin is very indecisive. He takes every opportunity to postpone decisions when he doesn’t have to choose he finds every reason to defer and then when he finally has to choose when it’s unavoidable, he acts impulsively and this is a relative admirer, I should say. Of Putin’s management style. In the past when Putin has had to get rid of people, he is preferred to do it gradually only after the burdens and disadvantages of keeping them on were demonstrated.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:15

    He doesn’t wanna look as though his hand is forced He might on that pattern get rid of Shoigu and Girasimov three, five months from now when it doesn’t look as though it’s in the heat of the moment he’s panicking it’s much more the careful czar. On your other question about, do other people look at this episode and think, okay, I’m not as big a buffoon as pregozi. I’m gonna have some better staff work and advice done for me and careful memo, decision memos prepared and I’m gonna know what I’m doing. Maybe the problem with that is in Russia today it’s very hard to launch a conspiracy because nobody trusts anyone else. And so they have all been people who were kind of players within the national security establishment, within the Kremlin, within the broader Russian elite.
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:29

    They are Because of Putin’s care and indecisiveness, able to be pretty confident that what they’ve got they can keep for a while. But they don’t have any confidence that they can form an independent cluster of associations, interests, and act to advance those. There is a kind of paralysis within the system that is perfectly good for Putin except when his indecision creates this sort of blow up. I mean I think he probably chose badly in deciding to side with the generals finally against precogion. He needs the manpower, he doesn’t need the grief, merely having the formality of contracts put him on a collision course with pregosn that ended up in crisis.
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:37

    Whether others will be inspired by that example or scouraged by it, we’re gonna have to see.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:44

    I mean, it’s true he doesn’t fire people by and large including some real incompetence. But I think you can interpret that either as indecision or extreme caution because he’s He’s aware that, you know, he may be the top shark in the shark tank, but there are a lot of other sharks out there. Whereas on other things, he could be perfectly decisive. I mean, firstly, perfectly decisive about assassinating plenty of people, perfectly decisive about launching the second Chen War the Georgia operation, the Crimea operation, the Dun boss operation, and of course this very, very big war. I mean, that will add Syria, I guess, another minor case.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:26

    So I think he he is quite capable being decisive externally. Those none of those decisions were the mark of an indecisive man, but internally may be less indecision than a great deal of caution. And what I wonder is, it’s this. Look, I you know, we’re all swimming in an informational murk. You know, we don’t know, so we’re it’s kind of fun to speculate, but we we don’t have a whole lot of data.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:53

    We can parse it as carefully as we wish. My guess is he probably doesn’t have a whole lot of data either. And so he is here’s what I suspect. That he’s wondering, okay, who else is out there? Why is it that nobody that the FSB didn’t give me a heads up that this was going to happen when the Americans knew it was going to happen.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:15

    You know, why is it that there wasn’t any opposition other than the air force, you know, who else is involved in the plot? And I think in that kind of system, you know, the paranoia may be unjustified, but it’ll be there. And and what, you know, and let me turn this into a question to you, Steve, but also Eric to you as well. You know, is part of the result of this, that the paranoia gets ratcheted up a lot because, you know, he feels he might quite literally be looking down the barrel of a gun or looking at a Novochuck cocktail. And so therefore, he begins acting more decisively internally, purging people, killing people, and that in turn sets off a dynamic in the system, which really becomes unpredictable.
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:06

    So I I put that to you as a hypothesis and just to solicit both of your reactions.
  • Speaker 3
    0:35:13

    Putin is going to have to find a way to convey that he’s back in charge and that the system is going to regain some of the normal balance and functioning that made it possible for him over many years to say, you see, I brought you stability. It is possible that he will in doing that become too vengeful too bloody, too prepared to cast off past alliances and create a kind of cluster of enemies that he didn’t have to make people who were prepared to be on his side. I as I say, I think that’s possible but it isn’t really the Putin style. The Putin style is much more deliberate, you know, you say cautious and I say indecisive that those are those are those are adjectives that fit the case broadly. He has over twenty plus years in power basically run a pretty bloodless dictatorship with some nasty exceptions but with few enough of them that people who are prepared to play ball can be confident that they’re not going to be the next target.
  • Speaker 3
    0:37:04

    Of, you know, a throat cutting and that it seems to me is the obvious strategy that his people are gonna be advising him to pursue. At the same time that he tries to combine it with what I described at the beginning of this answer and that is showing that he is in charge and trick for him in the next few months is gonna have to be to try to reestablish confidence that people have that he’s not a madman that he’s not gonna be too vengeful, that he’s not gonna be too cruel and that he’s capable of exercising real leadership, and that’s not the easiest thing to do, but there are a lot of people who want him to succeed in that because this is a very corrupt government from which a lot of people benefit and from the benefits of which they might think they’d lose if if it were really overturned.
  • Speaker 1
    0:38:16

    I have couple of thoughts on this. One is in terms of paranoia, He’s got to be deeply concerned by this. He will become aware if he’s not already of the reports we’ve seen in the western press about US intelligence, having known of this for days in advance, We also have, of course, the president of the United States, apparently trying to reassure him that we had no hand in this. I’m not quite sure what he’ll make of that. I’m sure he’ll interpret that as an indication that we had some hand in it, because otherwise, why would we be protesting so much about this?
  • Speaker 1
    0:38:52

    He will probably see reports that the Ukrainians saw this coming. There have been reports about Progyny having had some kinds of contact with Ukrainian intelligence during the Bakmoot campaign. He’ll have to wonder about that, but mostly he’ll have to wonder about how come my intelligence guys didn’t warn this was coming. I mean, the difference between the Saturday morning Putin and the Monday afternoon Putin was very striking, I thought. I mean, he looked very concerned on Saturday morning, I would say even a little frightened.
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:25

    Monday, you know, angry. Monday, when he was having, chairing a meeting of the security council, wasn’t quite as stark as the meeting a year ago with Gaurasimov and Shoego at the end of the football field long table, but the security council was about a half a table away from him. Which suggests, you know, that uneasy, you know, lies the head that wears the crown. And that’s gotta all increase because of all this. As I said, he’s gonna have to start going through lists of people who he thinks are, you know, whether he wants to replace people or not, he’s gonna have to be worried about people’s loyalty.
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:08

    But the second thing is, you know, does Will he have in a system where lying to the higher ups has become institutionalized. Will he have the actual information to be able to walk the very fine line that Steve has sketched out here? I was struck by because I know you’ve read this too, Steve, the transcript two weeks ago of his meeting with the military bloggers, in which he is asked about the Ukrainian counter offensive and provides numbers of, you know, equipment destroyed which I think is larger in some cases than Ukraine’s holdings of some of those some of those items, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, etcetera. He seems to really believe that he had negotiated a deal with the Ukrainians in Istanbul, which the Ukrainians then you know, at the direction of the United States rejected, which is, you know, totally fanciful as far as I can tell. So I mean, I just wonder how connected to the real reality he is, you know, as Steve, as you say, after twenty years of power in which this system is kind of, and then sort of exacerbated by the isolation of COVID, he’s become so cosseted that, you know, ability to actually navigate all this, I am not certain of at all.
  • Speaker 3
    0:41:41

    Look, Putin has given plenty of reason to wonder about his continued capacity to do the job over the past couple of years. I mean there’s hardly a better argument that I know of for term limits than Putin’s recent record. And it may be that he will not be able to square the circle that I’ve been saying he has to has to handle in some way. There are What I’m saying is this. On Saturday, on Friday and Saturday, Putin faced the possibility of a much more potent challenge to his rule than he had ever faced and not just because somebody who had ran a private military company was able to put his guys on the road to Moscow.
  • Speaker 3
    0:42:56

    But because a whole series of different dissatisfactions with Putin with the war, with corruption, with the way in which Cila Viki operate to serve their own interests. All of those had the potential if Pregosian had been better prepared and more strategic and more thoughtful to produce an even deeper crisis for the regime than the one that we’ve seen. In the end, you know, it may be, I mean, I I hate to disappoint you guys because it’s a disappointment for me too. It’s possible that this will turn out to be a kind of inoculation for Putin. That will actually make it easier for him to cope with some of these problems in the future because this potential challenge set of challenges to him was embodied in such an unlikely challenger.
  • Speaker 3
    0:44:10

    I think there is no way of knowing what’s in his head, no way for us at this distance to know really exactly what happened. But I’m struck by how much better things look for him on Tuesday than they did on Saturday morning.
  • Speaker 2
    0:44:33

    I I guess I that seems to be kind of a low bar. I mean, yes, survival is better than death, but which he may have been looking at, but I can’t see how he could possibly think that you know, he’s in anything remotely like a good position, because the damage that progression did was, you know, there’s the sheer the example of it, the, you know, everybody saw the pictures of, you know, people in Rustuff, cheering them on, and all that. But also on on its way out, and this and it hasn’t stopped yet. Progress is delivering this indictment of the war. And not actually not just of the conduct of the war, but of the war itself, which I thought was very interesting.
  • Speaker 2
    0:45:17

    And I’ll and I’ll just throw in one parenthetical about that. It it is it has been striking to me that even though, you know, progression is a brute and guilty of war crimes and atrocities, He’s sort of gone out of his way to be almost respectful of the Ukrainians in some of his rhetoric in terms of their fighting capacity and and all that sort of stuff, which sort of makes you think that he wants you know, he may have had some notion of positioning himself as the guy who can make a piece of the brave, that kind of thing. And I think particularly at a time when the Ukrainians are on the offensive and they are beginning to have some successes, you know, this could be quite dark. Let’s say, I’ve I’ve just say on on on the on Putin, you know, I What I’ve been wondering about is what what are the cumulative effects of over twenty years in power? Increasing physical isolation, probably increasing sick of fancy, and age.
  • Speaker 2
    0:46:20

    He’s the guys in his early seventies.
  • Speaker 1
    0:46:22

    Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Watch that.
  • Speaker 2
    0:46:25

    Hey. Listen, gramps. I’m that way too. But but I don’t think either of us are really up to run Russia.
  • Speaker 1
    0:46:33

    No. And I definitely am not.
  • Speaker 2
    0:46:35

    You know, and so I think you add all those up together. Who knows? Maybe we’ll probably never find out. But I would be surprised if you you know you end up with a fairly impaired decision maker.
  • Speaker 3
    0:46:48

    The war itself shows you you’ve got an impaired decision maker. This is one hundred percent, one thousand percent is what I typically say, his war and this was on the a choice made on his part on the basis, really a combination of completely nutty ideas, a kind of roll of the dice that was utterly unnecessary and utterly inconsistent with the kind of measured, balanced goods are style leadership that he’s tried to claim for himself. So there’s no, you know, there’s no case that and I’m certainly not trying to make it, that Putin, his his normal MO is good leadership. He is completely capable of failing to manage the challenges that he’s got after the coup, but I think it is possible that a combination of factors in Russian society, in the system that he’s created, will help him out of it. You know, the fact, as people always say about an autocrat of this sort, You can’t depose him without an alternative.
  • Speaker 3
    0:48:13

    And fortunately for Putin, he got offered up a really defective alternative and now he may benefit from the stabilization that follows the this
  • Speaker 1
    0:48:34

    enormous shock. So this follows in the train of what you’ve just been saying, Steven. One of the first phone calls he got was from my old friend, Richard Tayyip Erdogan, who had his own you know, close run experience with a coup in in twenty sixteen, and of course, I’m not sure what advice Erdogan gave in that phone call, but what Erdogan did was, you know, jail a hundred thousand people and, you know, create all sorts of repression, cashier, and all sorts of general officers, etcetera. So that’s one model Putin might follow. But to pick up on what you were saying earlier, you know, pregosions rant before he started, on Friday, was to, as you say, it’s, you know, denounce the war and kind of create this right wing nationalist but reformist anti corruption sort of a mix, which is I mean, I think potentially very powerful if someone more competent were to pick it up.
  • Speaker 1
    0:49:44

    And so does this create on one hand, an opening forced again someone else to say I can be that alternative, whether it’s Patricia or somebody else, And second, you know, the Russian troops on the front, we’re following all of this. On Telegram as it played out in real and on their cell phones talking to people back in Russia as it played out in in real time. And you can’t help but think that some of this is gonna be resonate you know, resonate with these, particularly with the mobilized troops and the conscripts, not the, you know, contract forces who are more professional. And do they want to be the ones to die for these grasping oligarchs? And you know, over time, that could be extremely corrosive, you know, Putin himself, raised the nineteen seventeen analogy in his speech on Saturday morning, and of course it was mutinies in the army like this, that led ultimately to the collapse of the Russian Army and everything that followed.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:59

    We have other examples we were talking in the green room before we came on, about the fact that the Forrest coup in nineteen ninety one against Gorbachev failed, Gorbachev was returned to power, but It exposed the weaknesses of the Soviet Union, and four months later, the Soviet Union was gone, and so was Gorbachev. You know, in nineteen seventeen, Karenceki’s provisional government faced a rebellion from Kornilov, that ended up so weakening the the provisional government, that a handful of Bolsheviks in October a few months later were able to take over the whole country and establish the Soviet Union. I think we sometimes failed to remember how close run a thing that was and how small a group of people it was that took over this giant Ramshackle state and somehow constructed the Soviet Union out of it. So I just throw that out there, as we close, what are your thoughts on that?
  • Speaker 3
    0:52:04

    Putin is at least as burdened by interest in historical analogies as the three of us. He definitely is thinking to himself, oh my god, MI Gerbachev, MI Nicholas the second, which of the various czars or pretenders in the past who were stabbed or betrayed by this or that conspiracy. Am I really? So, he’s got that on his mind. He’s got a tough road ahead for him, but just to compare him to Gerbatov for a second.
  • Speaker 3
    0:52:50

    The lost legitimacy of the communist system was the work of years before the coup and suddenly people woke up and thought to themselves wow, we just don’t need to accept this system and we’ve got an alternative. We’ve got Boris Yeltsin, we’ve got Andre Sakarov, we’ve got all of the people who were in the streets we’ve got the the military who are prepared to protect the alternatives. And we have an elite that’s not really willing to stand up for Gerbachev or continue to work with him and all of his people who were in his inner circle in the last days were starting to write their memoirs and look for western publishers and look for sabbaticals in the west and they were not gonna stand by him. Putin has a somewhat stronger hand now. He’s got a an elite that is is divided but is does not have anything like a Yeltsin Challenger to him, if you leave aside Navalny who’s conveniently in prison, he doesn’t have public opinion increasingly going over to the side of you know desiring a new system putin has for years and years shoved in the face of people who were dissatisfied with his regime his poll numbers, his ratings and he will be very interesting to see whether in the next weeks you see any kind of hiccup or you see some kind of resurgence of those numbers.
  • Speaker 3
    0:55:00

    You know those are not always the most trustworthy bowls, but Putin is going to be looking for little shreds of legitimacy that he can use to say you know I used to be mister stability and I’m gonna be mister stability again. Now, does he, you know, can, you know, try to reinvent himself. There are questions that policy questions that go along with that that are not just How does he handle Shoygu and Gaurasimov does he fire them because frankly the three of us don’t care what he does there. But is he more inclined to escalate in Ukraine? Is he more inclined to seek a settlement or just some way out of this mess You know, those are big questions that do concern other countries that should be discussed two weeks from now in vilnius that are matters of high policy for western governments and they’re gonna try to figure out how to protect themselves against all of those possibilities, frankly.
  • Speaker 3
    0:56:19

    I think it shouldn’t be ruled out that there can be a kind of nasty aftermath to this in in the war. So that the argument for doing more for Ukraine is greater after purgation, but not because we’re sure that Putin is weak. We just we need to be looking out for our interests and figuring out how Putin in his trapped way may decide to lash out. But there are you know, in the weeks ahead, we are going to see more abuse of historical analogies
  • Speaker 1
    0:57:04

    to me than we’ve committed
  • Speaker 3
    0:57:05

    here. And we we’ve committed here, and I’m gonna be doing it myself.
  • Speaker 2
    0:57:12

    I was I was gonna say, we we we, a shield of the Republic in tend to be at the forefront of that.
  • Speaker 3
    0:57:19

    Yeah. Well, look. What what else are we gonna do in the absence of any real knowledge? What what happened? And those analogies, they help us to think think about the problem, but they don’t, by themselves, give us ants.
  • Speaker 1
    0:57:37

    Absolutely. Well, Steve, this is this has been great having you on Children Republic. I appreciate you taking the time to join us today. This story is going to continue. We’re gonna probably have to have you back at some point to go over the future twists and turns and the ongoing story of Vladimir Putin.
  • Speaker 3
    0:57:55

    And some of us will have to eat their words.
  • Speaker 2
    0:58:02

    Undoubtedly, thanks, Steve.
  • Speaker 1
    0:58:05

    If you enjoyed this episode of Shield of Republic, please drop us a line at shield of the Republic at gmail dot com, and don’t forget to leave review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify wherever you get Secret Podcast from.