Putin's iron grip severely weakened after Wagner mercenaries march on Moscow
Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly heading to Belarus — but not before igniting chaos
When Yevgeny Prigozhin angrily vowed Friday evening that he and thousands of his Wagner fighters were going to march into Russia to take aim at what he sees as the country's incompetent and corrupt military leadership, the Kremlin called the act mutiny and threatened to imprison him for 20 years.
But 24 hours later, when a Wagner convoy was just 200 kilometres from the capital, there was an abrupt about-face.
It appeared that the country had avoided a potential coup — and Prigozhin, a Russian prison.
He waved to a small crowd of supporters as he was driven in a black van in Rostov-on-Don, a city near Ukraine's border.
The Kremlin says he was destined for Belarus. Officials say a deal was brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to de-escalate the situation and avoid bloodshed.
While a lot remains unclear about the agreement and the tumultuous period that led up to it, political observers believe the attempted rebellion has left President Vladimir Putin more vulnerable.
"I don't see how Putin survives this because Putin would be so weakened by having to make a deal with a guy who openly challenged him," said Sergey Radchenko, a professor at Johns Hopkins Advanced School for International Studies, who is currently teaching at Cardiff University in Wales.
The Kremlin maintains that Putin never left Moscow even though there were reports that government planes left the capital.
It was more than 12 hours after Prigozhin announced his rebellion that Putin made an address on state television where he spoke about treason and betrayal and said the "internal turmoil is a mortal threat" to Russia's statehood.
Anti-terror measures were put in place in the city of Moscow, and roadblocks were set up as well as positions manned by police officers with machine guns.
Scenarios averted after deal reached
When it looked like Wagner was going to enter the capital Radchenko told CBC News that he saw three possible scenarios: he thought it could lead to Putin being ousted, to Prigozhin's demise, or to a violent civil war.
Instead, Prigozhin has reportedly left the country, and Kremlin officials say they dropped criminal charges against him.
Putin's spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, says Russia won't be prosecuting the Wagner fighters that advanced toward the capital.
Radchenko is highly skeptical of the apparent agreement for de-escalation, as he says that history has shown Putin, Prigozhin and Lukashenko can't be trusted.
"It is a shadowboxing match and we will have to see who comes out on top."
Sergey Markov, a Moscow based political scientist who has previously advised Putin, told CBC News that he thought there would be some kind of compromise.
Markov predicted Putin might fire Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and top general Valery Gerasimov in order to appease Prigozhin, who had once been quite close to Russia's president.
Shoigu and Gerasimov were not publicly seen or heard from while the attempted rebellion unfolded.
Prigozhin, who was previously convicted of robbery, ended up in Putin's circle after rising through the ranks after being released from prison.
He started off running a hotdog stand, but then morphed into government caterer, and eventually a militia leader.
Uprising may be a 'harbinger,' retired general says
In recent months Prigozhin unleashed increasingly angry tirades at Russia's top military brass whom he accused of incompetence and lying to Putin about the battlefield realities in Ukraine.
On May 5, in a video published by his press service, Prigozhin stood in front of a row of bloody bodies screaming in an expletive laced rant about how the Russian defence ministry was depriving his fighters of ammunition, and they were dying in huge numbers as they fought to control Bakhmut.
"Those responsible would go to hell," Prigozhin shouted.
Two weeks later Wagner declared it controlled Bakhmut, but Prigozhin revealed online that the mercenary group had lost 20,000 fighters, half of which were convicts recruited from Russia's prisons.
When Russia's Defence Ministry announced that mercenary fighters in Ukraine had to sign contracts with the military by July 1, Prigozhin refused.
Hours before he launched what he called his "march for justice" Prigozhin said that Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu lied about the justification for the invasion of Ukraine.
"What was the war for? The war needed for Shoigu to receive a hero star," he said in a video he posted on his social media channel.
"The Ministry of Defence is trying to deceive the public, deceive the president and tell a story that there was some crazy aggression by Ukraine, that — together with the whole NATO bloc — Ukraine was planning to attack us," he said.
While Prigozhin mostly avoided any direct criticism of Putin, launching a rebellion against the military's top brass is an attack on his regime, according to retired British army general Richard Barrons.
"It may be a harbinger," Barrons said in an interview with Reuters. "The fracturing of the regime that sits around President Putin ... is very real."
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