June 24, 2024 - 1:25pm

On 24 June 2023, 200 km away from Moscow, Yevgeny Priogozhin gave up. Having led his mercenary army on a march towards the capital, he reasoned that he wanted to avoid spilling more Russian blood. When the head of a coterie of violent rapists and murderers is one of the better shots your country has at political change, you’re already in a bad place. Now, one year on from the Wagner Group’s aborted midsummer rebellion, Russia seems in a more pathetic state than ever.

It was exactly two months later that Vladimir Putin appeared before an audience on state TV, smiling against the backdrop of an orchestra as news of Prigozhin’s death in a mid-air plane explosion came through. The President’s authority had been temporarily dented, and he made a public spectacle of taking it back. Since then he has further consolidated it.

There have been few, if any, significant internal challenges to Putin, though there have been small pockets of single-issue dissent such as Put Domoy, a movement against Russian men being mobilised for the war, and January’s protests in Bashkortostan in support of a jailed activist. The Kremlin has also stamped out other major threats, most notably opposition campaigner Alexei Navalny who died in suspicious circumstances in February after a difficult winter in an arctic prison colony.

It’s not just Prigozhin’s loss that has deflated any remaining confidence among dissident Russians. The country has been in a state of political ennui bordering on nihilism for years, egged on by a state propaganda machine which has encouraged the public to trust nothing and nobody.

While some Russians are against the war, support consistently stands at around two-thirds of the population. Putin’s domestic popularity actually increased in the aftermath of the invasion. People aren’t challenging the regime, largely because they don’t want to. Even Prigozhin and his supporters were irate that the Russian army wasn’t killing Ukrainians effectively enough. Those who oppose the conflict are either powerless or reluctant to do anything about it, and many Russians are simply more concerned with their own standard of living than the fact their country is conducting acts of terror abroad. Some view themselves as the “real” victims.

Politically, Putin’s regime is reorienting. The central syndicate remains the same, just reshuffled into different positions of seniority, while the slightly lower-downs are the fall guys, of whom the internal security apparatus makes an example in an attempt to cow others into submission. And the President has clearly seen the need for some actual changes if he wants to stand a chance of fighting a protracted war. Ironically, it seems that Putin is finally starting to realise that Prigozhin may have been right about the flagging war effort.

Last month, Putin finally replaced longtime defence minister Sergey Shoigu with a technocrat, Andrei Belousov, in order to improve the war’s economic efficiency. Russia is trying to prove that it is not completely isolated on the world stage — an attempt somewhat undermined by having recently reached out to the hermit kingdom of North Korea as an ally.

Wagner, too, has changed shape. While some Prigozhin loyalists were reluctant to start cooperating with Russia’s official structures, many were easily integrated back into the country’s system under the control of the Ministry of Defence, the National Guard (Rosgvardiya), or other affiliated paramilitaries. Wagner is still active on the African continent, albeit under the new name of “Africa Corps”, and with different leadership. Old habits die hard, however: a rare recent piece of reportage documented how Russian paramilitaries have been drugging and raping teenage girls in the Central African Republic.

The regime has continued to crack down harshly on the few meaningful acts of resistance, as well as media freedoms. Russian-American Ksenia Karelina, for example, is currently on trial for donating $50 to a pro-Ukraine charity. Russia has lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Ukraine, either dead or wounded, and its brightest and best have fled abroad.

The outlook remains bleak for ordinary Russian people. But Putin doesn’t care. As long as he gets to continue his Ukrainian campaign, it doesn’t matter. In Russia, nothing matters.


Aliide Naylor is a journalist and the author of The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front

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