The Ukraine war has created ‘entitlement-carrying actors’ who are now involved in the conflict, sidelining military action inside Russia, observers say.
There was a meme, “Bombing Voronezh”, poking fun at the way the Russian government responded to the sanctions in a way that hurt itself. Today, the meme has become a reality as, after capturing the city of Rostov, the rebellious Wagner mercenaries march on the real city of Voronezh, halfway to Moscow.
“I saw a cloud of smoke from where the oil depot blew up, not far from my house,” 25-year-old Olesya from Voronezh told Al Jazeera.
“In turn, [people] Post videos of how a shell is falling in different parts of the city, or they are shooting, or they are blowing up a car Lots of soldiers on the road. Me and my family don’t leave the house, but if we pack our things.”
Olesia told Al Jazeera that she had not yet heard of any casualties.
Early Saturday, Wagner’s troops took control of Rostov, one of Russia’s largest cities, met minimal resistance from local security forces and seized the regional military headquarters.
A video soon emerged of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin meeting with senior Russian defense officials in Rostov. The oligarch and former Kremlin ally claimed his actions were not an attempted coup but a “trial of justice” against the military high command that “destroyed the lives of many thousands of Russian soldiers”.
Marat Gabidulin, a former Wagner fighter deployed in Syria, told Al Jazeera that he believed Prigogine “overestimated his talents, as he had done before”, and did not think the uprising would succeed. But from a military perspective, Gabidulin added, Wagner is in the right place.
“He’s in a strong position to negotiate: he’s got headquarters [Southern Military District] group, located within the boundaries of a large city,” he explained.
“Headquarters is his hostage. To smoke him out of there, you need to attract large forces. His mercenaries learned to fight in the city; Launching an operation against them means deploying a lot of military personnel.”
But Wagner’s rebellion has implications for President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power, Russia’s war effort, and the domestic situation.
“Among the few remaining sources of authority for the Putin regime is his long-held claim that he restored ‘law and order’ after the ‘chaotic’ 1990s,” Kevork Oskanian, a lecturer in comparative politics at the University of Exeter, told Al Jazeera.
“That perception now will backfire and make him much weaker in the long run, even if he ultimately wins.”
Historically, much of Putin’s popularity rested on restoring stability to the lives of Russians: in the post-Soviet collapse of the 1990s, Russia was plagued by turf wars between organized crime syndicates, pyramid schemes robbed citizens of money, a coup attempt left multiple people dead. Hundreds of bodies on the streets of Moscow, while a real war rages with Chechen separatists in the south.
He did this by incorporating a wide set of business, political, religious and even criminal interests into what has been called his “power vertical”. So far, he has been able to balance the competing interests of the Russian elite with a great level of success.
But as the war in Ukraine has dragged on with no clear path to victory, it has empowered players like Prigozhin, as well as Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov — who commands his own private militia known as “Kadyrovtsy” — at the expense of government armed forces.
“It seems the current unraveling of Russia’s political stability reflects internal pressures and fault lines in a country that waged an unjust and disastrous war with its neighbour,” Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, professor of Russian politics at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.
“The war has produced intra-elite pressures, blame-shifting games and entitlement-bearing actors who are now openly clashing, leading to military action within Russia.”
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