Bakhmut is likely to go the way of Kherson, Izyum, and other Russian-occupied cities. Its tormenter and principal captor, Yevgeniy Prigozhin's mercenary forces, announced last weekend that "From June 1, not a single Wagner fighter will be at the front until we undergo reorganization, re-equipment and additional training." The nine-month battle has thinned out Vladimir Putin's regular forces, and what remains will be needed elsewhere once President Zelensky's army launches its counteroffensive. Ukraine will then retake Bakhmut, just as it has retaken many other once-Russian-occupied localities, and anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 Wagner troops — The Washington Post claims the former, The Wall Street Journal the latter — will have died for nothing.
And Putin — not Prigozhin — will have another defeat to explain. The Daily Beast reports that his regime's increasingly "bizarre propaganda lines," full of Russian triumphalism, have become a laughingstock on domestic social media. Expatriate Gennady Gudkov, a former State Duma deputy, says "Putin and his guys are turning into a comedy club, they are not lords of the ring any longer. The Kremlin is making mistake after mistake, which makes it clear to the public that they are just a bunch of ridiculous fools."
Mockery and ridicule can be lethal to a repressive regime such as Putin's. Even more perilous is his loss of control over the byzantine network of the government's various power centers — an instability that is "escalating," reports the Journal. A power unto himself, Prigozhin, for one, is not holding back. He has repeatedly noted that as his troops were taking Bakhmut, Russia's regular forces were losing ground throughout southern and eastern Ukraine. Prigozhin's favorite targets of contempt are Russia's minister of defense, Sergei Shoigu, and its top general, Valeriy Gerasimov. "Because of their whims, five times more guys than had been supposed to die have died," says Prigozhin. "They will be held responsible for their actions, which in Russian are called crimes.” About Gen. Gerasimov, he adds, "the happy grandpa thinks that he’s doing well.... How will we win the war if it turns out that grandpa is a complete moron?" Prigozhin is now also denouncing the "clowns on Old Square," the headquarters of Putin's administration.
Observes the Journal's Yaroslav Trofimov, who works out of Ukraine, lest he meet the miserable fate of the Journal's Evan Gershkovich: "The extent to which [this 'significant crack in the country’s establishment'] has become public in recent weeks, affecting military operations, shows that Moscow’s setbacks on the front line are putting under strain the formidable system of power that has been created by President Vladimir Putin over the past two decades." Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov draws the "main conclusion" more graphically: "Russian elites [see] that Putin is not capable of regulating these relations. It means that Putin has become so weak that the power vertical is coming undone. In times of war, keeping a united front is the basic task of a state. And Putin is unable to achieve that."
What's extraordinary is that Prigozhin is still talking, publicly, anyway. Putin has savaged all domestic opposition to the Russia-Ukraine war; even the vague charge of “discrediting" Russia's armed forces will put a citizen in prison. And yet every day, Prigozhin issues either a condemnation of Russia's military strategy, or reveals the Ukrainian army's ominous strength, or complains of Russian troops' poltroonery and poor leadership. But should Vladimir suddenly depart from this earth, so too would Yevgeniy. "Prigozhin is hated by the generals," says the self-exiled Russian prime minister during Putin's first term, Mikhail Kasyanov. "His fate, and his very physical existence, entirely depend on Putin."
Still, says yet another expat, Andrei Kozyreva, President Boris Yeltsin's minister of foreign affairs, caution should be exercised when calculating the consequences of open breaks between Prigozhin and the regular Russian military. "[The] Wehrmacht’s officers also hated the SS, but all of them took part in the war despite that hatred," says Kozyreva. "Their tension was real. Yet Hitler’s Germany kept resisting until the last day." Even criminals tend to hang together in war, as they should literally, once peace is attained.
The Kremlin's official view of all this tempestuousness is the usual obfuscation — the Martin Bormann of Putin's regime, Dmitry Peskov, said he "cannot comment because it concerns the course of the special military operation." The Kremlin's inside view is just about anyone's guess, but mine leans toward the logically probable truth of Putin's former speechwriter; that "Russian elites," both inside and outside the Kremlin, see a despot's grip on disparate power centers weakening, and his inability to manipulate reality increasing.