Aday after Russia’s mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin called off a military march on Moscow, and Russia eased back from the brink of civil war, the country reacted with confusion and anger to a series of events that one leading media figure said had risked “cutting society in half.”
The TV anchor and Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov blasted Prigozhin and his Wagner Group fighters but acknowledged the dangerous divisions their march had exposed within Russia.
“Our country will never be the same again,” Solovyov said Sunday. “The column of Wagnerites didn't just move along the asphalt - it moved through the hearts of people, cutting society in half. We already have a hard time, but yesterday everything hung on a very thin thread.”
Some Russians cheered Prigozhin, who has criticized the Russian military brass for months for what he calls its inept prosecution of the war in Ukraine. Videos posted on social media Saturday showed residents of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don – where Prigozhin’s men had taken up positions and occupied the local military headquarters – applauding the Wagner troops as they departed. Some ran to shake hands with Prigozhin through the window of his SUV.
But on Sunday the mercenary commander, a prolific poster of often obscenity-laden statements on social media, had gone silent. The deal that ended the mutiny reportedly stripped Prigozhin of control of his personal army in return for amnesty and exile in Belarus.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was nowhere to be seen either, save for brief excerpts from an interview recorded for state TV before the Wagner rebellion began. In the clips, Putin could be heard saying, “We feel confident, and of course, we are in a position to implement all the plans and tasks ahead of us.”
In "civil war...there can be no victory"
But some of the loudest and most-watched Kremlin propagandists broke their silence about the events, and this group - normally in lockstep with one another - had different takes on what had happened.
Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state-controlled RT, said Russia had teetered on the cusp of "civil war” and invoked the 1917 Russian revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
“When you're fighting against your brother, there can be no victory!” Simonyan said. “When brother attacks brother, it's a war without the possibility of victory!”
Simonyan appeared to criticize the Kremlin for opening a criminal prosecution against Prigozhin (as it did midday Saturday) and then dropping the case and agreeing to his exile in Belarus.
“This is mocking legal norms,” she said. But she added that “if in some exceptional, critical situations it turns out that legal norms stop fulfilling their mission and start fulfilling the opposite mission, then to hell with these legal norms…Nothing can be more dreadful than civil conflict.”
Igor Girkin-Strelkov, a far-right conservative figure and veteran of the 2014 invasion of Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, urged Putin to either transfer power or start acting as "commander in chief."
“If the current president is not ready to take over the leadership of the process of transferring the country to a military footing, if he is not ready for the powers of the supreme commander in chief, then he simply needs to transfer them, but only legally, to someone who is capable of such hard work,” Girkin-Strelkov said Sunday.
In praise of Putin
Other prominent voices were more forgiving. Some went so far as to say Putin had saved the day.
Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of Russia Today and a longtime anchor on Russian TV, said the country had “passed the maturity test.”
Prigozhin’s “campaign against Moscow made no sense, the society did not support the rebellion,” Kiselyov said Sunday. “It is important that people on both sides, ready to give their lives for Russia, did not start killing each other in a senseless massacre…Russia once again passed the test of maturity, and the stronghold of unity remained unshakable."
Irada Zeynalova, host of another popular state media program, echoed the criticism of the Wagner Group leader.
"Prigozhin's PR people created for him the image of a politician who would restore order,” she said. “He manipulated the words ‘justice’ and ‘order’ for a day - but in the end he went home. Both the authorities and the rest of us drew conclusions: this is our country, and we will not allow anyone to play with its fate.”
The vast majority of Russians have no media platforms, of course, and it was impossible, one day after Prigozhin’s march, to know how they felt - and how many ordinary citizens might have cheered the Wagner fighters the way the Rostov-on-Don residents did Saturday.
“Prigozhin and his men enjoy the support of many Russians,” Wacław Radziwinowicz, a prominent Polish political analyst, wrote in a column published Sunday. “For them, Prigozhin is a hero, not a traitor, because he is one of the only public figures who dares to speak the truth about the Kremlin’s incompetent management of the war.”
The failed mutineer “will remain an icon for them,” Radziwinowicz said.
Other outside scholars and analysts said Putin had been the clear loser.
“The Kremlin now faces a deeply unstable equilibrium,” the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said, calling the deal “a short-term fix, not a long-term solution.”
“Prigozhin’s rebellion exposed severe weaknesses in the Kremlin” and in Russia’s defense ministry, the ISW said.
Michael Kofman, Director of Russian Studies at the Center for Naval Analyses, said via Twitter that while “Prigozhin ultimately lost...Putin lost as well, and the regime was wounded. What the long-term repercussions are remains to be seen.”
Stanislav Kucher contributed reporting.
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