Meeting Russian media figures behind closed doorways Tuesday night time, President Vladimir V. Putin offered himself as a frontrunner taking issues into his personal palms, delving into Yevgeny V. Prigozhin’s business contracts with the Russian Defense ministry, in line with an individual who was there.
The particular person, the newspaper editor Konstantin Remchukov, stated Mr. Putin additionally portrayed himself as having been totally engaged all through the 24-hour rebellion final weekend by Mr. Prigozhin, the chief of the Wagner paramilitary group.
“Putin said he didn’t sleep for a minute during the rebellion,” Mr. Remchukov stated in a cellphone interview from Moscow. In the insurrection’s aftermath, he stated, Mr. Putin appeared centered on the financial motives guiding Mr. Prigozhin: “He’s deep in the numbers of the Prigozhin contracts, the money flows.”
Those particulars from inside Mr. Putin’s assembly within the Kremlin with pro-war bloggers and Russian media chiefs present how the Russian president is happening the offensive to counter the sense that the weekend’s occasions confirmed that he was dropping management. The concentrate on Mr. Prigozhin’s monetary dealings allowed Mr. Putin to shift the story line away from the perceived risk to his management, and solid Mr. Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny as a private grievance over cash.
Mr. Putin was signaling that though he allowed Mr. Prigozhin and his fighters to obtain sanctuary in neighboring Belarus, the associates of the mercenary chieftain in authorities and elsewhere might nonetheless face penalties. Several pro-war Russian blogs reported this week that the authorities have been investigating navy service members with ties to Mr. Prigozhin, however these stories couldn’t be independently confirmed.
The downside for Mr. Putin is that Mr. Prigozhin has constructed an online of connections deep into Russia’s ruling elite, starting when he ran high-end eating places and catered banquets in St. Petersburg within the Nineteen Nineties.
Mr. Putin himself hinted on the depth of Mr. Prigozhin’s ties to the federal government in his public remarks on Tuesday, saying Mr. Prigozhin, a catering magnate, had earned roughly $1 billion from navy catering contracts up to now yr, and that the federal government had spent one other $1 billion to finance his mercenaries.
Mr. Remchukov stated that Mr. Putin returned to that theme within the closed-door assembly Tuesday night, and that it was evident Mr. Putin was “trying to learn the whole economic background” of Mr. Prigozhin’s monetary preparations with the federal government.
On Wednesday, Mr. Putin sought to indicate he was going again to business as common. He flew to the southern Russian area of Dagestan to debate home tourism, praising the enlargement of the native brandy trade and, in line with the Kremlin’s transcript, not mentioning the weekend’s rebellion.
But again in Moscow, with the character of Mr. Putin’s longer-term response to the insurrection a matter of guesswork, members of the Russian elite have been nonetheless scrambling to reveal their loyalty and disavow previous ties to Mr. Prigozhin.
“It’s a highly convoluted question” as to who ought to get punished for his or her ties to Mr. Prigozhin, stated Oleg Matveychev, a member of the Russian Parliament and a longtime pro-Kremlin political marketing consultant.
Those focused, he stated in a cellphone interview, wouldn’t be those that have been solely “pictured with Prigozhin somewhere,” however those that “actively covered for him, actively continue to do this, and actively work against the policy of the president.”
Mr. Matveychev acknowledged working with Mr. Prigozhin and his web “troll farm” a couple of decade in the past, however stated he stopped the partnership after concluding, in his view, that Mr. Prigozhin was a “mentally unstable person.”
The query of who will get punished for Mr. Prigozhin’s insurrection carries excessive stakes, particularly as a result of a few of Mr. Prigozhin’s key allies and sympathizers are believed to be contained in the navy. Mr. Remchukov stated there was intense hypothesis in Moscow in regards to the destiny of Sergei Surovikin, a senior common whom Mr. Prigozhin had praised publicly. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that American officers imagine General Surovikin knew in regards to the insurrection upfront.
“I think they’re going to ask why he was quiet” and didn’t communicate up towards Mr. Prigozhin earlier than the insurrection, Mr. Remchukov stated of General Surovikin. “Were there any interests, was there any connection?”On Wednesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, known as The Times’s report “speculations’’ but did not deny the reporting or express any support for the general, who has not been heard from since appearing in a video last Friday night pleading with the rebels to stand down.
But Mr. Prigozhin’s ties also extend well beyond the military. After a career spent in the shadows, Mr. Prigozhin turned himself into a public figure in the last year, casting himself as a tough-talking mercenary leader far more effective than the traditional military. He regularly castigated and belittled military leaders like Sergei K. Shoigu, the Russian defense minister.
In the last year, Pro-Kremlin figures seeking to prove their patriotic bona fides rushed for Mr. Prigozhin’s bandwagon.
The son of Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, bragged that he had joined an artillery unit in Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner group and earned a medal “for courage.” The head of a celebration in Russia’s rubber-stamp Parliament, Sergei Mironov, posed with a sledgehammer embellished with the Wagner insignia — a pile of skulls, and a hand-drawn smiley face.
The sledgehammer final yr grew to become Mr. Prigozhin’s trademark after he endorsed its use within the grotesque execution of a Wagner fighter who had surrendered to Ukraine.
“Thank you to Yevgeny Prigozhin for the present,” Mr. Mironov wrote on Twitter in January. “This is a useful instrument.”
But by Tuesday, Mr. Mironov had refashioned himself right into a bulwark towards Mr. Prigozhin’s insurrection. He known as for an investigation into what he claimed was a “line of V.I.P.’s — officials and civil servants” flocking to go away the nation from the non-public jet terminal of Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport throughout Wagner’s abbreviated march towards Moscow on Saturday.
“This is a fifth column!” he wrote on social media, with out naming names. “Traitors to the Motherland!”
There was additionally the query of who had spoken up for Mr. Putin whereas the insurrection was ongoing, and who stayed silent. One Moscow the political analyst Mikhail Vinogradov revealed what he known as an “oath rating” on the Telegram social community that cataloged, right down to the minute, at what time on Saturday Russia’s greater than 80 regional governors posted a message of help of Mr. Putin, in the event that they did — and listed the 21 who posted no such messages in any respect.
Mr. Vinogradov stated in an interview that it will be a mistake to attract critical conclusions from his score, however Mr. Matveychev, the member of Parliament, stated he discovered the checklist revealing.
“I had a glance and drew conclusions,” Mr. Matveychev stated, “that a person is, let’s say, unreliable and might act differently next time.”
Mr. Matveychev insisted that the aborted insurrection was a optimistic for Russia as a result of its failure “strengthens the image of the authorities” and acts as a “vaccine” towards future rebellions. And Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper editor, stated that regardless of his prediction on Sunday that Mr. Putin may not run for re-election subsequent yr due to the insurrection’s blow to his picture, he has seen Moscow’s Kremlin-connected elite rally to Mr. Putin’s facet as he seeks to telegraph power.
“Putin is now totally focused on sending the message to the elites that ‘I can protect you,’” Mr. Remchukov stated. “Now there will, I think, be some very energetic actions to show this, because his whole logic is to show that this was nothing but treason.”
But others noticed Mr. Prigozhin’s problem as an issue for Mr. Putin, particularly because the conflict drags on and members of the elite look guilty one another for setbacks on the entrance.
“This is a signal that the system of governance is not handling the wartime stress well,” Mr. Vinogradov, the Moscow analyst, stated. “Especially not in the last two months, when everyone was awaiting a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive and preparing to turn on one another — and even the lack of that success didn’t change this at all.”
For the Russian public, and the navy rank and file, the aftermath of the insurrection is a second of whiplash, with Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner pressure — which had scored Russia’s solely latest battlefield success and been celebrated by pro-war bloggers and at occasions the state media — being recast as traitors.
Leonid Ivashov, a retired senior Russian common who has spoken out towards the conflict however has remained in Russia, summarized the overarching query hanging over society and the navy thus: “What is going on?”
“Many can’t understand what the government actually wants,” General Ivashov stated in a cellphone interview. “The first question is: What is happening in the country and the army?”
Source: www.nytimes.com