Russia’s Periphery Takes Note of Putin’s Sudden Weakness

The New York Times called it Russia’s “36-hour rebellion,” as if the weekend’s shattering events could be confined to a day and a half. Even if Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin called off his group’s march on Moscow and has apparently begun his exile in Belarus, the continuing aftershocks of the mutiny that came within 125 miles of Russia’s virtually defenseless capital cannot be separated from the crisis itself.

For the West’s Russia watchers, much of the immediate focus has been on what actually transpired in Russia, what is happening now, and what it could mean for Russian politics, especially the reign of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin’s stranglehold on the media has reduced Russia to an information ecosystem where the dominant sources of news in times of crisis are gossip and piecemeal reporting on Telegram channels. By necessity, serious analysis of the rebellion’s implications on Putin therefore comes from outside the country. My colleague at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, Tatiana Stanovaya, offered a pithy summary, including the key point that Prigozhin very likely wasn’t trying to overthrow the regime. The ease with which his forces progressed toward Moscow likely surprised him and caused him to quickly seek an offramp.

The events that began last Friday will have reverberations outside Russia as well, especially among neighboring countries. Even before the Wagner revolt, Putin’s strategically catastrophic war in Ukraine had forced some measure of reevaluation of Russian intentions and strength in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Uzbekistan, and other countries in the region. If the war exposed weaknesses in Russia’s military and reliability as an ally, the rebellion exposed weaknesses that implicate Putin himself. Paradoxically, the events of recent days served as a reminder of the highly personalized nature of power in Putin’s regime—and at the same time struck a significant blow to that power.

Putin’s uncharacteristically brief Monday night address declaring the rebellion a betrayal of Russia and giving himself credit for defusing it will not rewind the tape; the damage is done. Prighozin’s own video statement that day—in which he appeared confident and assured—confirms that there is still another actor at what was supposed to be Putin’s one-man show. In a system where power is so personalized and performative—think shirtless photo shoots, hours-long press conferences, and ostentatious delays in meetings with foreign leaders—an unmistakable show of power by another actor in Russian society undermines the effect. Again, this story is not over.

For those on Russia’s periphery, the questions are less immediately pressing than for Russian elites trying to make sense of their country’s changing dynamics of power. We shouldn’t expect dramatic, near-term shifts in the foreign policy of Russia’s Central Asian or South Caucasus neighbors, in part because a focus on Russia’s geopolitical role misses the way that personalized politics has always been the foundation for many of those countries’ relationships with Russia under Putin. Over two decades, Putin has practiced a foreign policy that depended on authoritarian handshakes. It wasn’t that he was in any way personally close to the likes of Kazakhstan’s former strongman, Nursultan Nazarbayev, or the late Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov; Putin does not seem to form genuine friendships with anyone. Instead, he has cultivated a foreign policy that consecrated mutual, if unequal, support for respective systems of repression and corruption with much of Russia’s “near-abroad”—a euphemism for the former Soviet and Russian imperial space.

It is much too soon to tell the ultimate impact of last weekend’s events in Russia, in the region, and beyond.

Putin doesn’t encourage ostentatious supplicants; Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko is a loser to him, even if a useful one. (On the other hand, Lukashenko has been in power even longer than Putin despite having a weaker hand; being underestimated seems to be part of the former’s dictatorial playbook.) Putin found former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych waffling and weak—and wanted a harsher, faster crackdown on the Maidan demonstrators in Kyiv in late 2013. Demonstrating control over one’s own state has been an important way to earn Putin’s respect; weakness has been reason for derision.

Against this backdrop, the events of the last week may be akin to a neighborhood dominated by gangsters and strongmen witnessing a gang leader’s weaknesses being exposed. Other gang members aren’t necessarily eager to see him dethroned—but they are taking note. They may be reconsidering, in a different way than they did after the invasion last year, how much they can depend on Putin and how alone they might be in a case of domestic crisis. This time their reflections are spurred not by Putin’s aggression against a neighbor asserting its sovereignty but because of the weakness and regime fragility the rebellion has exposed.

Even in places that haven’t seen as dramatic a political shift away from the Kremlin’s orbit as Ukraine or Moldova, the cast of characters is slowly changing. Newer leaders such as Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Uzbekistan President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, and Kyrgyzstan President Sadyr Japarov may be asking themselves what role personalized handshake diplomacy with a damaged Putin will play in their own future. With a grin and a grimace, they might also be recalling the ways in which Putin has often conveyed a sense of condescending disdain toward those who allowed challenges to their own authority to fester.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev are watching too, though for them Putin’s woes are more of a confirmation than a revelation. One of the most significant shifts in the politics surrounding the conflict between the two Caucasus states has been a diminishment of Russia’s role in recent years. Before last week, Pashinyan didn’t have naïve hopes that Putin cared to help Armenia address outstanding border issues with its adversary, such as those on the Lachin corridor. Now, he may doubt how useful Putin would be even if Moscow tried to get involved. Aliyev, in turn, always had a kind of independence others in the region lacked, built on corruption, gas wealth, and Turkish support. Putin’s woes only confirm Aliyev’s freer hand.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Georgia, the democratic backsliding of recent years is unlikely to be helped by recent events. Questions remain about the Russian economic and political ties of former Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who remains the country’s dominant political force. Now, it is uncertainty about Russia, rather than any linkages, that could amplify Georgian political discord and retard a return to democratic progress.

Americans focused on competition with China may be inclined to assume that Putin’s latest setback is an opening for Beijing in Central Asia and elsewhere. But here too, an overly mechanistic view of regional politics can lead to incomplete analysis. For one, China is already a global power with significant economic and political ties in countries on Russia’s periphery; this is not an opportunity for China to move into a space where it isn’t already present. But the other reason why Putin’s setback is likely viewed with ambivalence in Beijing is that Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has similarly personalized power more than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, has made a bet on Putin. Whatever Xi’s assessment of the wisdom of that bet, he can’t easily change it; Putin’s weakness, especially if it were to lead to instability in Russia, is at least as much a headache as an opportunity for China. As much as the two countries are different, Xi generally does not want Russia to put on display, for all the world to see, the risks of building a centralized authoritarian regime on an autocrat’s highly personalized power.

It’s not only countries in Russia’s immediate neighborhood that will be digesting the Prigozhin affair in the weeks and months to come. Those Americans and Europeans who have poo-pooed any suggestion that there might be cracks in Putin’s power or that his regime could collapse must now acknowledge that the rebellion has left him looking weaker and his political system more fragile, notwithstanding his apparent neutralization of the proximate threat. Even in the likely event that Putin responds by asserting control ever more forcefully in the near term, a bit more humility is warranted by those who continue to insist that Putin has everything under control. And a bit more time should be spent by strategic planners in Western capitals studying the scenarios where Putin’s control might falter. On the whole, the last few days have been a reminder of the lesson that authoritarian regimes are stable—until suddenly they aren’t.

Then-Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s apocryphal quip in 1972 to then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about the ultimate impact of the 1789 French Revolution—that it was “too soon to tell”—was always too good to be true. But apocryphal quips, like clichés, resonate and endure because they capture some essential truth. Last weekend’s events in Russia weren’t a revolution or a civil war as some commentators have suggested, but it is much too soon to tell their ultimate impact—in Russia, in the region, and beyond.