Putin On His Heels

Are Vladimir Putin’s days numbered?

Jim: Charlie, you spent a lot of time in Russia. You were in Moscow for many years. Do you think that anything has really changed in light of the recent challenge to Russian leader Vladimir Putin's power? 

Charlie: No, I think It's always been a very delicate talent. And it depends on the people around him, the institutions around him, and keeping those things in line. That's why the Wagner Group action was so intriguing. 

Jim: So, what do you think is, is gonna happen? seems like no one knows where this guy is, right?

Charlie: Apparently he’s in Belarus, which I don't think is a good place to be for him. I don't think there is a good place.

Jim: So, you think that he’s a dead man?

Charlie: I hate predictions that are that definitive, but yeah, that's what I think. 

Jim: What do you think caused him to do this? 

Charlie: I think he perceived a pretty serious weakness on Putin's part and, and being an opportunist and having a lot of power. He decided to move on him. He was also angry. The Russian army did not deliver the goods that the Wagner Group wanted for its campaigns in Ukraine. He was coming home with piles of bodies. 

Jim: Looked to me like, he started to attack Moscow and then somehow lost support and decided to turn around and then everything fell apart. Is that a decent assessment or am I missing something? 

Charlie: No, if you remember what happened. His troops turned north and headed up toward Moscow, and that was the point at which Putin started talking about treason and other things. He agreed not to charge him, and that turned everything around.

Jim: I know. Right before I got on here, Putin gave a very angry speech denouncing the Wagner Group. Do you think that means anything? 

Charlie: I think he's, he couldn't do anything but that. I mean, they sent us, they sent troops against his forces. He couldn't say all is peace and love between us now, you know.

Jim: Was that Russian code? Do you think that the that Putin has been significantly weakened by this?

Charlie: You know, I wish I could answer that. You can't tell. We have no effective measure to assess what his position is and how stable it is. So, I think the question, I mean, this is rude, but I'll say it.The question is, who gets murdered next? 

Jim: So, how does this compare to when you were there? 

photo by Ivan Shilov

Charlie: Well, we weren't having a war. But the Kremlin was never direct about anything. I mean, I remember once reading a speech from Brezhnev about strategic issues and the old codger flipped a page and missed a while page. And so when he gave the speech, everybody was jumping to the fact that we thought the Russians had backed off on the whole section of the agreement. But they hadn't. He just got the pages stuck together. The way we found out about that was there was an agency which would sort of surreptitiously contact you and say, don't take that seriously. That's not what happened. He read over the part of the speech. We're not changing policies. The speech is exactly the one that you got on Tass. He just didn't read it right. And the fact that they even told us was an indication how they communicated. There was this surface thing. I was talking about it this morning and I said it was like going to a 3D movie, but not having the glasses. You know, you'd sort of see all these images popping around doing things. You wouldn't know what the hell it was about. But that was the nature of the place. 

Jim: I’m wondering if this is going to have an impact on the war with Ukraine. I don't see how it couldn't have an impact. Do you think I'm reading that wrong? 

Charlie: I don't see how it couldn't have an impact. I think it's absolutely right because the Wagner Group head has not been murdered yet. It sort of sends a bad message that while the Russian troops are in the field they don't want to go to Ukraine and get chewed up, maybe they don't have to. And remember the first thing that the Wagner Group leader did was call on Russians to join him. I mean, we don't have enough of a sense of how dramatic this whole thing really was. I mean, he was calling on the Russian Army to join him in a march on Moscow. So do you think that's pretty extreme? 

Jim: Do you think he stopped because the Russian army wasn't joining him?

Charlie: I think there'd be a power decision there, obviously, something like that. But he wasn't very far up the highway to Moscow before he stopped. So there may have been an opportunity for both sides. Putin would not have to risk having the entire Moscow Garrison leave him and join the Wagner Group. The Wagner Group would not have to risk having its entire army of something like 30,000 people obliterated by a much, much bigger Russian force. So they both had reasons for turning around and backing down. They didn't send me a note about that. That's what I think.

Jim: When you were in Moscow, had you ever seen anything like this? 

Charlie: No. There was always tension along the border with China. And you will get reports of things happening in China that you could never confirm. No one would ever confirm anything for you, but you’d get reports coming through various communities. And then it almost always turned out to be about Jews eating their babies and drinking their blood. And then you realize this is more anti-Semitic bullshit from the Kremlin which they had a lot of. So, you couldn't, you couldn't ever chase anything down. If you didn't witness it, you couldn't find out if it had happened. 

Jim: So, in this situation we have Putin criticizing Yevgeny Prigozhin and you have him blasting Putin and his army, but I haven't heard him directly criticize Putin, have you? 

Charlie: No. It's all been aimed at the head of the Russian military, Sergei Shogun, the minister of defense.  

Jim: So, what do you think the significance of that is? Putin hasn’t criticized him by name and he hasn't criticized Putin by name. So what's that mean?

Charlie:  Well, if you go back a couple weeks, Wagner Group was hiring every Russian prisoner it could find, having their sentences lifted, their crimes dismissed if they agree to go to Ukraine. And that was all the Wagner Group operation. So, at that point, obviously Putin was depending on them for soldiers because he didn't have anymore, there weren't any more he could reach out to. And the fact that he's gonna lose that excess, I suspect is gonna cost a lot for the Russians. 

Jim: So, do you think people are now going to stop wanting to line up and go to get killed?

Charlie: Yeah. And it seems like the Wagner Group has been diminished by this because, I mean, without their leader, presumably they're not gonna be willing to take some of the risks that they did before. Remember this is a classic American situation. They're all in it for the money. It's not like they're loyal to the cause, or determined to justify the abuses of Russian history? No. They're there for the money and, and that's what, the Wagner Group was using to get them. And that's what Putin was using to get the Wagner Group. So if you break up that money connection, they're sort of screwed, you know?

Jim: Well, I wonder what the other oligarchs and people like Prigozhin are gonna think when they see this happen to a guy as powerful as Putin?

Charlie: Well, I'm sure it makes them think again, if they were thinking about trying to get rid of Putin. He is obviously not gonna be easily dispatched with, but I think more importantly, you’ll see them as best they can fall in line and support the war instead of having a lot of things bubbling on the side in the background that indicates they might be shy about it. If you remember back beginning of the Ukrainian campaign, there were all sorts of rumors that the oligarchs wouldn't put up with this, and the oligarchs were gonna do this and that? That was bullshit. They didn't do anything. Okay. And, and you've now got a more than a hundred thousand dead Russian soldiers, you know? So it's pretty clear that those guys don't have any influence with Putin.

 Jim: Do you think that Putin can win this war without the Wagner Group? 

Charlie: I don't think he can win the war at all. I mean, you're standing down at the base of a dam here. He's down at the base of the dam and it's popping holes and squirting out water all over the place. What's on the other side of that dam is NATO, you know, and he doesn't want to get himself involved in an operation like that because NATO will crush hum. They don't have an army anymore that can do those kind of things. They were okay at occupying Poland and, and pushing Hungary around and Czechoslovakia and people like that, but it doesn't work that way now.

Jim: I still kind of come back to wondering what was Putin’s goal? What was he trying to do here? I mean, I think he wants to reunite the Russian Empire, and that would be Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, not necessarily recreate the old Soviet Union. 

Charlie: Well, that he would be creating the western fields of the old Soviet Union. I mean, you know, Kazakhstan and all those other places, probably not gonna happen. 

Jim: Why would he want all that? 

Charlie:  I mean he’s taken what he could get. He figured he could grab Ukraine but he didn't with Zelensky.  

Jim: Actually, the old Soviet Empire really was Russia, Belarus, Crimea, and Ukraine.

Charlie: So, right. It seems like, okay, he took Crimea. Now he was to take Ukraine and he's obviously stepped in it. He's probably not gonna be able to do that, and now he's lost his major mercenary force. So, if I'm sitting there and I'm a Russian guy, I'm an oligarch, I'm gonna look and say this guy hasn't been able to pull off anything. I mean, yeah, he did get Crimea. But that's only because the Americans at NATO didn't come back at him, so now he can't. Every time they reinforced Crimea, the Ukrainians blow up another bridge. You can only get to Crimea with bridges, so it’s pretty vulnerable. And I think the whole thing about the Russian fleet and the power of the Russian army, it's all been punctured. I mean somebody unleashed a drone attack on the Kremlin, you know? So it's a real debacle for them. The invulnerable have become vulnerable suddenly. Maybe they’ve always have been vulnerable, but this now makes it clear. 

Jim: It’s interesting that it took this long for somebody to directly challenge Putin. Why do you think that is? 

Charlie: Because of business. Everybody who needed to be greased got greased like everybody who needed to be killed. Obviously you have to have enough of an economy for the Russians that they’ll support him pretty strongly because. they've never had that before. You know, we live a life where we have access to everything we want, basically. They have never had that. Most of them have never had that, and you can't imagine how important it's for them to be able to go to a supermarket and buy food. Because their parents couldn’t. I remember their grandparents starving. Yeah. 

Jim: I remember going to Russia and in the early 1990s, and there were people sitting out on the streets in the middle of the winter with almost everything they owned on the curb there selling it so they could get some money for food. And this was at the time Yeltsin was had just taken over. The Soviet Union had collapsed and the Russians were poor. And it seems that since then life has improved in Moscow. Has it improved because of Putin?

Charlie:  Yeah. It has, but it's also improved because of all of the Western influences in European money that moved in there. I haven't been there in years, but the last time I was there, you could actually go to a restaurant and get good chicken. The soup did not look like the stuff you'd swap a floor with, you know, it was really getting to be quite the place. But again, that was after Boris Yeltsin fell, Putin's reign was pretty successful.

I'm not saying he was a nice guy, obviously. But I’m saying he was an effective political figure for Russian people who had nothing. 

Jim: It seems like within the last three years, or even during the Trump era, he suddenly turned and seemed to be more critical of the West and critical of the United States.

Charlie: I think everybody needs an external enemy. And, you know, he, most of all, needed somebody. We're a great enemy for him because we’re a bunch of capitalists.

You know, the other thing here is that over the past couple of years I’ve watched the influences of things like religion which never played much of a role in the Soviet Union, but obviously plays a big role now. And what he has been able to revive is a sense of patriotism. And the orthodox church plays a role in that.

Jim: Do you think Russians just don't like Americans? 

Charlie: No, I think the Russians really like Americans. I mean that country has been mowed over so many times over the past two hundred years that they're paranoid and xenophobic. You know, when they started using the phrase “Nazis in Ukraine,” that's important because of their history. They lost twenty-five million people in World War II. So it's like a nation with a huge and justified insecurity complex. 

Jim: So, all those years ago what was it like? I mean, what were the people like and how did you interact with people and how did they interact with you? Or did they? 

Charlie: Well, not very well because I wasn't very good at the language, but I was picking it up slowly. The people I interacted with, most of them spoke English. And when you get out of Moscow, they became just delightful people. I mean, you can't imagine how, how cool it is to go to somebody's little house out in the wild, to Siberia, and they welcome you as a guest. You know? It's very neat. You get to see a whole different culture at work, and you realize when you do that, these are not communists, these are not threats. They are just people trying to get by. 

Jim: So, it sounds like what really happened if you have a populace that is fearful of Putin because Putin has his hands on the security apparatus that can threaten and jail people and kill people.

Charlie:  And so they aren't gonna rebel against him as long as he's got that much power. Not now they’re not going to. They're not gonna go work for Putin in the government because they don't trust him and they're afraid of him. You know, here, people lust after jobs in the White House or in jobs in the government or anything that would give them a political position that they could hold. I don't think it works for him that way. Now that the Wagner Group and its leader have successfully called him out, he going to have a much harder time holding on to all the power he’s had. Power like that can erode real quickly. I mean, it depends on what pressure's put on him. He’s made it clear now with his behavior that he can be pushed. 

Jim: What are Putin's alternatives now? 

Charlie: That’s a real good question. He should just gather his friends and his enemies around him and keep an eye on all of them. Because you know, it reminds me of the movie, The Death of Stalin, which was hilarious on one level, but not on another level. Because they were all afraid they were gonna get killed and I suspect that as things worsen, which they will, that'll be a problem again. Why would Putin feel this way? I don't know. I can't figure it out. What he gets from Ukraine is nothing but a nation of people who hate him. There's just no upside to any of this stuff. But we can't make an assumption that there's a secret Russian agenda other than going from day to day. Where does it go? I don't know. It seems to me right now the situation is in a drift and the whole world's guessing. 

Jim: So, what’s going to happen? It doesn't sound like our intelligence people have a very good idea of where it's going.

Charlie:  Okay, there's something to say about that. What I understood about the Soviet Union when I was there was it was completely predictable. They had enough of a track record that if you were intelligent, you could look and say, “Here's what they did at this point in that point or that point,” and they would do the same thing all over again. Yeah. It was just the way that the place operated that's gone now. So, you can't sit down and say, “Well, their experience in Hungary and Slovakia and Poland and other places taught them to be this and that.” It doesn't relate. Now, they obviously don't have an army that's very good at aggression. Big, a lot of weapons, but you know, you saw what happened with part of the war. So, I think, you know, if you're in the intelligence community, you're probably sitting back and doing exactly what we're doing, which is waiting to see.

Jim:  I found it very interesting that the American intelligence people apparently had been tipped off that Prigozhin was going to make this attack and that he was going to take Rostow-on-Don. By the way, what is the significance of Rostov-on-Don? 

Charlie: What's the significance? It's the headquarters of the Russian military community. And the whole Ukrainian wars being run out of there. And all the generals are there and all the communications is there. And I think a lot of the troops were there. What that means today, I don't know. I mean, who do you call in Moscow if you're in the Army to say, “I need some help here now.” I don't know. 

Jim: It seems to me that if he captured that important of a military asset, he would've held onto it. He wouldn't have said, “Okay, I'm going to Belarus,” There must have been some kind of behind the scenes deal to to get him out of there.

Charlie:  I think when he started heading north the game changed. Aleksandr Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus, or somebody else, was able to persuade him that going up to Moscow at this stage was not good. So, he backed down and it looks like it was one of those things because it gave Putin a chance to say, “I'm triumphant, I chased these people away.” And it gave Prigozhin a chance to say, “I'm gonna live to see another day,” which is an assumption on his part. But he could say I will live to see another day here in Belarus. Somebody once called the whole place a mystery wrapped in an enigma or whatever. It's like a fortune cookie that you can't open. Who knows, some food analogy comes to mind. But I don't think anybody has any idea what will happen. It doesn't appear that we [the US] have much of an idea. I think we're hoping that that Ukraine can take advantage of this.

Jim: Do you know where the Wagner Group was deployed? 

Charlie: Most were deployed in Ukraine. They moved around. Anywhere that you saw small villages being burned to the ground and everybody being raped and shot, that's where they were. There are a lot of those. 

Jim: Now are they back in Rostow-on-Don? Or where do you know? 

Charlie: They may well be in Belarus. There's 25,000 of them in a lot of the equipment. So, like you can't hide them. So yeah. It's surprising to me that there was no Russian military assault on the whole effort, but there wasn't.

Jim: Why do you think that Putin just didn't attack the Wagner Group and knock them out? 

Charlie: No bullets. They're either out of rockets or out of bullets or their tanks. Their tanks don't work. As bad as what happened looked, it would've been really bad if they tried to attack him and got beat.

—James O’Shea and Charles Madigan

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.

Charles Madigan is a writer and veteran foreign and national correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, where he also served as a senior writer and editor. He examines news reporting, politics and world events.

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