Last month’s mutiny in Russia damaged President Vladimir Putin’s carefully crafted image as a strong ruler, and he is likely to seek revenge against the man who led the rebellion, CIA Director William Burns said Thursday.
The uprising by paramilitaries from Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group “exposed significant weaknesses in the system that Putin has built,” and the country’s security services, military and decision-makers appear to have been “adrift” for 36 hours, Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
The June 23-24 riot threatened the image that Putin has tried to paint of himself as the “arbitrator of order” in Russia, Burns said. Instead, for a brief period, the Wagner Forces advanced towards Moscow without resistance.
For Russians used to seeing Putin in control, “the question was ‘Does the emperor have no clothes?’ or at least ‘Why does it take you so long to get dressed?’” Burns said.
For Moscow’s elite, the episode raised questions that have been raised since his invasion of Ukraine “about Putin’s trial, about his relative detachment from events and about his indecisiveness.”
“The most remarkable thing that happened that day was that Putin was forced to make a deal with his old caterer,” alluding to Prigozhin’s earlier career as a caterer for public schools and Kremlin events, Burns said, referring to the ambiguous deal in which Wagner’s forces were supposed to be absorbed by the Russian military.
The rebellion represented “the most direct attack on the Russian state in Vladimir Putin’s 23 years in power,” Burns added.
Now Putin is waiting, “playing for time while he considers what to do with Wagner and what to do with Prigozhin himself. Putin hates, in my experience, the image that he is overreacting,” Burns said. “He’s trying to fix things.”
Putin most likely wants to gradually sideline Prigozhin but keep Wagner’s team, seeing paramilitaries as a useful tool, including in Africa and the Middle East, Burns said.
“What he is going to try to do is separate Prigozhin and undermine him, but preserve what is of value to him,” he said.
But as “the last apostle of retribution,” Putin will almost certainly go after Prigozhin when the time is right, said Burns, a former career diplomat and ambassador to Russia.
“I would be surprised if Prigozhin escapes further retaliation for this,” Burns said, adding: “If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire my food taster.”
