KYIV. — An abortive mutiny in Russia has shown the risks the Kremlin faces from a long, grinding conflict in Ukraine even though it has not handed Kyiv an immediate breakthrough on the battlefield.
Many questions still swirl after Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner forces returned to base after Friday’s mutiny, which was called off the following day under a deal brokered by the president of Belarus.
But current and former officials in Kyiv say the mutiny offered a startling glimpse into the strain the Russian political system is under. It revealed that Russian reserve forces were so thin they struggled to respond to the threat.
“I think clearly they’re not in a safe space regarding the endless continuation of the war,” Andriy Zagorodniuk, Ukraine’s defense minister from 2019 to 2020, told Reuters.
“Remember the concept of the ‘forever war’ that was in the press? I think they will have to rethink that.”
A war stretching many more months and possibly years would inevitably mean more deaths and wounded on each side.
Since Putin sent his forces into Ukraine in February 2022 in what he called a “special military operation” Western officials put the death toll in the tens of thousands.
The apparent ease with which Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary forces barreled hundreds of kilometers towards Moscow from Russia’s south facing little resistance was striking, Zagorodniuk said.
“They started to pool resources in order to stop them. We saw those resources and they weren’t substantial…Essentially, they don’t have much force left apart from what they have at the front right now,” he said.
US officials, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said much remained unclear, including why Russian forces did not do more to halt Wagner’s advance.
The Kremlin, a day after accusing Prigozhin of leading the mutiny, said he would be allowed to move to Belarus without facing charges in return for calling off his forces from hurtling towards Moscow.
No further details of the deal are known.
Prigozhin, once personally close to Putin and whose fighters played a prominent role in Russia’s offensives in the east, had made many blistering verbal attacks on Russia’s defense minister Sergei Shoigu and top military brass over the weeks. He had even challenged the rationale for the war.
“Any chaos behind the enemy lines works in our interests,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has said.
But Kyiv officials caution that even without its crack Wagner fighters, Russia still maintains a vast army inside Ukraine and is able to recruit more soldiers.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential official, told Reuters the turmoil would deal a blow to the morale of Russian troops.
“The additional demoralization of Russian soldiers and additional doubts among the Russian generals, who have been demonstrably humiliated, will worsen the quality of the defense somewhat.”
The turmoil in Russia comes with no end in sight to Moscow’s 16-month-old invasion and neither side is willing to make concessions.
Western-backed Ukraine is in the early phases of a long-touted counteroffensive to retake occupied land in its south and east. It says its main offensive thrust is yet to come with the bulk of its troops not committed.
Several weeks into operations, Kyiv has recaptured a string of villages, although President Voldomyr Zelenskiy has acknowledged the advance has been “slower than desired.”
A senior Central European diplomat said they saw “no immediate effect on the war” from Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny.
But the diplomat cautioned that many questions remained unanswered from the weekend’s events so it was too early to say anything about the longer-term impact.
The Ukrainian military’s National Resistance Centre said Russia had flown up to two companies of its 76th Airborne Assault Division to Moscow from the front on Saturday and that it planned to keep them there for at least a week.
“It should be noted that there are no facts of a mass transfer of enemy forces, we’re talking about individual units,” it said.
