00:00 On June 24th of this year, we saw some of the most dramatic events play out, I think,
00:11 in Putin-era Russia, where we had an armed rebellion of one faction of the Russian armed
00:17 forces marching on Moscow with tanks, taking over a few big Russian cities and taking them
00:26 very easily without much resistance.
00:29 And the importance of that is, I think, that it shook the authority of President Vladimir
00:34 Putin to the core.
00:35 I think it's a level of weakness and uncertainty in his grip on power that I haven't seen in
00:42 15 years of reporting on Russia.
00:46 The mutineer, it's a term you usually hear associated with pirates and buccaneers, but
00:52 it's kind of a useful way to think, actually, about the Wagner Group and Yevgeny Prigozhin,
00:57 its commander.
00:58 They are a private army, a mercenary force, a paramilitary force that operates within
01:04 the kind of broader umbrella of the Russian armed forces, but very much independent and
01:10 pretty autonomous, more and more so as the war in Ukraine has unfolded over the last
01:15 year and a half or so.
01:16 Yevgeny Prigozhin has spent months during the war in Ukraine complaining against the
01:22 commanders of the Russian military, saying that they are not providing him with enough
01:26 weapons, enough ammunition, that they are ineffective and competent, and trying to
01:32 kind of steal authority from them.
01:35 They've gotten more and more independent, confident, better armed, and I think that
01:41 independence is what gave the commander, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the confidence and the chutzpah
01:48 to declare this mutiny and go to war against basically the rest of the armed forces.
01:54 It's very hard to say how this is going to play out from now on.
01:58 There does seem to be at least the beginnings of a purge going on within the Russian elites
02:03 in response to this.
02:04 I haven't been to Moscow since 2015 when they expelled me from the country.
02:08 Certainly in the last few months, it has been rare for Western journalists to go in there.
02:16 Very consistently, the regime has gone after every layer of the media.
02:23 So now the level of control that the regime has and exerts over the media is so extreme
02:30 that it's very hard to find independent sources of information.
02:35 We've seen already at least one Russian general who was close to the rebel faction arrested.
02:43 General Surovikin, better known in the Russian media at least as General Armageddon for the
02:49 absolutely rampant and horrible war crimes that he's been accused of.
02:53 He was in charge for a period of a few months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then was
02:59 removed from that command.
03:00 General Surovikin is an ally of the rebel commander, Prygozhin.
03:05 They were quite close.
03:06 It seems that General Surovikin has been detained or arrested because of his connections to
03:11 this rebel faction.
03:13 There's an effort now to weed out or to figure out within the Russian elites who was aligned
03:18 with this rebellion, who was potentially helping them or giving them information or aware that
03:24 they were planning this mutiny.
03:26 So that's going to play out certainly in the coming days, if not weeks.
03:29 And again, the rebel commander is still free.
03:34 He's been given leave as far as we know.
03:36 So there is still this kind of rebel faction that is not being dismantled.
03:44 They're still around and they still can serve as a kind of alternative center of power,
03:49 alternative center of gravity for any factions within Russia, within the Russian elite, within
03:54 the Russian military to gravitate towards in opposition to President Vladimir Putin.
04:00 I think one thing that's been very consistent in Putin's 23 years in power is that he was
04:06 the man at the top of the pyramid, at the top of what he called the vertical of power,
04:11 this kind of great machinery of the state where he was at the wheel and all of the other
04:17 elements of this machine, all the different clans and towers of the Kremlin.
04:22 They might fight with each other, but Putin was always the kind of arbiter above them
04:25 all who could settle disputes and who could put people in their place when they challenged
04:32 the system.
04:33 And I think Putin himself is still trying to parse and understand just how deeply the
04:37 foundations of his authority have been shaken.
04:40 And I think intuitively his approach to doing that is to look for the traitors, to try to
04:45 find them, but also mindful of the fact that if there are more traitors than he thinks,
04:51 they could still unite and band together against him if he cracks down too hard.
04:56 So it's quite a delicate balancing act that he has to strike.
04:59 He needs to put down the rebellion and control the treasonous factions within the Russian
05:04 elites, but he can't do it so harshly and so openly that they have a mind to unite again
05:11 and maybe make another attempt to take Moscow.
05:14 But I think I would expect that Putin will now impose even harsher controls over the
05:21 elites and try to weed out, arrest, if not kill, enemies that he sees around him, that
05:28 he imagines around him.
05:30 That certainly has been the historical pattern that we've seen inside the Kremlin and within
05:36 the Russian leadership for hundreds of years.
05:38 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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