“Is the Wagner uprising and the ‘march’ on Moscow a farce? If that were the case, Vladimir Putin would have paid a price too high, with his image ‘weakened in a devastating way’. Giampiero Massolo, president of ISPI, does not believe in the hypothesis that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny was staged and that Wagner’s leader was actually in collusion with the Russian president, as some circles would have us believe.
“The entire incident shows an image of a weakened Putin. If it were true that it was a farce,” Massolo asserts in an interview with Adnkronos following the attempted coup, which concluded with Wagner’s withdrawal mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, “it would undoubtedly have been a farce that has cost Putin dearly because the image of weakness it portrays is sincerely devastating, to the point that some commentators question whether his decline has begun and whether we can speak of a situation similar to that of Gorbachev in 1991 after the failed coup, which ultimately led to Yeltsin’s rise.”
“I don’t believe it was a farce,” insists the president of ISPI, convinced that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed revolt was “a challenge to Putin’s leadership, who had so far managed to balance the factions” battling in the shadow of his power, with Wagner’s leader on one side and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov on the other.
Prigozhin’s objective was to settle the conflict with them, shifting the power balance, not to weaken Putin. But the ‘Kremlin chef,’ emphasizes Massolo, “has always been a tactician and not a strategist, and perhaps he underestimated” that by acting as he did yesterday, “he would have pushed Putin to defend the established order, but he would have also weakened him.”
At the same time, according to the president of ISPI, the way the incident ended, “with a sort of compromise and safe passage for Prigozhin, confirms the difficulty of doing without him, of getting rid of him: we still don’t know the price paid, we will find out in the coming weeks.” But even Putin may have underestimated Wagner’s leader if it is true, as intelligence sources suggest, that he knew about Prigozhin’s plans at least 24 hours in advance: “Such extreme behavior indeed caught everyone off guard,” concludes Massolo.