Welcome again. Western authorities analysts, impartial specialists and media commentators have been pressed all week to foretell what’s going to occur in Russia after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny. However the reality is, we don’t know — some extent that struck me once I remembered a joke I used to be instructed in Moscow within the Nineteen Eighties throughout the last years of the Soviet Union. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

In keeping with this joke, one Russian asks one other: “What’s coming?” The reply: “I do know what’s coming, however I don’t know what’s going to occur earlier than it comes.”

Positioned in as we speak’s context, the joke captures the truism that Vladimir Putin’s reign will finish in the future. What we can’t know — and what’s extra related for western policymakers — is the course that occasions will take earlier than that occurs.

From the publicly out there commentaries on Russia that I’ve sampled this week, I’d like to pick 5 themes. These are: what Prigozhin’s rebellion tells us in regards to the strengths and weaknesses of Putin’s system of rule; the chance of the disintegration of the Russian state; the affect on the conflict in Ukraine; the outlook for Russian-Chinese language relations; and the position of Belarus.

Putin’s weaknesses 

The consensus view is that Prigozhin’s mutiny uncovered grave vulnerabilities in Putin’s extremely personalised fashion of rule. Max Seddon, the FT’s Moscow bureau chief, quoted a Russian oligarch who has identified the president for the reason that Nineteen Nineties:

It’s an enormous humiliation for Putin, in fact . . . Hundreds of individuals with none resistance are going from Rostov nearly to Moscow, and no person can do something.

In an article for the Washington-based Middle for European Coverage Evaluation, Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov amplify this thought:

Prigozhin’s raid on Rostov-on-Don was so outrageous and brazen that it reminded the Russians of the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, when Chechen militants walked into hospitals, cities and colleges, taking everybody hostage and demanding the Kremlin cease the conflict in alternate for civilians’ lives.

A number of commentators made the purpose that, for the primary time in Putin’s 23-year rule, Russians acquired a glimpse of a future with out him. Sam Greene, professor of Russian politics at King’s Faculty London, tweeted:

The best risk to Putin at this level comes not from Prigozhin, however from the potential that these occasions break the airtight seal on the general public consensus that there isn’t any different to Putin.

Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Middle wrote within the New York Instances:

Prigozhin confirmed Russians a fleeting glimpse of an alternate future and, by doing so, gave Russians extra cause to doubt their management. Is Putin actually the omnipotent, czarlike determine they thought he was?

Putin’s strengths

Nevertheless, this isn’t the entire image. Some clever heads warning that Putin is in no way completed — not but, at the very least.

My colleague Dan Dombey, a former FT bureau chief in Turkey, jogged my memory this week that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan not solely survived a coup try in 2016 however struck again ferociously at adversaries actual and imagined — and he’s nonetheless in cost as we speak. Putin, it appears, is already placing again.

For these causes, I like to recommend this interview in Overseas Affairs journal with Stephen Kotkin, an eminent historian of the Soviet Union. He says:

I’ve lengthy been calling the Putin regime “hole but nonetheless robust”. It remained, and stays, viable so long as there isn’t any political different.

Nevertheless, echoing the observations of Greene and Kolesnikov, Kotkin provides:

Now, we’d see simply how hole the regime is. Putin has unwittingly launched a stress check of his personal regime. He had already misplaced his mystique with the bungling of the aggression towards Ukraine. Mystique, as soon as misplaced, is close to unimaginable to regain.

Will Russia disintegrate?

As I wrote on this publication precisely one 12 months in the past, Putin’s misfiring conflict in Ukraine has excited a lot hypothesis, significantly amongst conservatives within the US and central and japanese Europe, that Russia might break up underneath the pressure.

Prigozhin’s mutiny has breathed contemporary life into this line of pondering. Right here is Ana Palacio, a former Spanish international minister, writing for Social Europe:

Putin may very well be pushed from energy, abandoning a fragmented Russia the place numerous “warlords” compete for energy — together with management of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

Palacio’s article emphasises the risks of a Russian break-up. However on this commentary, Jean-Dominique Giuliani, chair of the Brussels-based Robert Schuman Basis, suggests there could also be an upside:

The top of the Russian Federation would merely be the fruits of a protracted strategy of decolonisation that started in 1991, the true finish of the tsarist period extended by the communist dictatorship, which survived solely by conquest.

Personally, I believe Giulani overstates the chance that autonomous areas reminiscent of Buryatia, Dagestan, Tatarstan and Tuva may construct viable impartial states subsequent to a truncated Russia, more likely to be filled with grievance-filled nationalists and extra average however shocked residents.

Nonetheless, it was revealing that Putin’s denunciations of Prigozhin used the phrase smuta, an allusion to the Time of Troubles of the early seventeenth century, when the Russian state broke down underneath the strain of competing factions in Moscow and international conflict.

Putin might have been taking part in on unusual Russians’ concern of violent dysfunction. However to me his language sounded filled with genuine rage on the prospect, nonetheless distant, of the state’s collapse.

Safety ensures for Ukraine

Is the Russian turmoil good or dangerous for Ukraine? The much-heralded Ukrainian counter-offensive has not but delivered breakthroughs on the size that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his army commanders hoped for.

However commentators reminiscent of Mikhail Komin contend that Prigozhin’s revolt uncovered “the size of the disaster throughout the Russian armed forces, that are disillusioned by fixed failures and uninterested in conflict”.

It’d subsequently be the fitting time for the US and its allies to double down on their army and monetary help for Ukraine. Judy Dempsey of Carnegie Europe goes additional and says western governments ought to prolong safety ensures to Kyiv on the forthcoming Nato summit in Lithuania.

Nevertheless, the US — which is the important thing determination maker — is cautious of going too far too quickly.

China and Russia: limits to the “no limits” friendship?

How China views Prigozhin’s mutiny and Putin’s response is value a complete publication in itself. , succinct evaluation appeared in this Twitter thread from Joseph Torigian of the American College in Washington. He says:

The Chinese language doubtless imagine that Putin remains to be one of the best probability for stability in Russia and see supporting him as one of many core foundations of the connection. Some Chinese language commentators have famous that Putin did emerge victorious shortly and with little blood spilt.

However, Beijing might take the view that Putin and his entourage really want to get their home so as. A small variety of Chinese language students have sounded uncertain about the place the supposed “no limits” friendship with Russia is taking their nation, with one suggesting that Beijing should take care to not get dragged by the Kremlin right into a quagmire of conflict.

I might add that China’s notion of the US as its chief long-term worldwide rival signifies that Beijing has a powerful curiosity in maintaining Russia on its aspect.

Lukashenko: ‘For half-hour, we talked obscenities’

And so to Belarus, whose dictator, Alexander Lukashenko (profiled right here within the FT), performed a component in defusing the showdown between Putin and Prigozhin.

On Monday the Economist journal revealed a commentary underneath the headline: “Alexander Lukashenko is the clearest beneficiary of Wagner’s munity.”

I’ve to say that I believe that is completely fallacious, and to be truthful the article did quote a Ukrainian official as saying that Lukashenko’s position had been a lot exaggerated:

“He was instructed to grow to be an middleman, and he stepped in line.”

Nevertheless, why not learn what Lukashenko mentioned about all of it? This transcript, supplied by the Meduza information web site, might be an merchandise for historians down the ages.

Lukashenko mentioned that, whereas Putin instructed him he couldn’t pay money for Prigozhin when the mercenary chief was in Rostov, he himself efficiently contacted the insurgent lower than an hour later.

“For the primary half-hour, we talked solely in obscenities,” Lukashenko mentioned — effectively, that bit actually rings true.

“We’re going to march on Moscow!” he quoted Prigozhin as saying. Then: “I mentioned to him, ‘They’ll squash you want a bug.’”

And so the dictator calmed down Prigozhin and lined himself in glory — or not. For a extra sober view, learn Thomas Graham, a distinguished former US diplomat in Moscow, within the New York Instances:

The actual fact is that Lukashenko is just not an impartial actor however a software of Kremlin coverage, and he has been for years.

Extra on this subject

What Prigozhin’s half-baked “coup” may imply for Putin’s rule — an interview within the New Yorker with Tatiana Stanovaya, founder and head of R. Politik, a political evaluation agency

Tony’s picks of the week