Reaction has been pouring in from Western news outlets amid the failed coup attempt staged by the private military company Wagner in Russia.
“As news of the attempted armed coup by the Wagner private military company filtered out to the West, newspaper columnists and pundits rushed to predict the downfall of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government, a military victory for Ukraine, and an uncertain end for Wagner chief Evgeny Prigozhin.
Prigozhin, often an open critic of the Russian Defense Ministry, claimed on Friday that the Russian military had shelled one of his group’s bases. He then ordered troops loyal to him to move towards Rostov-on-Don, a major urban and logistics hub in southern Russia. From there, he vowed to march on Moscow and remove military officials he claimed are corrupt.
Putin, on the other hand, vowed to take ‘decisive action’ to end Prigozhin’s ‘criminal gamble’, while Russia’s top military commanders called on Wagner fighters to lay down their arms ‘before it is too late’.
Among American outlets, CNN offered the most dramatic analysis, painting Wagner as a ‘dark, mercenary Frankenstein…which has turned on its masters’. The broadcaster described Prigozhin’s attempt at a coup as ‘the most serious threat to [Putin’s] power in all the 23 years he’s run the nuclear state’.
CNN predicted that internal ructions in Russia will ‘alter the course of the war in Kiev’s favor’, despite Ukraine’s counteroffensive incurring up to 13,000 casualties, according to Russian figures.
Extrapolating on this scenario, CNN speculated that ‘Putin’s regime will ever go back to its previous heights of control from this moment’, and that ‘further turmoil and change is ahead’.
The Financial Times offered one of the most apocalyptic takes on the situation. ‘It is hard to believe that Putin can ultimately survive this kind of humiliation’, columnist Gideon Rachman wrote in an op-ed also carried by the Irish Times. ‘His prestige, his power, even his life, are now on the line’. Rachman did not cite any evidence to back up his claim that Putin’s life may be threatened”. -RT
While any news agency’s portrayal of Prigozhin's so-called armed insurrection attempt as an existential threat to Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin would be downright risible, regardless of whether the mutiny carried out by the Wagner Private Military Company was actually a desperate, Western-backed countermeasure to the abject failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive or whether the claims of Prigozhin, an open critic of the Russian Defense Ministry, that the Russian military shelling one of his group’s bases is what prompted his move towards Rostov-on-Don and attempt to march on Moscow to oust supposedly “corrupt” military officials turn out to be entirely factual, the unusual situation has brought to mind the great Niccolò Machiavelli's cautionary writings against the serviceability of mercenaries and auxiliaries.
“I say, therefore, that the arms with which a prince defends his state are either his own, or they are mercenaries, auxiliaries, or mixed.
Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and [one’s own] destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, that they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you.
I wish to demonstrate further the infelicity of these arms [i.e., mercenaries]. The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain [i.e., the leader of the mercenaries] is not skillful, you are ruined in the usual way [i.e., you will lose the war]”. -Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XII (“How Many Kinds of Soldiery There Are, And Concerning Mercenaries”)