Another Russian mercenary leader has turned against Putin

A little over a year ago, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s former cook and the founder of the notorious Wagner private military company, launched a coup attempt that fizzled quickly. But, significantly, the Russian military and security services did nothing to stop it. They just watched — hardly a sign of their loyalty to Putin.

A few days ago, Georgy Zakrevsky, another head of a private military company, effectively called on Russians to get rid of the “Great” Putin (his modifier, not mine). When the guys with the guns start making fun of your greatness, it may be time to read the writing on the wall.

The 53-year-old Zakrevsky is no liberal and no good guy. He served in the KGB and Soviet army, earned a law degree and got “involved with secret activity, information about which is forbidden.” He then moved on to “independent military consulting” and founded the mercenary outfit Paladin.

Paladin is scary. Its own website describes the group as follows: “A few years ago no one knew of the private military company. Now the whole world knows. Let the dilettantes think we’re killers; their views don’t interest us. People don’t turn to us to defend their pharmacies; they don’t ask for permission to use arms. We don’t need to prove anything.”

The company has seen action in Congo, Lebanon and Ecuador; and it currently protects three “strategic objects” and has over 250 mercenaries.  

Given Zakrevsky’s past record and current credentials, the last thing one would expect such a cutthroat to do would be to turn against Russia’s cutthroat par excellence, the Great Putin. The pair should be, and presumably once were, natural allies. For someone like Zakrevsky to criticize Putin publicly is thus no small potatoes.

Zakrevsky must be mad as hell and, more important, he must know that he’s not the only Russian military man who agrees. And why shouldn’t their veins be throbbing? The Great Putin has come close to destroying Mother Russia.

Here’s Zakrevsky’s diatribe against Putin, in my translation:

“Our country is not just on the brink of disaster or already right next to it; our country is already in trouble. In big trouble. Drones are flying all over central Russia, right up to Moscow and St. Petersburg. They even attacked the Kremlin. Our Black Sea fleet is being pushed out. It’s being pushed out as if we were not a great power with a great fleet, but some third-rate country.

“Our air force is practically not working because it is also being pushed out. We are standing in the same positions that we took more than two years ago, and partly in those to which we retreated. The population is dying out, becoming impoverished, drinking itself to death: no one cares. All they have time to do is bring in migrants.”

Zakrevsky minces no words in assigning blame for this sad state of affairs: “And all this was done by the so-called ‘president.’ The ‘Great’ Putin.”

After accusing army officers of incompetence and worse, Zakrevsky concludes his screed with an appeal “to those who are in the trenches. You know very well what kind of indecency is happening there now….You know very well the faces that are mocking you and your relatives…. We call on everyone to join our union to save our country. The point of no return has already been passed.”

Note that Zakrevsky doesn’t say “I call on you,” but “we call on you.” The plural is presumably a reference to “our union,” Paladin, but it may also be a reference to other military men, whether in the private mercenary companies or the regular armed forces.

Also worth emphasizing is the target audience: the soldiers serving and dying in miserable conditions on the Ukrainian front. Zakrevsky must know that military desertions in 1916 and 1917 led directly to the downfall of the czar and to the Bolsheviks taking power.

Zakrevsky’s outburst was obviously prompted by Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Province and the shameful incompetence of the Russian army, the intelligence services and their leaders. And Zakrevsky is absolutely correct to realize that the buck stops with Putin. Having made himself the “great” leader, Putin bears responsibility for all that transpires inside Russia. That’s the price of being the dictator — you can’t pass the ruble.

Zakrevsky’s appeal, which has supposedly been distributed widely among Russia’s military and civilian elites, can’t be dismissed as the unrepresentative grumbling of a disgruntled mercenary. Zakrevsky, like Prigozhin before him, represents Russia’s military class. If he’s unhappy and willing to risk his career — and possibly his life — by going public with his call for Putin’s removal, there must be many others who share his discontent. That may be why he hasn’t been arrested or killed — yet.

Were Zakrevsky to somehow come to power, his political leanings would likely be identical to Putin’s: imperialism, fascism and war and genocide in Ukraine. But Zakrevsky is no Putin, and whatever the former’s political aspirations, he could never have the power and authority of Putin.

Zakrevsky is important, not because he portends a nicer, gentler Russia, but because he portends chaos among Russia’s ruling elites. And chaos means less interest by Moscow in Ukraine and other neighboring states, growing instability at home and the possibility — however small — of a turn away from fascism.

That may not sound like much, but, given the horror of Putin’s regime, it would be remarkable.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”