Put pressure on Putin while he’s down

After nearly a year and a half of support for Ukraine, the U.S. now has a chance to shape the escalation cycle with Russia. 

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive putsch demonstrated the fragility of the Russian regime and the stress it now faces. And so for the U.S., there are two operative questions to consider. First, how can the U.S. pressure the Russian state as a whole through more intense military activity? Second, how can we exploit internal divisions within Russia, and between Russia and Belarus?

Most substantive details on the Prigozhin incident will remain classified for decades, or at least until there is enough of a thaw between Russia and the West to enable the open exchange of archival material from the current war. Yet the outlines are increasingly clear.  Discounting the possibility of a Russian false-flag — not impossible but nevertheless extremely improbable — the incident demonstrates a deep degree of state erosion within Russia.

Before his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s greatest strength was, ironically, his soft touch. The FSB functioned as secret police, a nascent Gulag system existed, and there were a number of arbitrary, politically-motivated detentions, including of opposition figure Alexei Navalny. There were also murders at home and abroad. 

But in general, for an authoritarian, Putin ruled with a relatively light hand. The Russian elite were able to come and go as they pleased, sending their children to tony schools in Europe and the U.S. and stashing their mistresses in Switzerland and Miami. The urban professional classes of Moscow and Saint Petersburg were also allowed to live largely as they pleased, and even conduct some subversive activity in foreign universities. Academics could travel with relative ease, while foreign businessmen and tourists remained a common sight in European Russia. 

Putin’s was an illiberal regime even then, which at times crossed the line into open violence and had a fundamentally antagonistic relationship with its Ukrainian neighbor and the entire Anglosphere. But for Europeans and well-to-do Russians, this was a regime with which business could be done. 

Putin and his inner circle constructed this system by design. The intention was never to resurrect the full horror of the Stalin-era NKVD. Putin and his inner circle have not a scintilla of morality among them, yet they recognized the massive expense and risk that a wholesale security state would entail.

Most importantly, a well-resourced, powerful security state is also a potential threat to the executive. This is why Putin, in classic authoritarian fashion, established overlapping security institutions that would battle one another — the FSB, the GRU, the SVR, the FSO, the National Guard and even private military companies, of which Wagner was just one. The sheer complexity of this organizational structure ensures that no one accumulates enough power to become capable of seizing control of the state. 

Even so, this non-rationalized system has obvious seams, one of which Prigozhin exploited to march on Moscow. Putin could try to fix this by rationalizing the system, but that risks elevating a contender for his own position of power. 

Prigozhin’s putsch indicated the degree to which the Russian system is both divided and passive. As in most mutinies and coups, most state organs sat on the sidelines until the balance of forces became clear.  The amount of internal support for Prigozhin remains unknowable, but it is likely that some elements of the inner circle, along with the remaining pre-Putin oligarchs and part of the Russian military, either oppose the war in general or want to see Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov removed for incompetence. Reforming the system would risk giving one of those camps legitimate access to power, while also incapacitating each of the other security actors. 

The U.S. can exploit this system. There should be no expectation that a post-Putin Russia will be more amenable to the West, but sufficient pressure on this system could at least force an end to this war on favorable terms. The Russian system now has several interlocking strategic considerations that sap strategic attention and overload the state’s cognitive abilities. The U.S. can intensify this overload by taking four steps. 

First, the U.S. should take advantage of disorder in Russia and flood the information space with accusations of coups, plots, mutinies and other disruptive actions. The Russian state, at this point, cannot avoid following up on such leads, lest it miss a major event like Prigozhin’s coup attempt. The goal should be to distract and divide Russian decisionmaking and compel the Russian security apparatus to shift resources from Ukraine to internal protection. 

Second, the U.S. should provide structured, public incentives to any high-worth individual who might break ranks with Putin’s current policy. This might involve a degree of asset protection, amnesty from prosecution, or some other mix of favorable incentives. The difficulty of this policy is in public messaging. Ukraine and Eastern Europe will object to any outreach within Russia, but the U.S. cannot afford missing an opportunity to manipulate a major adversary. China will be doing the same, and American inaction today will allow Chinese penetration. 

Third, the U.S. should attempt to induce Belarus to separate itself somewhat from Russia. Since the 2020 protests against his fraudulent re-election, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko has been solidly under Putin’s thumb.  But he has resisted being drawn into the Ukraine war and, prior to 2020, was extraordinarily coy in positioning himself between Russia and Ukraine to gain leverage over Moscow. 

Lukashenko’s patronage of Prigozhin also seems designed to distance him from the Kremlin. A full break between Minsk and Moscow is highly improbable, absent a modification of the broader circumstances.  But marginal steps can be taken in the intelligence space, for example, to reduce Belarus’s accommodation of Russian forces. 

Fourth, the U.S. can increase its pressure on Russian positions beyond Ukraine, particularly in the Middle East. Russia retains significant air defense capabilities in Syria, despite its major redeployments to Ukraine. This is to preserve its leverage over Israel, even as Russia expands cooperation with Iran. Israel is unwilling to cut ties with Russia if Moscow can still influence a conflict in the Levant. 

Increased American pressure on Russian assets in the Levant would provide Israel with breathing space and reduce Russia’s ability to maintain a Moscow-Tehran pipeline with greater Israeli freedom of action.

Regime change need not be the U.S. course of action. But the Kremlin is weak and divided. The Biden administration would benefit from taking advantage of the situation to push its adversary. 

Seth Cropsey is founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy and Seablindness: How Political Neglect is Choking American Seapower and What to Do about it.