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yevgeny prigozhin
The Russian Mercenary Who Displaced France’s Neocolonial Imperium in Africa
Yevgeny Prigozhin was one of those quixotic, improbable adventurers who, over the past two centuries, have served as the vanguards of new forms of empire.
Oct 19, 2023
One of modern history’s major empires is falling apart right now, right before our eyes. Yet precious few in the media have reported on this extraordinary event, much less offered any analysis of its implications for the fast-changing shape of global power.
Over the past 60 years, France has used every possible diplomatic device, overt and covert, fair and foul, to incorporate some 14 African nations into a neocolonial imperium called “Françafrique”—a vast region covering a quarter of Africa and stretching for nearly 3,000 miles from Senegal on the Atlantic coast to Chad in the continent’s center.
While the rest of that continent frequently suffered from wars, coups, and chronic instability, Françafrique long enjoyed comparative peace. By dispatching paratroopers from its many African bases (or secret agents for the occasional assassination), Paris provided a rough version of stability—even if at the price of endemic corruption, entrenched autocratic rule, and deep economic exploitation. Recently, however, a rising nationalist consciousness in many of those relatively new countries has begun chafing against that European land’s repeated transgressions of their sovereignty. As French colonial and postcolonial dominance over this vast region moved ever deeper into its second century, unease bordering on open hostility against that country’s presence began to build.
Should this process continue successfully into the near future, Moscow will have flanked Europe (and so the U.S. as well) by forming a geopolitical arc of influence sweeping south through the Middle East and extending west across the whole of the Sahel that stretches from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
In less than a year, in fact, the sudden withdrawal of French troops from individual African nations has turned into a full-blown retreat from much of the region. As terrorists affiliated with ISIS first became active in 2014, France deployed some 5,000 elite troops for Operation Barkhane in collaboration with six nations of Africa’s arid Sahel region, the strip of territory extending across the continent, largely south of the Sahara Desert.
Yet just last December, French troops left the Central African Republic after Paris decided that the local government there was “complicit in an anti-French campaign allegedly steered by Russia.” In February, Burkino Faso’s new military government simply expelled French forces and hailed its new “strategic partnership” with Russia. And in August, following back-to-back coups in Mali, that country’s ruling junta grew resentful of the 2,400 French troops stationed there and forced them to withdraw into neighboring Niger, which became the new main base for their operations in the Sahel region. Then, last month, French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to announce that he was pulling his troops and his ambassador out of Niger as well. After seizing power in July, that country’s new military junta had demanded just such a French departure and, to drive the point home, closed its airspace to France. “Imperialist and neocolonialist forces are no longer welcome on our national territory,” the junta announced.
Amid such geopolitical upheaval, a most unlikely man from Moscow appeared on the spot in 2017. His name—now all too well known—was Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder and commander of a notorious mercenary army, the Wagner Group. As the French retreated slowly and exceedingly reluctantly from their postcolonial imperium, Wagner began moving in, becoming Moscow’s surrogate in an ongoing great-power contest for influence and control in Africa.
By the time in late 2022 that France’s failing nine-year effort to secure the Sahel was drawing down, Wagner’s forces were already operating secret gold mines in Sudan, running the largest gold mine in the Central African Republic with projected revenues of $100 million annually, and had earned $200 million since 2021 providing security for Mali, a land roiled by Islamist rebels. In March, Washington warned Chad’s president that Wagner mercenaries were plotting to assassinate him and were also preparing Chadian rebels to attack from their bases in the Central African Republic. After the July coup in Niger, cheering crowds were seen waving (as well as wearing) Russian flags. And as 1,500 French troops and that country’s ambassador were being withdrawn, Niger’s new military leaders promptly contacted Wagner for support, expanding Russia’s sphere of influence in the French imperium it was fast supplanting.
The strategic implications of this shift, should it continue, are potentially profound. As the NATO alliance moved ever closer to Russia’s sensitive western border in the 1990s, Moscow reacted early in this century (prior to the invasion of 2022) with repeated interventions in Ukraine, launched special operations to secure its allies in Central Asia, and, above all, engaged in a little understood geopolitical flanking maneuver across two continents.
The thrust of that move started in 2015 when Moscow leapfrogged over the NATO barrier of Turkey to open a massive air base at Latakia in northern Syria. Soon, Russian planes had reduced rebel-held cities like Aleppo to rubble. In 2021, leapfrogging again, this time over the close American ally Israel, Russia began supplying Egypt with two dozen of its advanced Sukhoi-35 jet fighters so its airmen could compete with Israelis flying advanced American F-35 fighter planes, which Washington refused to supply to Cairo. Completing Moscow’s southern push in the region, Russian President Vladimir Putin began building upon their shared interests as oil exporters to try to befriend Saudi Arabia’s functional leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, becoming so close by late last year that Western observers began to express concern about the possible loss of a key ally.
The final geopolitical pivot in Russia’s recent maneuvering proved particularly controversial and so initially remained significantly covert: The Wagner Group was used to extend Russia’s influence country by country, deal by dirty deal, across the Sahel. Should this process continue successfully into the near future, Moscow will have flanked Europe (and so the U.S. as well) by forming a geopolitical arc of influence sweeping south through the Middle East and extending west across the whole of the Sahel that stretches from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
For this maneuver to succeed, however, the end of French neocolonialism proved crucial. To appreciate the historical significance of the impending fall of Paris’s postcolonial empire, it’s important to understand something of its tangled history—otherwise it would be hard to grasp the full import of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s extraordinary role as the man on the spot in extending Russia’s influence into Africa for the first time since the Cold War.
The Hidden History of Françafrique
As the bitter, bloody French colonial war in Algeria was winding down to defeat in 1960, President Charles de Gaulle realized that the age of empire was ending and used his enormous prestige to grant independence to 14 West African nations. Yet his move was far from altruistic. As part of his vision of France as an independent global power, he began working to create a postcolonial sphere of influence by subsuming the new nations into an exclusive French zone called Françafrique.
While de Gaulle’s visionary rhetoric inspired an independent foreign policy, his “man of the shadows,” presidential adviser Jacques Foccart, built a full-scale covert apparatus for a postcolonial imperium that became the dark underside of the grand Gaullist state. During his service under Gaullist governments from 1960 to 1997, the shadowy Foccart used the state’s clandestine agency, Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, to maintain a deft, delicate synergy between metropolitan power in France and covert control of Francophone Africa. As head of de Gaulle’s political party and architect of its secret services, he would become the key link between the French executive and Françafrique’s African leaders, whom he personally selected, befriended, and defended with covert action.
At the moment of independence in 1960, Foccart bound all of those former colonies (except Guinea) to Paris by defense agreements that granted France military bases and the right of armed intervention in each country. In the process, he also developed treaties meant to secure strategic materials (cobalt, copper, oil, and uranium) from those countries, as well as a common currency pegged to the French franc that would ensure control of their economies.
With its lucrative oil concessions and its full integration into Foccart’s network, the exemplary state in Françafrique was undoubtedly Gabon.
Under this postcolonial iteration of informal empire, French troops shuttled in and out of West Africa, conducting more than 40 military interventions between 1960 and 2002, while maintaining a permanent presence at a half-dozen military bases on the continent. Although the rest of Africa suffered 188 coup attempts from 1956 to 2001, the readiness of the French military to quash any such effort provided Françafrique with what political scientist Crawford Young called an “effective inoculation against conspiracies” and so minimized and even controlled coups. Despite vivid personality cults, systemic corruption, and state terror, French complicity in all of the above assured its African allies of an extraordinary political longevity—exemplified by Omar Bongo who ruled Gabon for more than four decades.
With its lucrative oil concessions and its full integration into Foccart’s network, the exemplary state in Françafrique was undoubtedly Gabon—an unbearably poor country of 500,000 people that was surprisingly rich in natural resources. Three years after independence in 1960, as the country’s president lay dying of cancer in a Paris hospital, Foccart picked Omar Bongo, a veteran of French intelligence with no political base, as the ailing president’s running mate in the next election. That ticket then captured 99.5% of the vote, assuring that Bongo, though still just 31 years old, would succeed the president at his death six months later.
As Gabon’s political opposition revived in 1971, Foccart’s office dispatched the infamous mercenary Bob Denard as a “technical adviser” to President Bongo. Not surprisingly, when an influential opposition leader arrived home one night from the movies, an assassin stepped from the shadows and killed him, also wounding his wife and child. His body was never recovered.
During the long years of his rule, French officials enabled Bongo’s graft, making him a principal shareholder in that country’s lucrative Elf-Total oil company and facilitating illicit payments to him—estimated at $111 million a year—that were only exposed at the 2003 corruption trial of the company’s chief executive.
When he died in 2009 after a rule of 42 years, London’s Telegraph reported that he had looted revenues from the nation’s 2.5 billion barrel oil reserve to “become one of the world’s richest men,” while elevating “corruption to a method of government.” His son Ali-Ben Bongo succeeded him as president, inheriting, along with his siblings, 39 luxury properties in France worth $190 million and a country with a third of its population living on two dollars a day.
The son continued many of his father’s policies, including ruthlessly rigging the 2016 election by enforcing a 99% turnout in key districts. In August, however, after one too many rigged elections and amid an eruption of coups across the region that marked the fading of France’s postcolonial power, Ali Bongo was finally toppled by a military coup, ending a dynasty that had lasted nearly six decades.
Advent of Moscow’s Africa Man
To challenge that French postcolonial imperium built by cunning, corruption, and covert skullduggery, Moscow needed an operative who could match Jacques Foccart’s legendary mastery of the dirty business of empire, measure for measure. And it found him in the person of Yevgeny Prigozhin, one of those quixotic, improbable adventurers who, over the past two centuries, have served as the vanguards of new forms of empire.
Who was that extraordinary individual whose personal initiative shook up the world order in Africa, establishing a Russian mercenary troop presence and ties to governments in at least seven African countries? Emerging from Soviet prisons after a 10-year term for a teenage mugging spree, Prigozhin rose, through Vladimir Putin’s patronage, from a hot-dog vendor on the streets of St. Petersburg to a millionaire caterer for Russian schools and troops.
In 2014, his Wagner group of mercenaries first appeared as the shadowy “little green men” during the Russian seizure of Crimea and then moved on to Syria where they engaged in a war of atrocities. Between conflicts, his troll army fired off disinformation barrages meant to influence the 2016 presidential elections in the United States. As French influence in the Sahel was challenged by terrorist groups, Prigozhin inserted his Wagner mercenaries into the fissures being opened by the ending of Paris’ postcolonial empire and turned those cracks into gaping holes.
Despite the oft-cited role of military power in creating and maintaining them, individuals have often emerged from the covert realm to play surprisingly significant parts in the making of the postmodern version of empire.
When in 2022, as the first year of the Ukraine war was ending with Russian troops suffering demoralizing defeats at Kharkiv and Kherson, Prigozhin expanded his Wagner Syrian and African franchises to Ukraine, fielding some 50,000 convicts as troops for Putin’s military, a force that took heavy casualties while winning the battle for the devastated Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. Instead of celebrating his victory, Progozhin was growing ever more dissatisfied with Russia’s military chiefs.
“These are Wagner lads who died today,” he shouted on camera while pointing at a pile of corpses. “Those bastards who don’t give us ammunition, we will fucking eat their guts in fucking hell!” Within weeks his war of words had escalated into open conflict in Russia itself. In late June, Wagner’s troops were suddenly on the road to Moscow—smashing through barriers, shooting down Russian aircraft, and raising doubts about Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.
Flailing desperately to survive after defying Putin and halting the advance of his troops on Moscow, Prigozhin returned to Africa, landing in his private jet at Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic where his Wagner Group has gold mines and a security contract. After a private meeting with that country’s president on August 18, he flew on to Mali and drove out into the desert where he produced what would turn out to be his last video ever. Holding an assault rifle, he proclaimed: “The Wagner PMC [private military company] makes Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa more free.” Five days later, his private jet crashed on a flight from Moscow, killing Prigozhin and everyone else on board.
Even though Prigozhin was undoubtedly assassinated (like so many of Putin’s critics), his extraordinary relationship with Africa highlights an overlooked aspect of modern empires in what still passes for the post-imperial age. Despite the oft-cited role of military power in creating and maintaining them, individuals have often emerged from the covert realm to play surprisingly significant parts in the making of the postmodern version of empire.
Instead of the gentlemen adventurers of the British imperial age, our modern analogues are usually, like Prigozhin, covert operatives, often from anything but gentlemanly backgrounds. And count on one thing: As the struggle to shape and control northern Africa continues through what will undoubtedly be countless new chapters, Prigozhin will not be the last of those extraordinary secret agents, those men on the spot, who leave their fingerprints on the crime scenes of world history.
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Russian Officials Say Wagner Mutineer Prigozhin Was Passenger in Fatal Plane Crash
Suspicions quickly turned to Russian President Vladimir Putin, with U.S. President Joe Biden saying that "there's not much that happens in Russia" without his involvement.
Aug 23, 2023
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the billionaire head of the Wagner Group mercenary firm who recently led an aborted rebellion against Russian President Vladimir Putin—an erstwhile close ally—was on the passenger list of a plane that crashed on Wednesday north of Moscow, according to Russian officials and media.
The Russian Emergencies Ministry said there were no survivors among the 10 passengers aboard the Embraer Legacy 600 private business jet, which reportedly belonged to Prigozhin and was en route from St. Petersburg to Moscow when it crashed in the Tver region more than 60 miles north of Moscow.
Rosaviation, Russia's civil aviation regulator, confirmed that Prigozhin was on the passenger list—but it remains unclear whether he was actually aboard the doomed jet.
The fate of the 61-year-old oligarch—once known as "Putin's chef" because the Russian president ate at his restaurants and contracted his catering business—has confounded observers since he led his Wagner mercenaries in a short-lived mutiny in which they captured and briefly occupied the city of Rostov-on-Don in June.
Prigozhin then ordered his men to march on Moscow to seek "revenge," accusing Russian military leaders of killing his troops during the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Wagner forces played a critical role in Russia's battlefield successes and suffered heavy losses—especially among prisoners who volunteered to fight in exchange for their freedom.
In a deal brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko—a close Putin ally who has allowed Russian troops to invade Ukraine from his country—Prigozhin called off his coup attempt in exchange for safe passage to Belarus. However, Lukashenko said last month that Prigozhin and thousands of his fighters were still in Russia, while brushing off speculation that Putin would try to assassinate him.
"If you think Putin is so malicious and vindictive that he will wipe him out tomorrow... no, this will not happen," Lukashenko said at the time.
Earlier this week, Prigozhin published his first recruitment video since the mutiny, seeking soldiers of fortune to fight in African conflicts, including in Mali—where Wagner fighters, along with U.S.-backed government forces, are accused of committing widespread atrocities.
While the cause of Wednesday's plane crash remains unknown for now, speculation and suspicion of Putin's involvement came quickly, as the president vowed to severely punish what he called Wagner's "internal betrayal" and a "stab in the back of our country and our people."
U.S. President Joe Biden—a staunch supporter of Ukraine's defense against Russia's invasion—told reporters after the crash that "there's not much that happens in Russia that Putin's not behind."
"But I don't know enough to know the answer," he added. "I've been working out for the last hour-and-a-half."
Numerous prominent Putin opponents have suffered mysterious and usually fatal poisonings, falls, and shootings over the years.
In a 2018 interview, Putin was asked if he knew how to forgive. "Yes, but not everything," the Russian leader replied. When asked what he could not forgive, Putin answered with one word: "Betrayal."
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Does Aborted Mutiny Spell the End for Putin?
Putin is scrambling to reassert his power and rescue his image, but the future is anything but assured.
Jun 30, 2023
The former hotdog salesman rose about as high as he could. He became a caterer to the Russian elite and a confidante of the president. He led his country’s premier paramilitary force. He was one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs.
And then he overreached.
Yevgeny Prigozhin now says that he had no intention of overthrowing Russian President Vladimir Putin. That’s a surprise.
Here’s a man who made no secret of his disgust for the Russian military leadership and, by extension, the Russian government. Last weekend, he gathered several thousand of his Wagner Group mercenaries, plus a minor army’s worth of heavy-duty equipment, and took effective control of two major Russian cities: Rostov and Voronezh. On his march to Moscow, his forces shot down six helicopters and a plane, but otherwise encountered few obstacles.
Surely, Prigozhin didn’t expect to seize control of the Kremlin with such a relatively small force. According to his telling, he just wanted to force a shake-up in the Russian military, starting with the ouster of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
More likely, he expected that enough members of the political and military elite would side with him against Putin that he could orchestrate a bloodless coup. He had reason to believe that people were on his side. Ordinary residents of Rostov cheered his presence. Russian soldiers at various points on the way to Moscow let the Wagner units pass unhindered. The reports that Sergei Surovikin, a senior Russian general, might have helped plan the coup are probably not accurate, given that Surovikin early on condemned Prigozhin’s moves and ordered air strikes against the approaching column of Wagner troops.
Indeed, as the example of Surovikin demonstrates, the big boys did not abandon Putin, even though Putin himself apparently abandoned Moscow at the first signs of a fight. Without support from the inside and still a good way from Moscow, Prigozhin realized that he and his troops would soon be dangerously exposed. Taking the Kremlin would not be like taking Rostov.
Meanwhile, Putin was negotiating with fellow despot Aleksandr Lukashenko, the leader of neighboring Belarus, to craft a deal. If Prigozhin called off his coup, the Russian government would withdraw criminal charges against him, allow him to decamp to Belarus, and absorb all willing members of the Wagner Group into the Russian army. Prigozhin seized on this opportunity to recast his putsch as a patriotic effort to save Russia from its incompetent military. This, after all, was a theme he’d been pushing for months.
History does not look kindly on the hesitant usurper. For his part, Putin has punished lesser cases of treason with extrajudicial murder, so Prigozhin is probably wondering right now whether this deal is going to endure.
But it is Putin who must now be worrying about the future. Uneasy indeed lies the head that wears a crown, especially when there are other potential Macbeths afoot.
Why a Coup and Why Now?
Prigozhin was backed into a corner. Earlier in June, Shoigu announced that all paramilitary formations like the Wagner Group would have to sign direct contracts with the Russian military beginning July 1. That would have put Prigozhin under the thumb of the man he detested most. Even when Putin pushed the new regulation, the head of the Wagner Group continued to push back.
That’s when, according to Prigozhin, the Russian military ordered a missile strike against the Wagner Group. “We were ready to make concessions to the defense ministry, to surrender our weapons, to find a solution on how we would continue to defend the country. But these scumbags did not calm down,” Prigozhin said in a video. “We have 25,000 (soldiers), and we’re going to figure out why there’s chaos in the country. Everyone, who is willing, join us.”
The alleged missile strike was only the latest provocation. Earlier in the year, Prigozhin had to deal with the replacement of Surovikin, a close ally, as the top commander in charge of operations in Ukraine. Then he faced a cut-off in his chief supply of recruits when he no longer could tap into the Russian prison system. His lucrative military catering contracts—worth a cool billion dollars over the last year alone— were also at risk because of new supplier regulations. And Prigozhin believed that his Wagner Group had been undersupplied in its effort to seize the ravaged Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
To call Prigozhin unpredictable and impulsive would be an understatement. This is a guy who, according to the Discord leaks, was willing to give Ukraine the locations of Russian military positions if Ukrainian commanders pulled out of Bakhmut, where the Wagner Group was fighting and dying for the tiniest scraps of territory. It’s extraordinary that he maintained better relations with Ukrainian intelligence during the war than with the Russian military.
But Prigozhin is also a canny operator. He couldn’t have risen so high in the informal hierarchy around Putin if he didn’t know how to negotiate the turbulent tides of power. Given how he was being boxed in, he must have felt that he had to go big or go home. And Prigozhin is no homebody.
After the Shoigu announcement, Prigozhin began to stockpile weapons. His first plan was reportedly to kidnap top Russian military officials on their visit to southern Russia. When that plan was leaked, Prigozhin developed the alternative of seizing Rostov and marching on Moscow.
Even though the Kremlin knew of the initial kidnapping plan, it failed to anticipate Prigozhin’s next moves. According to CNN:
Multiple sources told CNN that US and Western officials believe that Putin was simply caught off guard by Prigozhin’s actions and did not have time to array his forces against the Wagner mercenaries before they managed to seize control of the military headquarters in Rostov. Putin also likely did not want to divert significant resources away from Ukraine, officials said.
In other words, the same miscalculations that plagued the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year have continued. Putin the autocrat is making decisions based on limited information and wishful thinking, and no one is courageous enough to contradict him. Only someone as crazy as Prigozhin was willing to speak his mind, and now he’s presumably on his way to Belarus. After this latest coup attempt, Putin will only be more paranoid and imperious.
What’s Next for Putin?
Putin is scrambling to reassert his power and rescue his image. In a speech this week after the mutiny fizzled, he emphasized the defense of the Fatherland, blamed the West, didn’t mention Prigozhin, and offered Wagner troops a choice of returning home, joining the Russian army, or relocating to Belarus.
What future does Putin face? Here are three possible scenarios:
The Status Quo Holds
Putin is 70 years old. He seems in good shape. He could hang onto power for another decade. He commands the loyalty of the siloviki, the “hard men” of the intelligence services that have formed the core of his support for decades. He has destroyed all left-wing or centrist challenges to his authority. Critics are in jail or in exile.
In this scenario, the economy falters but doesn’t collapse. The war in Ukraine grinds to a virtual halt, and Putin consolidates his territorial gains, even if the incorporation of the Donbas, Crimea, and the lands in between fails to win international recognition. He eventually passes on the scepter to a loyal lieutenant, like former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. His other trusted advisors, like intelligence chiefs Nikolai Patrushev and Alexander Bortnikov, are also in their early 70s. The best strategy in this situation: wait until this “Putin generation” passes away.
Ukraine Wins, Putin Loses
Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive has run up against Russian fortifications, particularly landmines. But perhaps, after finding a couple weaknesses in the Russian defenses, the Ukrainian army manages to break through. Meanwhile, anti-Putin forces escalate their attacks within Russia itself. Russian occupation forces, caught in the middle, turn tail.
That’s when history repeats and Russian soldiers stream back into the country, as they did in 1917, and demand accountability and change. Putin tries to put a positive spin on the obvious defeat of Russian forces—“We need all hands on deck to defend the Fatherland against the immoral West.” But like the boy who cried “Wolf!” Putin has cried “West!” too many times to be effective. His formerly loyal advisors decide that he is a liability. Putin goes down in what amounts to a palace coup.
Cue the Milosevic tape: Medvedev or someone like him abruptly pivots to put all the blame on Putin. The new Russian government delivers the former president to the International Criminal Court in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. The West pretends that the new nationalists in charge were not also responsible for war crimes.
Military Stalemate, Putin Overthrown
Only in this last case does the Wagner mutiny have any lasting impact. Here, the war in Ukraine turns into a stalemate, and Russia’s political and economic elite continues to question Putin’s ability to lead the nation.
But the loudest critics come from the far right, groups like the Club of Angry Patriots. One of the most prominent figures associated with the Club is former security operative and current military blogger Igor Girkin, who predicted some weeks ago that the Wagner Group would try to overthrow Putin. These far-right voices demand that Putin wage all-out war against Ukraine. If he doesn’t, they want him to step aside. “He’s never seen a tank except in a parade, what’s wrong with his head?” Girkin said of Putin. “He’s really acting not even like an old man, but like a child.”
Russia’s far right is not exactly unified. But it could fill the role of the Bolsheviks in a successful 2023 coup that mobilizes insider support with enough street violence to send Putin packing (perhaps to Belarus where he can collaborate once again with Prigozhin on a new catering business).
Girkin plays Prigozhin in this sequel to The Wagner Mutiny. But his performance is more convincing. Russia goes from crypto-fascist to overtly fascist. Girkin with nuclear weapons? Perish the thought; perish the world.
An Own Goal?
Putin has been in charge of Russia for more than two decades. He has made himself into the country’s indispensable leader by eliminating all potential challengers. But just as Prigozhin overreached with his thwarted mutiny, Putin overreached with his thwarted invasion of Ukraine. That ghastly mistake, an attack that has somehow landed the ball in Putin’s own net, has set into motion developments that Putin cannot entirely control. He could manage to hang on, but at a huge cost. Indeed, the current Russian leader seems determined to win his long-shot bet that he can revive the Russian empire—or, failing that, bring the entire country down with him.
Regime collapse? No one, least of all the U.S. government, wants a Russian civil war that puts all those nuclear weapons up for grabs.
Regime change? Not with options like Yevgeny Prigozhin and Igor Girkin waiting in the wings.
Regime continuity? The best scenario would be a relatively stable Russia that is so preoccupied with its own domestic problems that it no longer has the bandwidth to project power abroad. Ideally, such a government wouldn’t be saddled with Putin. But there are, unfortunately, worse options.
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