Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
There was understandable glee in Kyiv when news broke that the Kremlin was turning on the self-styled Club of Angry Patriots — the ultranationalists who, for months, have been decrying Russia’s war effort as too soft and castigating the country’s top generals for ineptness.
But given the bigger picture, the excitement may prove premature.
Among the ultranationalists, the sinister Igor Girkin was the first to be targeted. A former Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence officer who goes by the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov, Girkin was arrested last week for “public incitement of extremist activity.” He appears to have crossed the line by telling his 800,000 Telegram subscribers that Russia “won’t survive another six years with this talentless coward in power.” And more importantly, he appeared to be developing political ambitions.
Girkin played a key role in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 — as well as the war in Donbas —organizing the rabble of misfits, cranks, hooligans and drunks who comprised the Moscow-backed separatist forces before Russia’s marginally more disciplined “little green men” arrived. And last year, he was found guilty in absentia by a court in The Hague for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, which left all 298 people on board dead.
I had met him in Sloviansk, a rust belt industrial town on a tributary of the Donets River, around the time American journalist Simon Ostrovsky was abducted and roughed up for “not reporting in a correct way.” Girkin was an incongruous figure — his delicate features and Proustian mustache seemingly at odds with the thugs he commanded, as well as his own tight-lipped menace and fearsome background as a veteran of several Kremlin military interventions.
But it’s not just Girkin — other ultranationalists have been ensnared too. Vladimir Kvachkov, a retired colonel with the Russian military intelligence service GRU, has been charged with discrediting the Russian army. Also, last week, Russian authorities arrested former FSB officer Colonel Mikhail Polyakov.
Along with this trio of ultranationalists, the Kremlin’s attention has been focused on generals as well, and at least 13 high-ranking military officers have reportedly been fired, detained or questioned in the wake of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny three weeks ago.
According to Telegram channels close to Russia’s security services, General Vladimir Seliverstov, the commander of the 106th Airborne Division, was the latest to be dismissed by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The day before, it was Commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army Major General Ivan Popov, apparently fired for complaining about military missteps. And, of course, we still haven’t heard from “General Armageddon” Sergei Surovikin, commander-in-chief of the Aerospace Forces and one of Russia’s more tactically skilled officers — albeit a ruthless one.
“The more showdowns, interrogations, arrests, the more interesting it is to watch this process,” said Andrii Yusov, a Ukrainian military intelligence spokesman. “The residents of the Kremlin towers are entering an active phase of internal confrontation.” He and other Ukrainian officials like to speak of “spiders eating each other in a jar.”
Western and Ukrainian officials say that all this upheaval reflects disarray and panic as the Kremlin tries to work out who’s loyal and who’s treacherous. And Putin’s foes fervently hope this is the endgame — that things are falling apart.
But are they?
For all the talk of purges, there’s been no mass repression of ultranationalists, army personnel or security officials. The jails aren’t filling up with them — they’re brimming with pro-democracy opposition leaders and anti-war activists instead. And while some overexcited headline writers have been comparing the post-mutiny upheaval in Moscow to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 — when Hitler turned on the Sturmabteilung leadership — they seem to forget that Hitler’s purge left an estimated 700 to 1,000 dead.
Andrey Illarionov, a senior Kremlin policy adviser until he broke with Putin in 2005, wishes everything was indeed falling apart — but he doesn’t think it is. And he’s worried that “Putin is even stronger” than he was before Prigozhin’s aborted mutiny.
What Illarionov sees now is simply an adjustment — the “system” that’s presided over Russia for a quarter-century is in fact working according to design. And he takes issue with British intelligence chief Richard Moore’s view that the Russian president had to cut a “humiliating” deal and leave Prigozhin unpunished to “save his skin.”
A fervent Putin critic, Illarionov noted that there’s a major misunderstanding in the West about power in Russia — about how it is wielded and who wields it. “It is a different type of system than many in the West believe, even some of my fellow Russian opposition leaders. They think of it is a one-man show, a personal dictatorship. They all look at this from [the] outside, but I was inside, and I see it differently,” he told POLITICO.
“It is a corporation of serving and former security officers — the siloviki — and they enjoya broad degree of freedom, but up to a certain limit. They have a very special relationship with each other, even when they’re quarreling. They follow particular protocols, and they have a code of order — a code of behavior to ensure disputes don’t get out of hand. Only those who break the protocol get punished, like Alexander Litvinenko. And like Girkin right now,” Illarionov said. Girkin’s real offense wasn’t his open criticism, it was his political ambitions and the fact that he formed his club of angry patriots.
Admittedly, these protocols didn’t prevent the dispute between Prigozhin and Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov from momentarily getting out of hand. But Illarionov emphasized the word “mutiny,” avoiding describing the paramilitary leader’s self-styled “march for justice” as an insurrection or rebellion. “That’s when you saw Putin panic for a day and threaten to punish Prigozhin and Wagner,” he said.
But then the protocols kicked in, preventing the mutiny from developing into something much bigger and more dangerous. In the end, the corporation sorted it out. And Illarionov predicts many of the generals now being questioned will soon reappear, and that there won’t be any wholesale repression of the ultranatioanlists — just an insistence that they play within the rules, observe the codes of behavior and tone down their criticisms. In short, the siloviki are carefully shoring up their system.
Illarionov’s take isn’t that different from Russian political expert Tatiana Stanovaya. “This is a moment many within the siloviki have eagerly awaited. Strelkov had overstepped all conceivable boundaries a long time ago, sparking the desire among security forces — from the FSB to military chiefs — to apprehend him,” she wrote on Telegram.
When it comes to ultranationalists, she argued, “it’s unlikely that there will be massive repressions against ‘angry patriots,’ but the most vehement dissenters may face prosecution, serving as a cautionary tale for others.”
And noticeably, despite these sackings and arrests, Russia’s defenses are holding as Ukraine’s counteroffensive continues to make disappointing progress. After nearly two months of fighting, Ukraine’s made no significant breakthrough in the south, where Kyiv had hoped to see more progress in its bid to sever the so-called land bridge connecting the annexed Crimean isthmus and southern Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian forces. Moreover, Russia has launched its own counteroffensive further north around Kupyansk and Kreminna, where it has reportedly made some marginal gains.
Thus, as of yet, Prigozhin’s mutiny and the subsequent shake-up in Moscow hasn’t paid any dividends for Ukraine on the battlefield.
“Remember Putin’s speech in December 1999,” Illarionov counseled, referencing the Russian leader’s address to senior intelligence officers at the FSB’s Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow. “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished,” Putin had declared to chuckles from his fellow spooks. And, he added, “the siloviki have no intention of relaxing their grip on the Russian state.”