Mercenary Uprising
“Stay or flee?” – Muscovites worried
Barrier in front of Red Square, police officers are behind them. photo
© Hannah Wagner/dpa
For a day Moscow is threatened by a storm of mercenaries – until the revolt of the Wagner troops is surprisingly called off again. Many residents of Moscow seem relaxed, but in private conversations concern breaks out.
At first glance, Moscow seems almost unreally normal. Even during the hours when mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is threatening to march on the capital, people are strolling through the Alexander Garden at the Kremlin, coffee in hand and dog on a leash. The sun is shining. The air is a little muggy. Folk music blares from loudspeakers. By this time on Saturday evening, Prigozhin’s fighters are already halfway from Rostov-on-Don to the capital.
Officially, Moscow is still in emergency mode on Sunday and will remain so – even after Prigoshin surprisingly declared the march on Moscow to be over in the evening. The anti-terror emergency for the metropolis with more than 13 million inhabitants and the surrounding area continues to apply. State institutions are under special protection. In the meantime, a checkpoint was quickly set up on the ring road – a video shows soldiers, an infantry fighting vehicle and sandbags. Traffic between Moscow and Rostov will also remain restricted on Sunday.
Changes are also noticeable near the Kremlin if you take a closer look. Nothing can be seen of the tanks that rolled through the streets here on Saturday night. But in front of the State Duma there are more heavily armed and masked soldiers patrolling than usual. Barriers everywhere. And last but not least: Red Square is closed to visitors – and will remain so after the Prigozhin spook is officially over.
“Now we’ve come here specially,” sighs a woman on Saturday, when the dangerous situation has not yet been averted. She is standing with a group of tourists in front of the locked entrance to the world-famous square where St. Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s Mausoleum are located.
A married couple with a small son is also disappointed. The three come from Rostov – of all places, the city 1,000 kilometers to the south where Prigozhin’s men started their uprising. The man says his small family left just in time for their vacation on Friday. Then he laughs briefly: “What luck.” Is he afraid of returning in a few weeks? Not particularly, he replies. “Hopefully everything will be calmer by then.”
Not everyone is optimistic
However, not everyone is so optimistic here. At an ice cream stand next to the police line, three saleswomen in dark red overalls are whispering excitedly to one another. Once “Shoigu” is heard – the surname of Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, who Prigozhin declared a kind of archenemy.
As customers approach, the women immediately fall silent. When asked how they assess the situation, they answer taciturnly and with a suspicious look. “It’s terrible,” says one. She doesn’t know what to believe, after all, you read so much on social networks. As she looks for the change, the clerk adds: “I don’t know what to do: stay or flee?”
Young Muscovites, in particular, who consume critical and foreign media, are agitated in these hours of uncertainty. “I’m afraid that the war will eventually come to us,” wrote a 26-year-old in a private chat, referring to the war of aggression that Russia has been waging against Ukraine for the past 16 months.
Another young woman says she fears a possible state of war could now be imposed. She supports neither the Wagner fighters nor the regular army – but in the event of a civil war she clearly hopes that Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin will be defeated.
A 21-year-old student, on the other hand, writes: “Some people are talking about the beginning of a civil war in Russia. But I think that the real civil war is not taking place on the streets, but in people’s minds. Either we consciously renounce being an empire – or not. And if not, then even a military coup will not help us.”