TWO DECADES in the past Yevgeny Prigozhin, the violent ex-convict and restaurateur who heads Wagner, a Russian mercenary group, printed an illustrated fairy story that he had written along with his two kids. The story considerations a band of mates who rescue an uncontrollably shrinking king by blowing a magic flute. At first he grows too quick, smashing a gap within the palace ceiling, earlier than they create him again right down to measurement. “It is a very dangerous toy,” says the king, who takes away the flute.

Mr Prigozhin, a crony of Vladimir Putin, lengthy helped inflate the Russian president, for instance by operating pro-Kremlin troll farms. Now he has lower him right down to measurement. Last month his troopers seized a navy headquarters within the southern metropolis of Rostov-on-Don and drove in the direction of Moscow, downing a number of helicopters and a aircraft alongside the best way. Mr Prigozhin mentioned his “march of justice” was meant to take away Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the pinnacle of the military, or to reverse their determination to combine Wagner into Russia’s common forces. But he added populist anti-corruption slogans borrowed from Alexei Navalny, Russia’s foremost opposition chief, pledging to purge Russia of its thieving elite. The failure of safety companies to assault the Wagner troops and Mr Putin’s bewildered efficiency throughout a tv look have gravely undermined the Kremlin’s authority.

Under Russian regulation Mr Prigozhin ought to face jail phrases of between 12 years and life for mutiny, recruiting mercenaries, unlawful arms buying and selling and murder as a part of an organised group. According to the unwritten guidelines of Mr Putin’s mafia state he ought to in all probability be lifeless. Instead, on June twenty ninth, 5 days after Mr Putin vowed on TV to crush the revolt, he met Mr Prigozhin and his high commanders within the Kremlin. He regretted that they’d acquired blended up in a mutiny and provided to allow them to preserve serving underneath a brand new commander. The intention was to point out that he nonetheless had full management over the state of affairs.

Nobody has been charged with the deaths of some 13 pilots downed by Wagner. Mr Putin just lately denied the group existed (having admitted two weeks earlier that it had been financed by the state). Mr Prigozhin’s whereabouts are unknown. State tv bashes him, however whereas some web sites linked to him have been censored, a lot of his Telegram channels proceed to function. Senior navy officers near Mr Prigozhin, together with General Sergei Surovikin (as soon as accountable for the invasion of Ukraine), are reported to have been detained and questioned. Television reveals Wagner arms being taken over by the military and its fighters transferring to Belarus. But as Novaya Gazeta, an impartial Russian newspaper, writes, it’s too early to put in writing off the “chef”.

Whatever occurs to Mr Prigozhin, his mutiny has revealed the erosion of the state and the flimsiness of Mr Putin’s assist base. His dictatorship has thus far relied much less on mass purges than a consensus between energy teams. His political opponents have ended up in jail (like Mr Navalny) or exile. Meanwhile he has sowed rivalries between his loyalists, making himself their arbiter. To forestall a palace coup he prevented consolidation within the military and safety companies and created parallel buildings similar to Wagner.

This labored in peacetime however faltered underneath the stress of struggle. Mr Prigozhin’s mutiny was not an under-the-carpet factional squabble however a public cut up inside Mr Putin’s “pro-war” constituency. On one facet stands the conformist elite, making an attempt to maintain up a pretence of regular life. On the opposite is a gaggle of offended navy patriots, most prominently Mr Prigozhin. Most worryingly for Mr Putin, the military itself appears cut up.

The public is watching: the Levada Centre, an impartial pollster, discovered that 92% of Russians adopted the coup to some extent. Almost half sympathised with Mr Prigozhin’s criticisms of corruption, navy incompetence and lies concerning the struggle, although solely 22% trusted the Wagner boss himself. In the absence of different crucial voices, Mr Prigozhin attracted consideration past his audience of navy patriots. Many of the sympathisers didn’t assist both facet, mentioned Denis Volkov, a sociologist at Levada, however “stocked up on popcorn” for the battle between “a toad and a viper” .

The mutiny additionally confirmed that Telegram, and Mr Prigozhin’s community of trolls and bloggers on it, have eroded the Kremlin’s monopoly over info, significantly amongst younger individuals. While tv propagandists awaited directions from the Kremlin, the mutiny unfolded on-line. Less than 1 / 4 of younger Russians belief TV. Mr Putin staged a parade of uniformed males within the Kremlin, praising them merely for not becoming a member of the mutiny, and flew to Dagestan, a Muslim area within the Caucasus, for a present of adoration from his topics there. An eight-year-old who supposedly cried as a result of she didn’t get to see the president was flown to the Kremlin and introduced with 5bn roubles ($55m) for Dagestan’s wants.

“While it might look like Putin has successfully dealt with the uprising’s fallout… the strain on the system remains,” wrote Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia-Eurasia Centre, a think-tank in Berlin. The absence of public retribution towards high-ranking navy officers who sided with Mr Prigozhin, and the reward showered on safety companies, which did not forestall it, means that Mr Putin is simply too nervous that purges may create rifts within the military to guard his strongman picture.

New cracks appeared on July thirteenth. Major-General Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th combined-arms military, one of many nation’s largest and most succesful models, went public after being fired for telling his superiors what was occurring on the entrance: big losses, insufficient rotation and inferior counter-artillery capabilities. “The forces of Ukraine could not break through our army from the front, but our senior commander hit us from the rear,” Mr Popov mentioned in an audio message that was posted on-line. Mr Popov’s insubordination made a giant impression on pro-war bloggers. Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, a former intelligence officer who led Russia’s incursion in Donbas in 2014, wrote that an uncontrolled disintegration of the military was “just a stone’s throw away”.

What occurs subsequent is determined by the battlefield. The bombing of the Kerch street bridge that connects Russia to Crimea, which Russia attributed to Ukrainian naval drones, was one other blow. Mr Putin maintains that Ukraine has failed to attain any progress in its counter-offensive. Russian commanders have defended towards Ukraine’s counter-offensive nicely forward of ready fortifications, as an alternative of falling again to defensive positions established by Mr Surovikin—at a major value to the Russian forces. This slows the Ukrainians’ progress, but when they handle to interrupt by way of, it may have a higher impact on the Kremlin’s political energy. As one overseas navy official put it: “It is like hitting a brick wall with a sledgehammer. If it crumbles, there may not be much behind it.”

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