And most remarkably, Putin had to call on Prigozhin’s ally Kadyrov to defend the capital, before striking a compromise with Lukashenko that dropped all charges against the mutineers. It appears that Russia’s regular military sat on its hands and let Prigozhin send a message to Putin.

    The ultra-nationalist “Great Russia” current in Moscow thinks Putin is soft on the West. Putin petitioned then-president Bill Clinton in 2000 for Russia to join NATO, and was refused; he obtained a pledge from Washington not to intervene in Ukraine, which the Bush administration violated when it sponsored the 2004 Orange Revolution.

    And he struck a deal with former German chancellor Angela Merkel to guarantee the safety and rights of Ukraine’s Russophone minority through the Minsk II agreement, which Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky repudiated in 2022 with Anglo-American backing.

    The Prigozhin mutiny now makes Putin dependent on Russia’s extreme right. If he is overthrown, his successor will not be a liberal democrat of the sort that Washington dreams about, but rather a Russian nationalist bent on absolute victory in Ukraine, likely even if it requires the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

    There is no liberal current of importance in Russia. But the ruling Russian elite is gestating a powerful group of right-wing nationalists, who dream of a revived “Great Russia.” Ominously, this current is coalescing from several disparate groups.

It includes Liberal-Democratic Party leader Leonid Slutsky, the “Eurasianist” philosopher Alexander Dugin, the popular TV anchors Vladimir Solovyev and Dimitri Dibrov, Chechen leader Kadyrov, the Moscow Patriarchate’s television channel SPAS and the neo-Czarist Union of the Russian people.

    It also includes former Russian flag officers forcibly retired by Putin and Wagner boss Prigozhin, who have grumbled about Putin’s military timidity and the poor performance of his hand-picked commanders. What holds together this motley coalition is one idea, that Russia must defeat Ukraine at any price, and that the war can only end with victory at the western borders of the former Soviet Union.

    The potential the use of Russia’s 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which start at 1 kiloton, is not a matter of mere media speculation. The most prominent mouthpieces of “Great Russia” nationalism are demanding their deployment.

    The ultra-nationalist hydra has many heads but one has a louder voice than the others, the self-described “red Nazi” Dugin. In a viral March 2023 post on Telegram, Dugin demanded a general mobilization of all Russian military manpower, militarization of the economy, internment of war opponents and the use of tactical nuclear weapons if other measures do not succeed.

    Dugin suggested “doing everything” to avoid the use of “non-strategic nuclear weapons” but using them if necessary. Russia should also “be ready to use strategic nuclear weapons,” Dugin declared. Dugin’s daughter died in August 2022 when a bomb destroyed the car that she was traveling in, which was possibly meant for Dugin himself.

    A self-proclaimed disciple of Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, Dugin has denounced Putin for putting the Russian polity ahead of the “Russky Mir,” or Russianness. “He puts the Russian state first, while I think from Russky Mir. This Russian world is much wider than the Russian state. Putin desecrates Russian identity, and in doing so, he has disappointed many patriots,” the ideologue told a Dutch newspaper in 2018.

    Russia’s war with Ukraine, for all practical purposes, is a war between the Russian Federation and NATO. Russia is fighting an army of Ukrainians armed, trained and paid by the United States and other NATO countries. The sanctions against Russia, including the unprecedented seizure of about US$500 billion of its foreign exchange reserves absent a full declaration of war, were designed to crush Russia’s capacity to fight.

    All important currents of Russian opinion believe that the Western objective in this war is to force regime change in Russia and, potentially, splinter the ethnically diverse and geographically far-flung Russian Federation itself.

    The Russians aren’t paranoid on the matter. Regime change in Russia has been on the agenda of some senior Biden administration officials for a decade. 

    As Undersecretary of State Nuland, then-head of the State Department’s Eastern European desk, told a Congressional committee on May 6, 2014: “Since 1992, we have provided $20 billion to Russia to support the pursuit of transition to the peaceful, prosperous, democratic state its people deserve.” The same theme is repeated dutifully at major Washington think tanks and the editorial pages of the mainstream press.

    There is no effective democratic opposition in waiting to the present Russian regime. Before 2022, the putative democrat Alexei Navalny had the support of a few pockets of opinion.

    Even before the Ukraine invasion, though, Russia’s security services forced most of Navalny’s supporters to emigrate or threw them in jail. Another wave of immigration followed the February 24, 2022 invasion, effectively clearing the landscape of any liberal opposition.

    Putin’s most probable policy response to the mutiny and its temporary resolution will be to augment the mobilization of Russian manpower, coopting a key element of Dugin’s program. This is all the more likely after the Ukraine government announced on June 19 more stringent mobilization standards in several oblasts, starting with Kiev.