Russia's Apparent Coup Attempt: What Just Happened?

On the twenty-third of June, 2023, a Russian paramilitary organization known as the Wagner Group did the unthinkable. After well over a year’s faithful service to President Vladimir Putin during Russia’s war of expansion in Ukraine, the Wagner Group, led by its commander Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced that it would march on Moscow. The reason, said Prigozhin, was an alleged airstrike by the Russian military on Wagner Group fighters, a long-awaited explosion of tensions that had simmered between the Wagner Group and Russia’s Ministry of Defense for months.

In retaliation, Wagner would begin an armed conflict against the Russian MOD, and thus the whole of the Russian military, in a battle for control of the nation. But in the following thirty-six hours, Russia’s coup attempt took more twists and turns than a season of Black Mirror. From an initial explosion across the Rostov region of Russia, to a very real march on Moscow that forced the entire city to ready for war, to a truly unexpected ending that saw Putin and Prigozhin seem to reach some sort of deal, the coup’s entire birth and death took place in less than two days.

In its wake, rumors abound as to what this could mean for the Russian war in Ukraine, what might happen to Prigozhin and his Wagner Group, and whether even Vladimir Putin’s own future might be in jeopardy.

Rising Tensions Between Wagner and Russia’s Ministry of Defense

A little over a year before the coup attempt, Russia attacked Ukraine in a full-scale invasion that rocked the geopolitical balance of the entire world. But Russia had had its sights set on Ukraine for a long time before it marched on Kyiv on the 24th of February, 2022. Several years earlier, in 2014, Russia had seized and annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, and in the intervening years, they supported a long, low-grade insurgency in Ukraine’s Donbas region, far in the eastern reaches of the country.

And since those early days, the private military company known as the Wagner Group has been a critical part of Russia’s approach to conquering Ukraine. In the early days, Wagner was a rather small organization, made up of some five-thousand-or-so fighters, mostly veterans who had served as part of Russia’s elite military regiments and special forces. They also maintained a presence in African countries like Sudan and the Central African Republic, and in both Syria and Libya during the civil wars there, where they gained a reputation for torture, indiscriminate killing of civilians, and a long list of war crimes.

These are a group with deep roots in neo-Nazi ideology, and they’ve allegedly carried out some pretty horrific acts not just in Africa and the Middle East, but in the Donbas region of Ukraine and in Crimea. There, known as “little green men” for their unmarked green army uniforms, the Wagner Group helped to train and support pro-Russian separatist forces, while rooting out or even assassinating rogue separatists who wanted to form a new nation independent from Russia. In the following years, the Wagner Group swelled in size, to the point that they are believed to operate in at least thirty countries around the world.

For Russia, they are an incredibly convenient asset to have, a powerful military group that can operate anywhere with impunity, and give Russia enough plausible deniability that anyone around the world who accuses Russia of using Wagner as a proxy force doesn’t have quite enough proof to get the world to respond. After all, paramilitary companies aren’t even legal in Russia, so of course Putin wouldn’t be giving them orders. Since 2014, the Wagner army has grown in size ten times over, with modern estimates suggesting that as many as fifty thousand soldiers might fill their ranks.

Prigozhin’s Rise from Putin’s Chef to Paramilitary Commander

When it came time for Russia to conduct its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they were more than happy to welcome Wagner to the mission; after all, these are troops who had been getting real combat experience around the world, and easily outclassed the conscripts who would come to fill the Russian ranks. And just as important as it is to understand Wagner is understanding their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. In his early days, Prigozhin was about the last person anyone would expect to grow up and become Vladimir Putin’s right-hand henchman; he spent the 1980s in prison after a series of robberies, and after he got out, he grew a small hot-dog stand in Leningrad into a catering and grocery store business, even feeding dinner to George W.

Bush in 2002. But even though he met Putin when he was a mere caterer, Prigozhin ended up providing his services to Russia’s armed forces, growing closer and closer to Putin until he became a political fixer, earning himself the nickname “Putin’s Chef.” Now an oligarch himself, Prigozhin claims to have been the person who founded the Wagner Group, and he oversaw its expansion from a modest private militia into a booming paramilitary force.

Once Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started to seem as if it would be a much longer, more drawn-out conflict, rather than the one-way steamrolling Vladimir Putin drew it up to be, Prigozhin and his forces quickly became indispensable to the war effort. Many of Russia’s experienced combat troops were killed or wounded in the early months of battle, leaving a vacuum of expertise and manpower that Wagner stepped in to fill. Beginning in July of 2022, Wagner operated an amnesty program in which Russian prisoners could join their ranks, serving for six months and receiving pay and legal amnesty if they survived.

These convicts were then used as expendable troops in massive wave attacks, which the Wagner Group orchestrated and carried out in towns like Bakhmut, Soledar, and other parts of the Donbas region. But even though the Wagner Group’s cheap, relatively expendable troops have been a big help to Russia, Wagner also means that the Russian invasion has been split between two armies, each answering to different people: Yevgeny Prigozhin, for Wagner, and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, for the formal Russian military. Prigozhin and Shoigu do not like each other.

Prigozhin has been a frequent and forceful critic of Shoigu and other members of Russia’s military elite, calling them lazy, corrupt, ineffectual, reckless, and disrespectful. Shoigu’s critiques against Prigozhin have not been as public, but most Western analysts suspect they have to do with Prigozhin’s informal influence on Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, and Wagner’s tendency to entice elite Russian troops to quit their jobs and go earn more in “private practice.”

Putin’s Divide-and-Rule Strategy Begins to Fracture

Relations between Prigozhin and Shoigu really began to fray during Russia’s operations in the small city of Bakhmut, which Prigozhin appeared to try and make into a showcase for Wagner’s effectiveness compared to Russia’s conscript army, while Shoigu and his allies were left to help pick up the pieces once the battle devolved into a months-long slog for no strategic gain. But no matter their disagreements with each other, it is very important to note that neither Shoigu nor Prigozhin directed any of their frustrations against the person who put their forces in Bakhmut to begin with, Vladimir Putin—and that is by design. Historically speaking, this conflict between his top officials is precisely what Vladimir Putin wants.

Far from being a sign of inefficiency, most foreign analysts believe that Putin views this discord between his subordinates as a good thing, a way to keep all parties in check by having them fight against each other instead of challenging Putin himself. Not only does the distrust between Shoigu and Prigozhin keep both of them too busy to move against Putin, but it keeps them from working together in order to do so. Putin has a long history of manipulating his underlings in this way, and it has long been believed that he will actively foment animosity between them, if they start getting too friendly with each other.

But in the months before the coup, there was increased speculation that Putin might be losing control. In early 2023, Prigozhin began to accuse the Ministry of Defense of actively undermining his forces, withholding ammunition and forcing Wagner fighters into the most dangerous mission roles. Prigozhin began to make increasingly unhinged, public posts to the social media app Telegram, at one point ranting against Shoigu while surrounded by the bodies of dead Wagner soldiers.

These tensions reached a boiling point on June 10, when Sergei Shoigu released his response: an order that so-called “volunteer formations,” meaning private military companies like Wagner, would be required to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense, thus subordinating themselves to Shoigu’s and Putin’s direct command. Prigozhin reacted with immediate hostility, but this time, something was different: Vladimir Putin picked a side. According to Putin, Shoigu’s decree was “in line with common sense”—meaning that if Prigozhin didn’t like it, he was out of luck.

The Wagner Group Strikes: From Rostov-on-Don to the Gates of Moscow

Shoigu’s decree to integrate Wagner into the Russian MOD was issued on June 10, and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion began on June 23. When Prigozhin took to Telegram to announce his march on Moscow, he claimed that this was in response to an attack in which the Russian military had struck a Wagner camp with a missile, killing numerous fighters in an act that Prigozhin alleged was intentional. Recent revelations from the United States’ intelligence apparatus, which apparently knew that Prigozhin was planning something weeks prior to the attack, must be acknowledged.

According to official sources interviewed by the Washington Post, US intelligence was confident that Prigozhin was planning an armed attack on the Russian establishment—so confident, in fact, that they briefed leaders in the US Congress that a coup was coming before it actually began. This would strongly suggest that the missile strike Prigozhin referenced, whether it actually happened or not, was pretext for a premeditated attack that the Wagner Group knew full well was going to happen. Conveniently, Wagner had announced that they would be rotating out of Bakhmut in order to recuperate from their losses, train, and prepare for further operations, and although that announcement came weeks before Sergei Shoigu called for Wagner’s integration into the military, it meant that when Shoigu’s demand came, Prigozhin and his forces were already away from the front lines, consolidated into camps with plenty of time to ready themselves for an attempted coup.

According to the Washington Post’s sources, Putin may have received word about a coup attempt over a day before it began, so if an airstrike on Wagner positions did take place, it is important to consider that this may have been an attempt by Putin to cow Prigozhin into submission before the march to Moscow began. But if that is what happened, then it was a clear miscalculation by Putin, handing Prigozhin all the pretext he needed to justify his eventual announcement. And when that announcement came, it was an anti-regime tour-de-force.

Prigozhin didn’t just criticize Shoigu; he didn’t just criticize Putin. He went for the jugular, in a message that the entire Russian public could see. Prigozhin contradicted Putin’s original claim about the war in Ukraine, that it had been a necessary intervention, and dismissed Putin’s justification for war as outright lies.

In his own words, translated from Russian: “The ministry of defense now is trying to deceive society, the president, and tell a story there was insane aggression from Ukraine and that they intended to attack us with the whole NATO bloc. The Special Military Operation that began on February 24 was started for completely different reasons.” Prigozhin stated that the claims of de-Nazifying Ukraine were baseless, that Shoigu and a cabal of oligarchs were intent on robbing Ukraine of its assets, and that that cabal, not Putin, rules Russia.

He exposed territorial losses, and the loss of up to a thousand Russian troops a day, information that had been carefully obscured from the manicured picture of the war that the Russian public hears every day.

The Seizure of Rostov-on-Don and the March North

Prigozhin claimed that Shoigu had deliberately weakened the Russian military through corruption, and then made catastrophic tactical failures in his invasion, thinking that Ukraine would just roll over. And Prigozhin claimed that Russian forces in the regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson were now in full retreat, but that Putin himself was being fed false reports of Russian success even now, well over a year into the war. As soon as Prigozhin’s announcement hit the airwaves, Wagner troops were on their way out of Ukraine, marching into Russia from at least two locations.

Their primary target in the first stage of their attack was the city of Rostov-on-Don, capital of Russia’s Rostov oblast, a strategically critical city whose airfield has been a centerpiece of the Russian air war against Ukraine. Rostov-on-Don is the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District and for the Russian Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine, meaning that most of the work done controlling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happens in that city. Within hours, Wagner seized Rostov-on-Don, despite some degree of military resistance, and before long Prigozhin himself was in the city.

Once he arrived, Prigozhin claimed that the Russian war effort would not be disrupted, and that Russia’s troops there were operating their airfield as normal—but far from just being a show of mercy from Prigozhin, it was a condemnation of the Russian Ministry of Defense. Russian troops were right there, practically within shooting distance, controlling armed warplanes, but they weren’t willing to oppose him. In fact, there were a number of important Russian officials in Rostov-on-Don at the time, including Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, a deputy defense minister.

Yevkurov was unable to persuade Wagner to withdraw, and a number of Russian troops inside the city joined Wagner’s movement, with reports from US intelligence suggesting that Wagner was welcomed in the city. Eyewitnesses in and around the city reported that a column of Chechen military and civilian leaders, loyal to Vladimir Putin’s puppet dictator in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, approached Rostov-on-Don while Wagner occupied it, but no confrontation took place. The reasons why remain unclear.

From Rostov-on-Don, Wagner began its march on Moscow, a journey of 1,100 kilometers, 680 miles, almost directly northward. By the start of the next day, June 24, Wagner was over halfway there, and before long, they had set up shop in Lipetsk Oblast, just 250 miles from Moscow. Wagner’s column appeared to be made up of no fewer than 25,000 troops, as well as heavy equipment, and small groups began to break off and establish control of the towns along their route.

Wagner was opposed in a few locations, including the city of Voronezh, but they are believed to have brought down at least six Russian helicopters and a command-and-control plane.

Moscow Prepares for War as Oligarchs Flee

Up until this point, Western onlookers were still uncertain about what Prigozhin wanted in Moscow. After all, his advance could have been in line with how Putin manages tensions between him and Shoigu—that is to say, Prigozhin might have gone to Moscow to challenge Shoigu, not Putin. But as the Wagner advance continued, Russia and the world quickly realized that Prigozhin’s appetite had grown bigger than Shoigu, and bigger than the MOD.

Putin himself was in trouble. Russian forces destroyed highways and barricaded bridges in the convoy’s path, setting up defensive lines along the Oka River south of Moscow, and inside the city, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin instituted a so-called counter-terrorism regime, a state of emergency. Also around this time, global flight-trackers observed a large number of private jets fleeing Moscow—presumably carrying many members of Russia’s oligarch class away from the danger.

Whether those oligarchs wanted to ensure they didn’t go down with Putin, whether they planned to express support for Prigozhin once they were far out of Putin’s grasp, or whether they wanted to signal their neutrality as they waited for a result, it is hard to say, but by all accounts, the threat to Moscow was so severe that the city’s ultra-rich had little faith a defense could hold. Even Vladimir Putin’s own private jet was tracked flying toward St. Petersburg, and while the Kremlin has since stated that Putin never left Moscow, that claim may not be accurate.

By the evening of June 24, it seemed almost certain that Wagner would make it to Moscow. Their force consisted of some twenty-five thousand experienced, battle-hardened mercenaries, plus troop carriers, tanks, and other heavy warfighting equipment. Although it is unclear what exactly they would have faced once they arrived in the city, they likely would have found some unlikely bedfellows in Moscow’s defense: Chechen militias loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov, an assortment of Moscow-based or nearby Russian intelligence and special-operations forces numbering in the high hundreds or low thousands, and some truly bottom-of-the-barrel military conscripts—inexperienced troops in their late teens who were kept far away from the front lines to do state funerals and guard duty in Moscow.

Whether this hodgepodge of forces could have held back the Wagner Group, or whether they even would have wanted to, is up for debate. Certainly, Wagner faced minimal opposition elsewhere in Russia, smashing through the barricades and destroying everything in their path.

Putin’s Emergency Address and the Eleventh-Hour Deal

Putin made a public emergency address on the 24th, and for once, he appeared to be honest with the Russian public: “Today Russia is fighting fiercely for its future… We fight for the lives and security of our people; for our sovereignty and independence; for the right to remain Russia, a state with a thousand-year history… I repeat: any internal mutiny is a deadly threat to our state, to us as a nation. It’s a blow against Russia, against our people. And our actions to defend the fatherland from such a threat will be brutal.”

To call that an exceptional statement by Putin is a gross understatement. At the same time, Putin expressed a wish to spare people who were participating in the march on Moscow due to their orders, and made a direct overture to Wagner fighters to lay down their arms and be forgiven. The speech appeared to have little effect, and the convoy moved onward, seeming more and more like an inevitable tide.

But at the eleventh hour, with Wagner forces sitting within just two hours’ drive of Moscow, the world received quite possibly the most unexpected news of this entire affair: the rebellion was off. Announced by the president of Russia’s close ally Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, who maintains close ties to both Putin and Prigozhin, the Wagner Group’s coup had been cancelled in response to a deal that Lukashenko had brokered, and both Putin and Prigozhin had agreed to. Within just a few minutes, Prigozhin released a voice memo to Telegram confirming that Wagner would no longer attack the Russian capital, but would instead turn around and head back to their camps in eastern Ukraine.

As for what the deal included, or how Lukashenko, who has long had the reputation of a rather clueless crackpot dictator, suddenly managed to negotiate a peace, no one can say with certainty. Did Prigozhin receive a frantic phone call from Vladimir Putin himself, threatening to drop nuclear weapons on the Wagner column as it advanced? Did Putin arrange a flyover from a fleet of Russian bomber and fighter aircraft, loaded up with bombs?

Did Prigozhin learn about the influx of Chechen fighters and the fortification of Moscow, and decide that pissing off Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov simply wasn’t worth the risk? Or, did Vladimir Putin genuinely offer concessions to Prigozhin, or even offer Sergei Shoigu all trussed-up and served on a platter, simply to save his own skin? The answer remains unknown, and may never come to light.

But something happened during those negotiations that put a stop to Prigozhin’s advance, and given that Moscow was almost within Wagner’s grip, the game-changing piece of the negotiation must have been something big.

Amnesty, Exile, and the Uncertain Fate of Prigozhin

Shortly after Prigozhin agreed to the terms of the deal, the Kremlin began to issue additional information on what came next. All Wagner fighters who participated in the march on Moscow would receive amnesty, said spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and they would be offered the opportunity to join Russia’s military proper, but would not be forced to do so. And unlike past Russian leaders who have tried to orchestrate opposition to Putin, the terms Peskov described for Prigozhin were incredibly lenient: an exile to Belarus, where the important subtext was that Putin’s close friend Lukashenko wouldn’t be expected to punish Prigozhin any further.

The strangeness of the deal suggests there is a lot the world doesn’t know; after all, people in Prigozhin’s current position tend to find themselves on the wrong side of a fortieth-story window, or receiving a sly poke from a radioactive umbrella tip. But Prigozhin abandoned the tens of thousands of fighters who could have kept him safe from retribution, and was driven away, amidst cheers and salutes not just from his fighters, but from the ordinary citizens of Rostov-on-Don, who even swarmed his car to get pictures with him and shake his hand. And just like that, the Wagner march on Moscow was over—a truly unforeseen crisis, that ended in a way no one expected.

As of the immediate aftermath, Prigozhin had not been heard from once following his departure from Rostov-on-Don. He was supposed to be making his way to Belarus, per the terms of his agreement with Putin, but the truth of the matter was entirely unknown. Depending on the leverage he might have over Putin, Prigozhin could well have been negotiating a return to collaboration with the Russian government.

Or, Prigozhin could already be dead, taken out behind his SUV and shot as soon as he left the Rostov-on-Don city limits. His fate was unknown, and he could very well end up just being disappeared, but where Prigozhin is concerned, quite literally anything is possible.

Implications for Putin’s Grip on Power and the War in Ukraine

The march on Moscow has ended, but for Vladimir Putin, there is a very real chance that his struggles have only just begun. Regardless of the Lukashenko deal, Putin’s near-unquestioned authority in Moscow has been challenged in a way that he has never had to face before, and the truth of how vulnerable his regime is has finally been laid bare. No matter what Putin does next, nothing can take back the panic ordinary Russians saw written across his face in his emergency address, and nothing except a swift hit to the frontal lobe could erase the memories of tanks rolling across Moscow, memories the Russian people now have sitting at the forefront of their awareness.

For decades, Vladimir Putin’s main pitch to his people has been one of stability—like the dictator or not, you can at least trust that when you wake up tomorrow, the dictator won’t be replaced by someone worse. Now, that illusion has been fundamentally disrupted, and if the Russian people are seeing it, then the oligarch class are seeing it too. What that means for Putin, whose stability in power is guaranteed based on how well he can deliver profits to Russia’s rich and famous, remains to be seen.

More broadly, Prigozhin has finally said the quiet part out loud, in a way that no other Russian elite has dared attempt. Although many ordinary Russians have long held suspicions that the war in Ukraine is not nearly as clean or painless as Putin has made it out to be, the type of confirmation and detail Prigozhin offered is something that Putin’s propagandists will not be able to rewrite. Families whose sons have been sent off to war, and who have never had their children’s deaths acknowledged despite a sick sense of awareness that their boys are never coming home, have been vindicated, and the entire Ukrainian meat-grinder has been exposed for something that will eat the next round of conscripts alive, if their families allow another conscription to happen.

And not only that, but with tanks rolling across their streets, having to feel uncertainty about whether their government will survive another day, the real implications of being at war have finally come home to Russian citizens. Then there is the question of the Wagner Group at large. The Kremlin has said that Wagner isn’t facing reprisals, and per Sergei Shoigu’s order that set this whole thing off, they were due to be folded into the Russian military on July 1.

However, it is important to note that if Putin were to wave his magic wand and declare all Wagner troops to be part of the Russian military, that would also apply to Wagner troops around the world. Bring in Wagner, and Russia would suddenly assume responsibility for paramilitary operations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, a liability that Russia very specifically doesn’t want; after all, if they wanted to send Russian troops directly to those places, they wouldn’t have been using the Wagner Group there at all. Certainly, a big part of Putin’s tolerance for Prigozhin’s months of insults toward the Kremlin comes from the fact that Putin can’t achieve success in Ukraine without Wagner’s help.

The Russian State Duma, the lower Parliament, appeared to be working toward a law to regulate Wagner, but what that law contains would only be known with time. In Ukraine, both political leaders and the general public reacted to the coup with eagerness, hoping for all manner of helpful chaos inside Russia, and entertaining the possibility that a real upheaval could lead to a quicker end to the war. Ukrainian officials took to social media to mock the situation and tease both Putin and Prigozhin.

And on the battlefield, Ukraine surged forces into hot zones from Bakhmut to Lyman to Zaporizhzhia, taking advantage of the chaos to wear down Russian defensive positions. Ukrainian leaders suggested that this is the first in a long series of steps necessary to dismantle the Putin regime, a sentiment echoed by Ukraine’s Western allies. Among the Ukrainian public, the tone appeared to be more disappointed than anything; in the words of 63-year-old Nadia of Kyiv, interviewed by CNN, “We are very disappointed that they couldn’t even do a coup d’état!

What a useless nation!” In the span of the last two years, the Russian military has gone from being regarded as the second-most-dangerous army in the world, to the second-most-dangerous army in Ukraine, and on June 23, 2023, the Russian army became the second-most-dangerous army in Russia. Yevgeny Prigozhin ultimately did not take Moscow, and it is important to note that a Prigozhin-controlled Russia might have been one of the few outcomes worse than a Putin-controlled Russia.

But the Wagner Group’s march on Moscow has forced a massive crack across the Russian regime’s façade, and taken a bold first swing at Putin in a way that nobody else has managed to do. Vladimir Putin is the President of the Russian Federation, and one day, he won’t be. No one can see the ticking clock that counts down to the precise moment that he will leave power—not even him.

But in this incredibly strange incident, in this odd Russian coup attempt that has somehow left more questions than answers, one thing is clear: that countdown clock just started ticking faster.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the immediate trigger for Prigozhin’s march on Moscow, and was it genuine?

Prigozhin claimed the Russian military deliberately struck a Wagner camp with a missile, killing numerous fighters. However, US intelligence had told Congressional leaders weeks in advance that Prigozhin was planning an armed attack on the Russian establishment, strongly suggesting the airstrike was a pretext for a premeditated march that had already been in preparation while Wagner was consolidating troops away from the front lines in Bakhmut.

How far did Wagner actually advance, and what forces did they defeat along the way?

Wagner seized the strategically critical city of Rostov-on-Don within hours of beginning the march, then drove north. By the start of June 24 they had reached Lipetsk Oblast, roughly 250 miles from Moscow, with a column of approximately 25,000 troops and heavy equipment. Along the route they shot down at least six Russian helicopters and a command-and-control plane, and met only minimal armed resistance at most points.

How did the coup end, and what were the terms of the deal?

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered an eleventh-hour agreement while Wagner was within two hours of Moscow. Prigozhin agreed to halt the advance and go into exile in Belarus; Wagner fighters who participated in the march were granted amnesty and offered the opportunity to join the Russian military proper, though not forced to do so. The specific concessions that persuaded Prigozhin to stand down have never been confirmed publicly.

What did Prigozhin publicly reveal about the war in Ukraine during his rebellion?

Prigozhin contradicted Putin’s stated justification for the war, calling the claims of de-Nazifying Ukraine baseless and alleging that a cabal of oligarchs around Defense Minister Shoigu, not Ukraine’s aggression, was the true reason for the invasion. He also disclosed territorial losses and claimed Russia was losing up to a thousand troops a day, information carefully hidden from the Russian public, and accused Shoigu of catastrophic tactical failures and corruption.

What were the broader implications of the coup attempt for Putin’s hold on power?

Putin’s apparent vulnerability was broadcast to the Russian public in a way he had never before faced, from his visibly panicked emergency address to footage of tanks rolling through Russian cities. Ordinary Russians saw their sons’ deaths in Ukraine vindicated and newly confirmed. Russia’s oligarch class responded by fleeing Moscow in private jets, and even Putin’s own aircraft was tracked departing toward St. Petersburg.

The march exposed that Putin’s guarantee of stability, his main political pitch for decades, was no longer unassailable.

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