As President Vladimir V. Putin seeks to assert control over Russia, he is moving to punish the people who made mercenary boss Yevgeny V. Prigozhin rebel over the weekend, but Mr.
The question of who will be punished for the mutiny has high stakes for the Russian leadership, especially since some of Mr. Prigozhin is believed to be inside the military and government.
There is serious concern in Moscow about the fate of Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a senior military officer admired by Mr. Prigozhin in public and who is said to have known in advance about the rebellion; he has not been seen in public since early Saturday. Several pro-war Russian blogs have reported that authorities are investigating military service members who had ties to Mr. Prigozhin, but those reports could not be independently confirmed.
Mr. Putin fed speculation about a wider crackdown on Tuesday night in a closed-door meeting with Russian media figures in the Kremlin. At the meeting, he presented himself as a leader in full control, and said that he had reviewed the business contracts of Mr. Prigozhin in the Russian Defense Ministry.
Mr. Putin also described himself as fully involved throughout the 24-hour uprising last week by Mr. Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, according to the newspaper editor who attended the meeting, Konstantin Remchukov. “Putin said he didn’t sleep for a minute during the rebellion,” Mr. Remchukov said in a telephone interview from Moscow.
After the rebellion, when Wagner’s forces seized a military installation and headed for Moscow, he said, Mr. Putin appeared focused on the economic motives that guided Mr. Prigozhin. And he signaled that the authorities will find “who signed what and lobbied for orders, or for uniforms, or for weapons.”
“He is deep in the number of contracts with Prigozhin, the money is flowing,” said Mr. Remchukov.
Mr. Putin himself announced the depth of the relationship with Mr. Prigozhin of the government in his public statements on Tuesday, saying that Mr. Prigozhin, a catering magnate, earned nearly $1 billion from military catering contracts last year, and the government spent another $1 billion to fund his mercenaries.
The fate of Mr. Prigozhin’s wider operations is also under scrutiny. On Tuesday, Syria, where Wagner’s mercenaries operate heavily, released a photo of Russia’s deputy foreign minister meeting with Syrian officials, saying the two sides were holding talks. “as part of the regular political consultation between the two friendly countries.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Putin sought to signal that he would return to business as usual. He flew to Russia’s southern region of Dagestan to discuss local tourism, praising the expansion of the local brandy industry. State media released video of Mr. Putin walking through a city square and being greeted by large crowds – an image that appeared designed to show that the president retained public support.
But back in Moscow, with the nature of Mr. Putin’s longer-term response to the rebellion a matter of conjecture, members of Russia’s elite are still scrambling to show their loyalty and repudiate past ties to Mr. . Prigozhin.
“It’s a very complicated question” of who should be punished for their connections to the Wagner leader, said Oleg Matveychev, a member of the Russian Parliament and a long-time pro-Kremlin political consultant. .
Those targeted, he said in a telephone interview, were not those “pictured with Prigozhin somewhere,” but those “actively covering for him, actively continuing to do so, and actively working against the policy of president.”
Mr. Matveychev acknowledged working with Mr. Prigozhin about a decade ago, but said he stopped the partnership after concluding, in his view, that Mr. Prigozhin was a “mentally unstable person.”
Mr. Prigozhin built a web of connections starting when he ran high-end restaurants and prepared banquets in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. More recently, he worked with General Surovikin in Syria, where Wagner’s forces are fighting.
“I think they will ask why he was silent” and did not speak out against Mr. Prigozhin before the rebellion, Mr. Remchukov said about the general. “Are there interests? Is there a connection?”
On Wednesday, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, called a New York Times report that General Surovikin knew about the rebellion “speculation,” but did not dispute the report or express any support for the general, who has not been heard from since the appearance of a video early Saturday imploring the rebels to stop.
After a career spent in the shadows, Mr. Prigozhin has become a more public figure in the past year, positioning himself as a powerful mercenary leader who is more effective than the traditional military. He often criticized and despised military leaders such as Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister.
Last year, pro-Kremlin figures seeking to prove their patriotic bona fides rushed to join Mr. Trump’s bandwagon. Prigozhin.
Mr. Peskov’s son, the Kremlin spokesman, boasted that he joined an artillery unit in the Wagner group and earned a medal “for bravery.”
And the head of a party in Russia’s rubber-stamp Parliament, Sergei Mironov, pose with a sledgehammer emblazoned with the Wagner insignia, a pile of skulls and a hand-drawn smiley face. The sledgehammer became Mr. Prigozhin after he endorsed its use in the horrific killing of a Wagner fighter who surrendered in Ukraine.
“Thanks to Yevgeny Prigozhin for today,” Mr. Mironov WRITES on Twitter in January. “It’s a useful instrument.”
But on Tuesday, Mr. Mironov himself a bulwark against the rebellion of Mr. Prigozhin. He called for an investigation into what he claimed was a “line of VIPs — officials and civil servants” flocking to leave the country from the private jet terminal at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport during the shortened Wagner’s march to Moscow on Saturday.
“This is the fifth column!” he wrote on social media, without naming names. “Traitors to the Mother!”
There is also the question of who spoke for Mr. Putin as the rebellion continued, and who remained silent. A Moscow political analyst, Mikhail Vinogradov, published what he called an “oath rating” on the Telegram social network that listed, down to the minute, at what time on Saturday Russia’s regional governors posted a message of support for Mr. Putin, and listed. the 21 left.
Mr. Vinogradov said in an interview that it would be a mistake to draw serious conclusions from his ratings, but Mr. Matveychev, the member of Parliament, said he saw that the list was revealing.
“I have a view and make conclusions: that a person, so to speak, is not trustworthy and will be different next time,” he said.
Mr. insisted. Matveychev that the aborted rebellion was positive for Russia because its failure “strengthened the image of the authorities” and acted as a “vaccine” against future rebellions.
And Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper’s editor, said that despite his prediction on Sunday that Mr. Putin might not run for re-election next year because of the rebellion’s blow to his image, he saw the elite rally who is connected to the Kremlin in Moscow to Mr. Putin’s side as he seeks telegraph power.
“Putin is now completely focused on sending the message to the elite that ‘I will protect you,'” Mr. Remchukov said. “Now there are, I think, some very strong actions to show this, because his whole logic is to show that this is treason.”
Others see a continuing challenge for Mr. Putin, especially as the war drags on and members of the elite look to blame each other for failures on the front.
“This is a signal that the management system does not handle wartime stress well,” said Mr. Vinogradov, the Moscow analyst. “Especially not in the last two months, when everyone was waiting for a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive and preparing to fight each other – and even the lack of that success did not change it at all.”
For the Russian public, and military ranks, the outcome of the rebellion was a moment of beating, together with the forces of Wagner – who had scored a recent success in the Russian battlefield and were celebrated by pro-war bloggers and sometimes in the state. media – returned as traitors.
Leonid Ivashov, a retired senior Russian general who spoke out against the war but remains in Russia, summed up the general question hanging over society and the military thus: “What happened?”
“Many don’t understand what the government really wants,” General Ivashov said in a telephone interview. “The first question is: What happened to the country and the army?”
