Just over a week ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s power grab seemed to be falling apart. Rebel mercenaries advanced on Moscow against little or no resistance. Wealthy Muscovites rushed to get tickets out of the country. An attempted coup

watched

menacing.

And then a startling reversal. After denouncing the mutiny as treason, Putin agreed to allow his leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin

to take

exile in neighboring Belarus. Prigozhin, presumably realizing that his mercenaries could not conquer Moscow without the help of regular army units, submitted.

Putin, once seen as an all-powerful autocrat, seemed to have dealt a humiliating blow to his authority.

But don’t count Putin out just yet.

That’s what a growing number of Russian experts said last week as the dust settled and a little bit of perspective emerged.

Putin has many problems

,

to be sure, Stephen said

Stestanovich Sestanovich

,

a

professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University. But it looks like he still has most of the resources he needs to tackle them.

People would love to find new evidence that Putin is vulnerable, but it may be exaggerated, warned Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The power of wishful thinking.

These Russian scholars are not defending Putin, his regime’s brutality, or his catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine.

There is no better argument for term limits than Vladimir Putin,

Sestanovich

said.

They only note that he has survived tough challenges before and after 23 years in power, he is unlikely to collapse without a fight.

Much of what happened in the bizarre standoff with Prigozhin remains obscure. The boss of the Wagner Group, a supposedly private military company, rebelled against Putin’s order to subject his mercenaries to the command of the regular forces.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Prigozhin planned to kidnap Russia’s defense minister and army chief of staff to plead his case. Prigozhin might also have expected other military officers to rally to his side; when that did not happen, he acknowledged that his cause was lost.

The deeper mystery is why Putin’s intelligence services apparently failed to warn him of the plot and why other military units failed to block the attacks.

the Wagners of the mercenaries

March to Moscow.

By the time Prigozhin’s men were within 125 miles of the capital, Putin was staring down the barrel of a gun, Sestanovich said. He had an overarching goal, which was to prevent firing in the streets of Moscow. That would have been vivid proof that he had failed.

Putin’s brand is stability

Sestanovich

explained. What he needs above all is to convey normalcy [and] the feeling that he is in charge again.

Once the outcome was clear, officials in Moscow rushed to declare loyalty to Putin. The Russian military and intelligence services have launched an investigation to determine what went wrong. General Sergei Surovikin, the air force commander close to Prigozhin, is reportedly being interrogated.

Meanwhile, Putin has launched a charm offensive, staging a sudden wave of public appearances after three years of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. His propaganda machine plays down the mutiny.

It is even possible, Sestanovich said, that the mutiny may have shocked Putin to the point that he has lost touch with his country’s politics.

This was a kind of waking heart attack for him, Sestanovich suggested. He has to make everyone feel like they are still benefiting from his regimen, quite a tough challenge.

Meanwhile, his war against Ukraine continues unabated. The high-level unrest in Moscow had no discernible effect on the battlefields in the south. Russian units continued to defend their occupied Ukrainian territory behind a terrifying system of minefields and tank traps, ironically dubbed the Surovikin Line, built by the general during interrogation. No units were reported to have deserted or defected.

At least the episode appeared to secure the jobs of Prigozhin’s main targets, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Army Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov, even though both have been widely criticized as incompetent.

Another sign of normality, Putin-style: Wagner’s recruiting office in Moscow, which was briefly closed during the mutiny, reopened, telling organizations it was taking on new applicants, according to the BBC and Russian media.

That suggests

S

that Putin has decided not to disband Wagner, who has not only been more brutal on the battlefield

than the regular army

but also more successful

than the regular army

in recruiting, in part because it pays higher wages.

Like Wagner

where to

to disappear

edit

Putin’s war machine could lose as many as 15,000 of its most experienced fighters.

Some

W

Western officials have expressed impatience that Ukraine’s offensive is not accelerating. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged that progress is slower than desired.

But Ukrainian officers have

said noticed that

finding weak spots in the Russian defense will take time, and that the fighting season will run until November.

There’s not much the United States and its allies can do to influence Putin’s fate in Moscow, except perhaps stay out of the way.

But they can ensure that military and economic aid continues to flow to Ukraine to increase the chances of success.

Putin is unlikely to fall

time soon, but he is still more vulnerable than before the mutiny. Now is not the time to give him breathing room.