On the menu today: Sorting through all of the strange and contradictory reports about the weekend’s almost-coup in Russia.
An Unprepared Putin
Many aspects of this weekend’s short-lived coup attempt in Russia remain mysterious, but the Wall Street Journal’s Bojan Pancevski, the paper’s Germany correspondent, sheds a little light on what Yevgeny Prigozhin wanted to do:
Prigozhin originally intended to capture Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, during a visit to a southern region that borders Ukraine that the two were planning. But the Federal Security Service, or FSB, found out about the plan two days before it was to be executed, according to Western officials.
One big, almost mind-blowing question is how Prigozhin and the Wagner Group could effectively “sneak up” on a leader as spectacularly paranoid as Vladimir Putin. Perhaps Prigozhin helped his cause by hiding in plain sight, constantly complaining on social media about the incompetence of the Russian Defense Ministry. If Prigozhin is always publicly and loudly raging about Shoigu and Gerasimov, perhaps his opposition to those leaders starts to sound like inconsequential background noise.
For what it’s worth, General Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard of Russia, a domestic military force that reports directly to Putin, told Russian state media that he knew about the coming coup: “Specific leaks about preparations for a rebellion that would begin between June 22-25 were leaked from Prigozhin’s camp.”
Perhaps that’s true, but Putin and the Russian government certainly didn’t look prepared; the Wagner Group column of mercenaries got within 125 miles of Moscow and encountered minimal resistance before shocking the world by stopping and turning back. If you’re a ruthless dictator who rules his country with an iron fist, you would presumably prefer to shut down a coup attempt as quickly as possible. And you would probably want to stop that coup before the plotters shot down Russian military aircraft.
Reportedly, the U.S. intelligence community knew Prigozhin was planning some sort of armed action against the Russian defense establishment. If the U.S. knew, it’s likely the Ukrainians knew, and it’s conceivable the Ukrainians might have heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Prigozhin had reportedly had conversations with Ukrainian intelligence in late January, offering to give Kyiv information on Russian troop positions if Ukraine’s commanders withdrew their soldiers from the area around Bakhmut, where they were inflicting serious losses on the Wagner Group. Ukraine reportedly turned down the offer. It seems Prigozhin perceives Ukraine as his opponent, but the Russian military as his enemy.
So how could Putin, who is obsessed with rooting out any potential threat to his grip on power, have been blindsided by a mercenary army turning rogue, taking over the military headquarters closest to Ukraine, and marching down the road to Moscow with so little opposition?
This morning, U.S. intelligence officials are telling the New York Times that General Sergei Surovikin, the former top Russian commander in Ukraine, had advance knowledge of Prigozhin’s plans.
Surovikin is the man nicknamed “General Armageddon” and “the Butcher of Syria,”* a lifelong Russian military man who first achieved notoriety for shooting protesters during the attempted coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991:
The protesters had barricaded the road with buses and street-cleaning vehicles, and in the chaos that ensued, three of them were killed. Ultimately, the column retreated.
The clash was a turning point in the coup, which collapsed the next day.
The man who commanded the unit was Captain Sergei Surovikin, 24, a mid-ranking officer who was briefly arrested for his orders but later cleared.
Surovikin went on to a long career in Russia’s military, where he was repeatedly promoted and gained a reputation for unalloyed brutality in Chechnya and, more recently, in Syria. On October 8, President Vladimir Putin appointed the much-decorated Surovikin, who is now 56, as the overall commander of Russia’s flagging war on Ukraine.
To update this weekend’s headline, “Brutal Maniac, Working with Other Brutal Maniac, Fails to Depose Chief Brutal Maniac.”
There’s also widespread belief that Prigozhin had some reason to believe that the Russian military was not entirely on the side of Putin or the top leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry.
And yet evidence suggests that for some period of time, Prigozhin’s planning eluded the Russian domestic-surveillance machine. Today’s Journal reports, “Western intelligence agencies also found out early about the plans by Prigozhin, Putin’s former confidant, by analyzing electronic communications intercepts and satellite imagery.”
If Western intelligence agencies — likely the U.S. National Security Agency and the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters — could intercept electronic communications that hinted at the impending coup, then it is likely the Russian security agencies could, too. The Russian government’s systems for snooping on its citizens may not be quite as invasive, far-reaching, and technologically advanced as those of China or North Korea, but they aren’t far behind.
Basically, if you type something into any device that connects to the Internet in Russia, there is an exceptionally high chance that it will be seen or intercepted by Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency that is allegedly assigned to regulate the Internet but is in fact a key part of the government’s domestic surveillance operations:
Roskomnadzor, the Russian Internet censorship agency, has been operating a national system of monitoring online protest activities since 2020. In every Russian region, local branches of Roskomnadzor trace “points of tension,” or events that could cause public discontent. Their primary goal is to identify local troublemakers and then to share this data with the Federal Security Services (FSB) and the Interior Ministry to ensure they are punished.
In September, the New York Times published a deep dive into Roskomnadzor, after reviewing a leak of nearly 160,000 records, detailing “the inner workings of a critical facet of Mr. Putin’s surveillance and censorship system”:
Unlike more technologically savvy counterparts in China, where internet surveillance is more automated, much of the work of Russian censors is done manually, the documents show. But what Russia lacks in sophistication it has made up for in determination. . . .
In some cases, censors recorded their screens showing detail down to the movements of their computer mouse as they watched over the internet.
Separate but intertwined with Roskomnadzor is the FSB’s System for Operative Investigative Activities, whose systems were built, in part, by the Finnish multinational telecommunications company Nokia:
For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications.
The documents, spanning 2008 to 2017, show in previously unreported detail that Nokia knew it was enabling a Russian surveillance system. The work was essential for Nokia to do business in Russia, where it had become a top supplier of equipment and services to various telecommunications customers to help their networks function. The business yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, even as Mr. Putin became more belligerent abroad and more controlling at home.
One of the big reasons that Vladimir Putin grew into the threat that he is that a whole lot of Westerners insisted he could never turn into this kind of threat, and that it was safe to do business with him and his regime.
*In recent years, the nicknames of rogues, threats, dictators, and other enemies of the United States have included “General Armageddon,” “Dr. Germ,” “The Pale Moth,” and “The Butcher of the Balkans.” And, I suppose, depending on your perspective, “the Little Potato.”
Marvel and D.C., you’ve got to step up your villain code-name efforts.
ADDENDUM: If you’re going to appear on Hugh Hewitt’s show, make sure you do your homework.