Prigozhin has made Putin more dangerous than ever

As rebel tanks trundled up the highway towards Moscow yesterday morning, Vladimir Putin labelled the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin a ‘traitor’ – and vowed to crush him. But hours later Putin capitulated, allowing Prigozhin to retire to an honourable exile in Belarus and pardoning the 25,000-strong Wagner force which had spent the day in open, armed rebellion against the Kremlin’s authority. For Putin, who had built his image as Russia’s strongman protector, the particular humiliation of allowing an armed general to cross back over the Rubicon unscathed must have stung deeply. 

Of course, things could have ended far worse for Putin. The alternative to letting Prigozhin escape and his men returning to barracks would have been fighting them on the streets of Rostov-on-Don, where Wagner had captured the headquarters of the Russian Army’s Southern Military Command. Worse, the troops Putin would have had to send in were Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov’s semi-irregular fighters.