For a moment last week, the war in Ukraine appeared to have arrived at an almost inconceivable turning point. The Wagner Group, a brutal mercenary army the Kremlin deploys to conduct off-book military operations around the world, from Mali to Syria, did an about-face from its position in Ukraine and invaded the motherland. In the course of their rebellion, Wagner troops shot down five Russian helicopters and a valuable command plane. Rostov-on-Don, a Russian city of a million people near the Ukrainian border that serves as the hub of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, fell to Wagner without a shot being fired. Then the mercenary army began moving north toward Moscow.
A world-historical event seemed to be underway — possibly a coup d’etat. “Russia Slides Into Civil War,” a headline to a story by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic screamed. “Is Putin facing his Czar Nicholas II moment?” read Applebaum’s subheadline, referring to the last monarch of Russia, who was executed in the Russian Revolution.
But then the storm subsided almost as quickly as it began. Within 24 hours, a settlement had been reached. Wagner forces stood down, and Putin absolved them of any criminal charges for their act of treason. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner and the leader of the insurrection, took refuge in Belarus, where he was promised the same amnesty.
The fraught and bizarre series of events reflected the madness of the war in Ukraine.