Putin’s war hawks are no longer in step

Now we know: Even in a country as tightly controlled as Russia, a string of military defeats will be followed by public squabbling and personal attacks. But then again, perhaps Russia is less tightly controlled as a battlefield loser than as the fearsome, almost unbeatable military superpower it was before invading Ukraine. As he prepares to celebrate his 70th birthday on October 7, Vladimir Putin should start worrying about his continued ascendancy.
After previous setbacks, the Russian far right had already criticized the military top brass, especially Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is not an ethnic Russian and thus an easy target for the ultranationalists. But last week, when Russia lost the important town of Lyman in the Donetsk region hours after declaring it, and the rest of occupied Ukraine, part of its territory, the accusations rose to a new level.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator of Chechnya, who has described himself as “Putin’s infantryman,” published a bitter post on Telegram, slamming Colonel General Alexander Lapin for the Lyman defeat — and Russia’s top military commander, Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, of ignoring his earlier complaints about Lapin’s conduct of the campaign. Lapin purportedly ran the defense of Lyman from Luhansk, 150 kilometers away, and bungled the communication and logistics aspects of the defensive operation. “Lapin’s lack of talent is not the worst of it — it’s that the top people at the General Staff are covering up for him,” Kadyrov wrote. “If it were up to me, I’d downgrade Lapin to private, strip him of his medals and send him to the front lines with gun to wash off his disgrace with his blood.”
“I don’t know what the Defense Ministry is reporting to the Commander-in-Chief,” Kadyrov added.
Kadyrov’s outburst got a sympathetic reaction from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group private military company, which has played an outsized role in the conflict. “Way to go, Ramzan, you’re the man,” Prigozhin’s press service quoted him as saying. “All these jerk-offs should be sent to the front lines with submachine guns, barefoot.” In subsequent comments, however, Prigozhin denied — with his usual sarcastic slyness — that his words referred to top generals.
A former top military commander, Lieutenant General Andrey Gurulyov, now a parliament member from the ruling United Russia party, added his voice to the chorus of criticism. The Russian military, he said, was in trouble because “everybody’s lying, reporting that the situation is good.”
It’s natural, of course, that the military leadership would get some flak for systematic battlefield mishaps. Yet it’s hardly common for the leaders of other fighting forces under Putin’s banners — both Kadyrov and Prigozhin have thousands of well-trained fighters in Ukraine — to attack the “special military operation’s” top strategic planners and commanders. Someone of Gurulyov’s rank accusing the military chain of command of pervasive “lying” is also extraordinary. Countries at war usually at least try to mask any differences among top commanders and make a show of cohesion; while it was on the retreat during the summer, Ukraine presented a united front without any visible cracks.
You won’t hear Kadyrov, Prigozhin or Gurulyov criticizing the “Commander-in-Chief” himself. On the surface, a conflict is brewing between the regular military and “freelancers” of all stripes: Chechen volunteer fighters, Wagner mercenaries, the nationalist ex-military from Colonel Igor Girkin (Strelkov) to the more moderate Gurulyov. All of them are Putin loyalists, except star Telegram commentator Strelkov, who has vowed to refrain from criticizing the president while the war is on. But anger at Putin is the next logical step if the military defeats continue.
If the chain of command is rotten and truthful information is not reaching Putin, even though it’s being reported by dozens of pro-war Telegram channels and by the “freelancers,” who but Putin bears the final responsibility for filtering out these reports and acting as if everything is still going to plan? Who bears the final responsibility for not making any personnel changes at the Defense Ministry and the General Staff? These questions are bound to arise if Russia continues losing territory that it has just claimed as its own. Even the use of nuclear weapons — with the inevitable blowback it would provoke — would not deflect them.

—Bloomberg

Leonid Bershidsky formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”