Is the Ukraine war over?

Oh, not yet. Regular Russian army formations still battle on the lines in the Donbas and near Kherson. Vladimir Putin ordered a new blast of missile attacks on Ukrainian cities last night as well. Putin still holds Crimea. However, the rebellion of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group and their strategic execution have made it impossible for Russia to maintain its occupation, let alone win a war.

If you have not yet read John’s excellent post this morning on the events unfolding over the last day in Russia, do so now. I won’t recap the specifics of Prigozhin’s actions, but the key to this — as Prigozhin apparently realized too — was Rostov (or Rostov-on-Don, if you prefer). After the Ukrainians won the battle of Kharkiv and pushed the Russians significantly farther to the south in that area, Rostov became the main center for Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to their troops in Ukraine. The loss of Kharkiv and most of the territory between it and the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts eliminated Belgorod as an effective communications point.  There may be minor GLOCs bypassing Rostov still open, but there are none that has the capacity for resupply to a largish invading army. Prigozhin’s seizure of Rostov cut Russia’s invading army off from everything it needs to survive in hostile territory. And the apparent seizure of Voronezh probably cut off any minor GLOCs still open.

It won’t take Russian army forces long to realize it, either. The Russian army already had severe manpower, supply, and morale issues. Wagner had been more effective and better supplied than most of those, which means the sudden march on Rostov has left big gaps in Russian capability. But it also left all of Putin’s effective fighting forces in Ukraine, cut off by the Wagner Group but still engaged with Ukrainian forces and likely unable to move without significant losses.

And that becomes a very big problem for Putin facing a rebel army of 25,000 or more. The UK’s Ministry of Defence assesses that well over 90% of Putin’s troops are in Ukraine, a figure that may not include Russian national-guard units. Under normal circumstances in such situations, the army would call up its reserves to put down a mutiny, but Putin doesn’t have reserves. He barely has an effective fighting force in Ukraine, and nothing to its rear except untested and likely untrained civil defense formations.

Prigozhin no doubt saw this and realized that the road to Moscow would be as open as the road to Rome was when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Moscow could still call up national-guard units to slow them down, but those are non-combat-ready units facing off against a battle-tested and highly motivated army of 25,000 very angry and brutal mercenaries. These same Wagner mercs have spent the last 16 months committing war crimes against Ukrainians, and who now feel that Putin lied them into the war in the first place — which he did, of course.

In fact, that was Prigozhin’s point yesterday in launching the rebellion:

Mr Prigozhin has for months been accusing Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, of rank incompetence, but on Friday he for the first time rejected Russia’s core justifications for invading Ukraine on February 24 last year in what it calls a “special military operation”.

“The Defence Ministry is trying to deceive society and the president and tell us a story about how there was crazy aggression from Ukraine and that they were planning to attack us with the whole of NATO,” Mr Prigozhin said in a video clip released on Telegram by his press service, calling the official version “a beautiful story”. …

“The task was to divide material assets (in Ukraine),” he said.

“There was massive theft in the Donbas, but they wanted more.”

That message will resonate with Russians who have lived under the thumb of the rapacious oligarchical class for the last 30 years. It certainly worked with the Wagner Group troops. And how long will China and Iran keep dealing with Putin while he’s facing a mutiny in his own army?

Putin now faces a set of very ugly choices. He can muster the Rosgvardiya and hope to burn Prigozhin’s forces down before they reach Moscow. (As of this moment, they are encircling Moscow to keep Prigozhin out, a strategy that will only last as long as Muscovites want Putin around, which might not be too long under the circumstances.) Or he can use his only really effective option for opposing forces and send his army from Ukraine through Rostov and attack Wagner from the rear. Either way or both — which is the most obvious strategy — the war in Donetsk and Luhansk is essentially lost. Even if Putin defeats Prigozhin and manages to take control of Rostov (and now Voronezh), the disruption and loss of men and materiel will make prosecuting the war impossible, let alone winning it. Without resupply and reserves, and now without 25,000 of their more effective troops on the line, the Ukrainian counteroffensive will eventually chew up what’s left of the Russian army to pieces.

Putin knows it, too. His speech overnight warned of the consequences of civil war, and he pleaded with Russians not to support Prigozhin and have Russia lose its imperial vision of “Novorossiya” (Ukraine as a Russian possession). In doing so, Putin put himself in the position of Tsar Nicholas II, which is both ironic and startling:

And therefore, the actions that split our unity are, in fact, a betrayal of our people, our comrades-in-arms, who are now fighting at the front. This is a stab in the back of our country and our people.

The same blow was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was waging the First World War. But the victory was stolen from it. Intrigues, squabbles, politicking behind the backs of the army and the people turned into the greatest shock, the destruction of the army and the collapse of the state, the loss of vast territories. As a result, the tragedy of the civil war ensued.

Russians killed Russians, brothers on brothers, and all sorts of political adventurers and foreign forces, who divided the country, tore it apart, reaping selfish gain.

We won’t let this happen again. We will protect both our people and our statehood from any threats, including those stemming from internal betrayal.

And what we are faced with is precisely a betrayal. Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests led to treason, to the betrayal of our country, our people, and the cause for which, side by side with our other units, the fighters and commanders of the Wagner Group fought and died. The heroes who liberated Soledar and Artyomovsk [Bakhmut], the cities and towns of Donbas, fought and gave their lives for Novorossia, for the unity of the Russian world. Their name and glory were also betrayed by those who are trying to organize a rebellion, pushing the country toward anarchy and fratricide, to defeat and, in the end, surrender.

That’s whistling in the wind, and by this time Putin knows it too. Allowing military force to exist outside the MoD was the fatal error by Putin made in desperation to get the oligarchical support he needed to launch a war of imperial aggression against Ukraine. That weapon has turned against him as the lies that Putin constructed to support the war have been exposed.

But even apart from that, the simple mathematics of logistics and manpower make the Ukraine war impossible for Putin now. The best use Putin can make of what’s left of his army is to get them out of Ukraine and send them back through the same path Prigozhin just took to relieve the Kremlin from a siege of Moscow. Whether or not Putin wants to admit it, his dream of “Novorossiya” is dead, and so is Putin if he doesn’t act quickly.

Alea iacta est.

Addendum: Putin did get one piece of good news from Ramzan Kadyrov this morning:

Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of Chechnya, has backed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s condemnation of the rebellion by Wagner Group, although some prominent figures have not yet commented on the mercenaries reportedly taking over Rostov-on-Don. …

Kadyrov expressed solidarity with Putin, writing on Telegram that his fighters, who have played a key role in Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “have already left for the zones of tension” and would “do everything to preserve the unity of Russia.”

A Putin loyalist, Kadyrov has at times sided with Prigozhin’s hawkish approach to the war, but has distanced himself from his recent criticism of military leaders. In the Telegram post, Kadyrov described the actions of the Wagner chief as a “vile betrayal.”

That’s not nothing, but Kadyrov’s forces are in Ukraine too and cut off by Prigozhin’s seizure of Rostov. He’ll have to fall back into Russia to do anything significant to save Putin, and that will also mean an effective end to their war in Ukraine.