Why Putin is Invincible

On June 24th, 2023, this man was all over the news.

Yevgeny Prigozhin was the leader of a private militia that's been fighting alongside the Russian military in Ukraine.

The problem, however, on June 24 was that he was going the wrong way.

That morning, his troops stormed Russian military headquarters in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.

By that afternoon, he was leading his troops toward the Russian capital of Moscow.

And along the way, he explained why.

Prigozhin was suddenly the most serious threat Russian president Vladimir Putin had ever faced.

The real surprise though was where he came from.

This was a threat coming from inside the house.

This was someone close to him who he had trusted and was really seen as a political ally.

For more than 20 years, Putin has constructed a seemingly impenetrable wall of secret police, intelligence agencies, and military groups around himself and used it to eliminate anyone who challenged his power, that is until one of them threatened to bring it all down.

So who are the ones that keep Putin in power and why did one of them rebel?

The Committee for State Security was the Soviet Union's notorious intelligence service and it's where this whole story begins.

The KGB consisted of hundreds of thousands of agents whose mission was to spy both in foreign countries and inside the Soviet Union.

It monitored Soviet dissidents, media organizations, and even members of the ruling Communist Party, all in service of one main goal, keeping the top leaders of the Soviet Union in power.

The KGB even spied on the military, the other major force keeping these leaders in power.

By pitting the KGB against the military, the Soviet leaders maintained a firm grip on power for decades until one day, they collapsed.

When the Soviet Union fell, so did the KGB, and the new Russian President Boris Yeltsin broke it up into several smaller agencies with distinct responsibilities.

The Federal Counter-intelligence Service was to prevent threats within Russia.

The Foreign Intelligence Service was in charge of spying in other countries.

The Federal Protective Service was to protect the president.

And others were responsible for things like border control, electronic eavesdropping, and even Russia's many secret underground bunkers.

These are Russia's security services.

In the 1990s, they were dysfunctional and weak, while around them, new factions were on the rise.

Rival politicians and a new class of ultrawealthy businessmen called oligarchs were battling for power under a weakening Yeltsin.

In the midst of all of this, a young Vladimir Putin had risen to the right place at the right time.

In the 1980s, Putin was a KGB officer in East Germany.

Then in the 90s, he went from a mid-level bureaucrat to the head of the FSK since renamed the FSB, then to the head of Russia's Security Council where he coordinated with all of Russia's security services.

When Yeltsin suddenly resigned, he chose the 47-year-old Putin to succeed him.

Putin immediately set out to consolidate power, and he started by calling on the only people he knew and believed he could trust.

The FSB was the security service that most resembled the old KGB, it even worked out of its old building.

Quickly after becoming president, Putin pulled the FSB directly under his command, then expanded many of its responsibilities and had it absorb other security services.

He then directed it to arrest oligarchs that didn't pledge loyalty to him and investigate rival politicians.

The FSB also trumped up fake charges against countless human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents.

This is how Putin captured so much power in the early 2000s.

He then elevated the other security services to create a new layer in the Russian state alongside the military and the sprawling Interior Ministry, the MVD.

Putin was pulling Russia's thousands of spies, police officers, and soldiers onto his side.

And like bricks in a wall, they blocked anyone from rising up against him.

Putin, who grew up with that KGB background, had a sense of how to use the security services to his own ends. They purposefully operate in the shadows.

Members and former members of these services were known as the siloviki, and Putin elevated several of them into his inner circle along with some trusted politicians and military leaders.

This was a collection of close confidants who Putin gave power and wealth to in exchange for their total subordination and loyalty - those influential members of the inner circle with the siloviki who worked with Putin before he was president, like the head of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, who worked with Putin in the KGB back in the 70s, same as the head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, and the head of the SVR, Sergei Naryshkin who worked with Putin in the 1990s.

Since they owed their positions to Putin, they helped keep this wall of security services and military firmly on Putin's side as he continued to eliminate challengers well into the 2010s.

The Russian leader doesn't even try to be subtle anymore.

Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is murdered steps from Red Square.

Alexei Navalny, who survived a poisoning from a nerve agent that CNN helped trace back to Russian intelligence and the FSB. Navalny is now in solitary confinement in one of Russia's most brutal penal colonies.

With all his challengers defeated, the only factions left that could hypothetically threaten his power were in the wall.

So Putin has developed some tactics to coup-proof it.

Putin and various Russian leaders before him have always harboured this fear of the threat from within.

First, Putin gives the security services overlapping responsibilities.

For example, the SVR, FSB, and military all have formed units in charge of spying in other countries.

And Putin has created a new service in charge of protecting himself, a responsibility long held by the FSO and MVD.

He's forcing the services to compete against each other for his favour.

Putin also has them spy on each other.

Just like under the Soviet Union, the FSB has many agents inside the military, and FSB agents are often arrested by other FSB agents.

Finally, Putin frequently purges personnel in these services.

If someone seems too ambitious, they're replaced with someone less threatening and more loyal.

Not even the members of his inner circle are safe from these purges.

Putin's tactics have purposely turned the services and those in the inner circle into bitter rivals so that if one of them rises up against him, the others will keep it in check.

So it was no surprise when Putin allowed a a new group to form.

Wagner is a militia that emerged around 2014.

Although it was technically illegal under Russian law, it quickly became one of Putin's most useful tools for achieving goals abroad.

Wagner helped the Russian military invade Ukraine in 2014 and helped it fight in Syria beginning in 2015.

Wagner also operated in several more countries that Russia had an interest in.

The person in charge of Wagner was named Yevgeny Prigozhin.

He was an entrepreneur who built several companies, including one that catered meals for the Kremlin, where he caught Putin's eye.

Prigozhin in his young adulthood was a criminal and he did eventually build up this business empire using this sort of gang mafia-style politics.

That sort of background and appetite to take on violence, to do whatever it takes to succeed, that really made him stand out to Putin.

So Putin had Prigozhin's Wagner work alongside the Russian military, and for years, they seemed to work well together, but that would change when Putin made the biggest mistake of his reign.

Hope you enjoyed this issue about Putin’s rise to power. I’ll continue this story and expand on Prigozhin’s attempted coup in tomorrow’s issue!,