Column: Bizarre standoff with Wagner Group’s Prigozhin weakens Putin. But don’t count him out
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group, leaves the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on June 24. “But it looks as if he’s still got most of the assets he needs to address them.” “People would like to find new evidence that Putin is vulnerable, but it may be overstated,” warned Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The power of wishful thinking.” These Russia scholars aren’t defending Putin, the brutality of his regime or his catastrophic decision to invade Ukraine. “There’s no better argument for term limits than Vladimir Putin,” Sestanovich said. By the time Prigozhin’s men were within 125 miles of the capital, “Putin was staring down the barrel of a gun,” Sestanovich said.
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