Prigozhin’s Rebellion Ended: What It Means for Ukraine and World

June 25, 2023March 18, 2026

Yesterday’s Wagner march on Moscow we assess with a big plus sign for an entirely understandable reason. It’s clear the character surnamed Pootin has become so disgusting that every Ukrainian wishes he wouldn’t make it to The Hague but would instead travel straight to hell with many transfers — far more transfers than Gaddafi got, so he could feel all the nuances of the process. So any events leading to such a scenario look encouraging, even yesterday’s. But Prigozhin’s rebellion ended without achieving its stated goals, revealing something perhaps more important than regime change.

In reality, yesterday we observed a process directly opposite to what could lead to long-term positive changes on our northern and eastern borders after Pootin’s liquidation. Essentially, Wagner’s rebellion was an attempted coup in the reverse direction. An even more fascist grouping than the one sitting in the Kremlin raised it. By the way, it got support from part of society dissatisfied that Pootin still hasn’t managed to destroy Ukraine. Prigozhin’s statements that Shoigu and Gerasimov don’t know how to fight and wasted huge numbers of military personnel weren’t made to show the criminality of the war itself, but to show that Shoigu and Gerasimov can’t properly organize the war’s conduct.

Who Supported Prigozhin — And Why That Matters

Precisely these statements about the needlessly destroyed career army found resonance among the Rabid Federation’s population, which supported the putschists. By the way, that part of army figures who came out on Prigozhin’s side also want a more proper and organized war with Ukraine. Here we should pay attention to a very important fact. Yesterday truly saw an attempted military coup. True, Western analysts assessed the putsch’s prospects as meager and doomed to failure. But tonight showed these events truly scared all the ruling public in Moscow. Besides everything undertaken to stop the capital’s storming, today we didn’t see continuation of the missile terror cycle observed in previous days.

According to the already-tested algorithm, today should have seen a massive missile-drone attack. Moreover, the missile part of the attack should have been ensured not by cruise missiles but by ballistics and/or aero-ballistics. This is precisely that Putin signature called “thirst for escalation”. Having fired one of the most powerful cruise missile packages ever the day before — 50+ — the indicated continuation simply begged to happen. Especially since many surely noticed the enemy tries to use low cloud cover so missile strikes can be flavored with drones, which in such case become invisible to small arms means of destruction based on visual target detection. Today all night long, clouds hung over the capital and rain fell.

In other words, continuation simply begged for this very night, but it didn’t follow. This stems from Moscow trying to come to its senses and somehow adapt to the new reality after Prigozhin’s rebellion ended so abruptly. But what nobody saw has far more important significance.

The Silence of “Democratic Opposition”

The fact is, the regime yesterday truly stood on the brink of major upheavals. This was not just the best but the ideal moment for “not such Russians” to act and all those who talked about hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who want but can’t return the country to democracy’s path. Well, yesterday was precisely that moment.

In this case, it doesn’t matter who initiated events or how they developed. What matters: the Kremlin showed its vulnerability. The same Moscow remained without punitive forces’ cover — they advanced to intercept Wagner. And then — silence and emptiness. Nobody went into the streets. Nobody took up arms. There weren’t even calls to do something similar. Instead, various Khodorkovskys and figures he feeds started singing odes and cantatas to Prigozhin, who outdid even Girkin in his ultra-fascism. Put simply, at this moment Prigozhin with his sledgehammer and convicts merged in unified ecstasy with Khodorkovskys, Navalnys, and various Yulia-Latyninаs on the other side.

For some short time period, events showed this entire freak show’s essence. Prigozhin showed what few could expect. Until yesterday he played on charisma. Now he showed 90% that this wasn’t charisma but a dildo in manipulators’ skilled hands. If there’s charisma, there’s no way back — that’s what charisma is. But this was a Russian putsch, and like everything Russian, of maximally low quality. Prigozhin’s rebellion ended the way all Russian rebellions end — with a whimper, not a bang.

Why Yesterday’s Events Still Help Ukraine

But even if we’re not talking about Pootin’s removal, the consequences of yesterday’s events will still be serious and positive for Ukraine even though Prigozhin’s rebellion ended without regime change. The aggressor country after these events will no longer be that unconditional and monolithic herd it was until this moment. Now everyone sees you can divide it fairly easily. You just need to know where and how to apply efforts.

Moreover, these same events showed one more important moment. This viper’s nest has no prospects of moving toward civilization simply because there’s no public demand for it there. There’s not a single force that could excite this demand, express it, and lead the struggle to exit the wilderness of authoritarianism. By the way, if Prigozhin had managed to occupy the Kremlin, authoritarianism in the federation would have ended. A new era of dictatorship would have begun — but already a thieves’ dictatorship, as it was under Lenin and especially Stalin, who was a thief and thug.

In general, subsequent events will show the essence of what’s happening there and what Pootin paid off the grouping behind Prigozhin with. We need to understand a simple truth: no friendly relations with the Rotten Federation will exist in 100 or 200 years. Moreover, there won’t even be “democratic opposition” there, since yesterday clearly showed that all who call themselves such are imitators living off exploiting this image.

Result is positive

But the outcome is still positive. Achieving such a blow to aviation EW means would be difficult by other means. Three EW helicopters and a reconnaissance plane in just one day is quite a good result. Plus damage to dual-purpose infrastructure in the enemy’s deep rear. They didn’t even have to spend ammunition on the same Voronezh refinery. So the pluses from the failed putsch are obvious. We wish them — let them have more such upheavals more often. We will win!