The Wagner ‘Coup’ Was Staged by Putin—and the West Fell for It

By now, everyone has heard about the narrowly avoided coup in Russia: Last Friday night, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, one of Putin’s most trusted allies and the commander of the notorious Russian mercinary Wagner Group, marched on Moscow in an apparent coup d’etat, only to come to a swift agreement with Vladimir Putin and decamp for Belarus. While most commentators acknowledged that things didn’t quite add up, the “expert” class happily concluded that at least it had weakened Putin in his war against Ukraine.

None seemed to realize the obvious truth: The coup was staged, and completely faked false flag operation.

Think about it: An army invades Russia, race right up to Moscow, and no one gets hurt? With just a few thousand men, it achieved what Hitler with almost a million men wasn’t able to? And Putin holds his military back? And then, with Moscow supposedly within his grasp, Prigozhin decides, “Oh well, never mind” and heads to Belarus?

Prigozhin would have had to be an idiot or suicidal to think that with 8,000 men he could invade Moscow. Yet Prigozhin is very smart man, a juvenile delinquent turned convict, then hot dog salesman, then CEO of a multi-million dollar catering business serving the Kremlin, to finally commander of the world’s most formidable mercenary force. It is utterly implausible that Prigozhin thought that he could take on Rosgvardia, Russia’s National Guard, a 340,000-strong domestic security force reporting directly Putin.

And then there was the footage of Prigozhin sitting a bench in Rostov-on-Don, bantering amiably with Russia’s deputy minister of defense, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and deputy head of the Russian military intelligence, the GRU, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev. It was just too chummy for a true rebellion.

That Prigozhin is still alive, having supposedly betrayed the Russian motherland, is inconceivable under the rule of Putin, who famously said in 2019 that “treason is the biggest crime on earth” and who hunts down traitors anywhere on the globe, including in the United States.

The “coup” was staged. The only question is, why would Putin stage such an elaborate deception?

And the answer is politics. The Russian strongman is up for re-election on March 17, 2024. With no end in sight to the Russia-Ukraine war, Putin has to convince the Russians of the need to bear even more sacrifices in order to maintain popular support for the war in Ukraine. Putin achieved this by appealing to two primordial fears of the Russian people: invasion from the West and chaos.

In his address on Saturday, the capstone of this whole charade, Putin asserted that the West was behind Prigozhin mutiny, which he likened to the 1917 revolution. As Putin knows, if you want to scare a Russian, tell them they are going to go through the horror and disorder of the Bolshevik revolution again. These claims became the pretext for Putin to gain more power, not less. He declared a “counter-terrorism operation,” effectively marshal law, requiring extreme security measures, including constant monitoring of citizens communications. And he reversed the rule that prohibited people with a criminal record from joining the military, which will enable additional military mobilization.

And the Russian media predictably cheered the dear leader for saving Mother Russia and “chasing away” the traitors.

Of course, what Russians view as strength—Putin was able to squash a major armed mutiny—Western media and Biden’s “experts” interpreted as weakness. And this, too, is as Putin wants it. The perception in the West that he is weak and his military is incompetent suggests that the West need not provide so much assistance to Ukraine, a key goal of Putin’s.

Putin is also reminding the world that the longer the Ukraine war continues, the greater the chance for unpredictable consequences, like, say, nuclear Armageddon. As Prigozhin’s troops rolled up the M4 highway to Moscow, commentators fretted about the chaos and who was in control of Russia’s nukes.

There’s an entire doctrine in the Russian military science called Reflexive Control, which is designed to trick the enemy by serving him information he is likely to believe because of his pre-existing bias. Team Biden is already there.

Meanwhile, the Wagner Group has used its trip to Moscow to land itself in Belarus, which just received a gift of tactical nuclear weapons from Putin. This points to yet another potential goal of the false flag operation: opening a second front to Ukraine’s north while directly threatening NATO‘s eastern flank with the weapons of Armageddon. This time, Putin is doing it with Russia’s most effective fighting force.

Rebekah Koffler is the president of Doctrine & Strategy Consulting, a former DIA intelligence officer, and the author of  “Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America.” She also wrote the foreword for “Zelensky: The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero Who Defied Putin and United the World.“

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.