Putin turns to smear campaign in power move

Russian President Vladimir Putin turns to a familiar playbook to bolster his authority: a smear campaign against Yevgeny Prigozhin, the military leader of the Wagner Group who led a brief mutiny against the Kremlin.

Public opinion against Prigozhin dropped sharply in the days following the rebellion.

Putin therefore moved quickly to discredit Prigozhin’s public image.

Putin ordered the state to dismantle the Wagner business empire, including its military, internet troll farms, and gold and other mineral mining operations on the African continent. And a Russian state media report published what it said was footage of a police raid on one of Prigozhin’s lavish homes in St Petersburg – pointing to weapons, cash, gold bricks, wigs and several passports in a space filled with ornate furniture, an indoor pool and outdoor helicopter pad.

These kinds of gestures are aimed at discrediting Prigozhin’s image among the public, who regard him as a frontline warrior in the Russian war in Ukraine, which has called Russian generals incompetent and corrupt.

“Showing Prigozhin’s wealth is a way to undermine his anti-elite message to the population,” said Mary Glantz, senior adviser to the Russia and Europe Center at the U.S. Institute for Peace.

While the Kremlin initially said criminal charges against Prigozhin would be dropped in exchange for his exile to Belarus, the leader of the mercenary group appears to be in Russia.

“The media hit usually precedes the real hit,” said Brian Whitmore, nonresident senior fellow at the Eurasia Center with the Atlantic Council, during a panel discussion Thursday.

“So I’m watching this closely, and the first thing that came to mind when all this happened – come to the king, you better not miss, Prigozhin missed.”

A poll by the Russia-based Levada Center showed public favor for Prigozhin dropped by half – from around 58% to 30% – in the days immediately before and after the attempt. of mutiny. Polls recorded 22% support for Prigozhin in early July.

Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, said the polling firm was in the midst of a monthly door-to-door survey and it gave them a unique insight into how public opinion has changed from one day to day.

Most of those interviewed appeared to have learned of the Prighozin mutiny from remarks by Putin or other government sources and after it was largely resolved, influencing their negative views of the Wagner leader, Volkov wrote in analysis.

Volkov said their poll did not damage Putin’s reputation, with the majority holding a “positive-neutral assessment” and wanting to see him re-elected in Russia’s 2024 presidential elections, which are due to be held in March 2024.

While Levada is considered one of the few reputable polling companies in Russia, It is the data is collected in a culture where critical discourse against the government and the military is tightly controlled and where almost all independent information and analysis is blocked in the country.

And while criticism, opposition, disagreements and debates are present in the Russian media environment, they are often blunted or undermined by a stronger, government-backed effort to promote propaganda and sow confusion and distrust.

“They [Russia] do a good job of changing the subject…it’s kind of what they often do, and so it’s more like information chaos,” said Jonathan Teubner, founder and CEO of Filter Labs, which uses intelligence artificial to comb through online communications in Russia to follow public opinion.

If informational chaos serves to discourage public opinion from mobilizing a unified opposition, it also has the disadvantage of weakening efforts to organize support.

“What we’re seeing now is that they probably need to motivate their population to believe something or do something, and they’re really bad at it,” Teubner said.

“They don’t have another playbook.”

Western intelligence said the Prigozhin mutiny – which was launched and aborted for a chaotic 36 hours late last month – presented the most serious challenge to Putin’s rule in Russia in more than two decades.

But the United States, its allies and its experts held back from predicting the Russian leader’s rapid fall from power.

“People are going to kind of talk about how weak Putin is, and why didn’t he follow through on what he said…but there’s a story of him kind of adopt these less direct approaches to solving problems,” said Peter Shroeder, a former senior US intelligence official focused on Russia and who is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Putin made a rare televised public address in the early hours of the Prighozin rebellion – which broke out in earnest on June 24 – promising to punish the mutineers and calling the acts treason and terrorism.

But with the intervention of authoritarian Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Putin backed down from his public threats, saying Prigozhin and his band of mercenaries could take refuge in Belarus. Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, dropped criminal charges against Wagner’s chief.

Schroeder called the episode “striking”, adding that Putin could face consequences if he does not follow through on his words.

“Putin might not care about perceptions and believe that by controlling state media he can control the narrative. But how the elites view Putin matters; it matters how they will act in the future,” he said. “And he won’t be able to hide the fact that he let the rivalry between Prigozhin and the Russian military rulers go on for too long and had to scramble to avoid a worse outcome.”

Building public support is a key way to fend off faltering elite loyalty, USIP’s Glantz said, and it likely prompted Putin to make a surprise visit and walk among the public in the southern territory of Russia, Dagestan, a few days after Prigozhin’s retreat from his march on Moscow.

The video and images showed Putin taking selfies with supporters in the street, at one point kissing a little girl on the forehead.

It was a shocking visit for a leader who has largely withdrawn from public life, adopting strict isolation policies around COVID-19 and welcoming visitors, from his closest advisers to foreign leaders, in cavernous rooms. on a 20 foot table.

“One of the things he’s used to help maintain his control over the elites is his ability to say ‘people are with me,'” Glantz said.

“That’s one of the reasons why he went to Dagestan, is to be with the people and to show the elites around him: ‘Listen, don’t assume that Prigozhin has their support and I don’t. ‘”

Glantz added that Putin was cautious, moving slowly to retribution – taking away Prigozhin’s wealth, weapons and power – and asserting himself as more committed to running the state.

“It’s kind of a familiar playbook,” she said. “I think he’s going back to more active management, to asserting that he makes decisions and knows what to do and to try to re-establish that he may not be as weak or incompetent as he is. seems so.”