Putin turns to smear campaign in power move

Russian President Vladimir Putin is turning to a familiar playbook in shoring up his authority: a smear campaign against Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group military leader who led a brief mutiny against the Kremlin. 

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

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

Putin has directed 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 were images from a police raid on one of Prigozhin’s palatial homes in St. Petersburg — pointing out weapons, cash, gold bricks, wigs and multiple passports in a space filled with ornate furnishings, an indoor pool and a helicopter pad outside.

Those kinds of moves are meant to discredit Prigozhin’s image among the public, who see him as a warrior on the frontline of Russia’s war in Ukraine calling out Russian generals as incompetent and corrupt.

“Showing the wealth that Prigozhin has is a way to undercut his anti-elite message amongst the population,” said Mary Glantz, senior advisor for the Russia and Europe Center for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).

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

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

“So I’m watching this closely, and the first thing that came into my mind when this all went down — come at the king, you best not miss, Prigozhin missed.”

Polling by the Russian-based Levada Center documented public favorability of Prigozhin dropping by half — from about 58 percent to 30 percent — in the days immediately before and after the attempted mutiny. Polling recorded 22 percent favorability of Prigozhin in early July. 

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

Most respondents appeared to have learned about Prighozin’s 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 an analysis. 

Volkov said their polling found little damage to Putin’s reputation, with a majority holding a “positive-neutral assessment” and indicating that they would like to see him re-elected in Russia’s 2024 presidential elections, set to take place in March 2024. 

While Levada is considered one of the few reputable polling agencies left in Russia, its data is collected in a culture where critical speech against the government and military is heavily policed, and nearly all independent news and analysis are 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 mistrust. 

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

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

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

“They don’t have another playbook.”

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

But the U.S, allies and experts have held back on predicting the Russian leader’s quick fall from power.

“People will sort of talk about this that Putin is weak, and why didn’t he follow through on what he said … but there is a history of him sort of taking these less straightforward approaches to resolving challenges,” said Peter Schroeder, a former senior U.S. intelligence official focused on Russia who serves as a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security.

Putin made a rare televised public address in the initial hours of Prighozin’s rebellion — which broke out in earnest on June 24 — promising to deliver punishment against the mutineers and describing the acts as treason and terrorism. 

But with the intervention of Belarusian authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Putin backed off 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 the Wagner head. 

Schroeder called the episode “striking,” adding that Putin could face consequences for not following through on his words.  

“Putin might not care about the perceptions and believe that through control of state media, he can control the narrative. But, how elites view Putin does matter; it matters to 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 leadership go on too long and that he had to scramble to prevent a worse outcome.”

Shoring up public support is a key way to push back against faltering loyalty among the elite, said USIP’s Glantz, and that likely prompted Putin to make a surprise visit and walk among the public in the southern Russian territory of Dagestan, days after Prigozhin’s retreat from his march on Moscow.

Video and images showed Putin taking selfies with supporters on 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, enacting strict isolation policies around COVID-19 and hosting visitors, from his closest advisors to foreign leaders, in cavernous rooms across a 20-foot table. 

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

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

Glantz added that Putin is being cautious, carrying out retribution slowly — taking away Prigozhin’s wealth, weapons and power — and asserting himself as more engaged in managing the state.

“It is sort of a familiar playbook,” she said. “I think he’s returning to the more active management, to assert that he’s making decisions and he knows what to do and to try and reestablish that maybe he’s not as weak or incompetent as he seems.”