EP199 · Society · first published 2023-06-29
Prigozhin against Putin | Pekka Toveri | Negotiator 199
MP and former head of Finnish military intelligence Pekka Toveri reviews Wagner's midsummer mutiny a week after the events. The operation was, he says, competently planned — heavy transporters in place, logistics arranged, Rostov secured the rear — until Prigozhin lost his nerve. The best structural explanation concerns why Prigozhin was allowed to rage at all: in the good tsar, bad boyars model he served as a lightning rod, so the accusations never reached Putin. The mutiny exposed four things: the rear is empty, nobody defended, information does not move inside the administration, and a dictator does not get accurate information. Toveri dismisses the staged-coup theory with two arguments. It closes on the counteroffensive: a Russian defence 20 to 30 kilometres deep whose first line has not yet been broken. Published 29 June 2023.
Prigozhin against Putin | Pekka Toveri
Summary: In episode 199 Sami Miettinen interviews Pekka Toveri — MP, former major general and head of Finnish military intelligence — about the Wagner mutiny over midsummer and its consequences. Recorded a week after the events, and the channel’s first episode as a NATO member. Published 29 June 2023.
What happened at midsummer
Toveri’s characterisation sets the tone: “a typical Russian operation, an attempted mutiny”. The sequence: after the capture of Bakhmut, the bulk of Wagner’s forces had been pulled out of the line for resupply and reorganisation. With those forces they marched from Ukraine across the Russian border — the FSB’s border troops did nothing to stop them. They went to Rostov, where the Southern Military District headquarters directing the war against Ukraine sits, and took it. From there a smaller part, around 5,000 troops, continued north; Voronezh was taken on the way, and the march continued “without anyone seriously stopping it”, until the deal was announced and they turned back.
Toveri’s assessment of the operation’s quality is what makes this interesting: it was competently planned. American sources said it had been prepared for some time — the heavy transporters were in place, logistics were arranged, and taking Rostov secured the rear so that moving troops quickly from the Ukrainian front towards Moscow would have been difficult. “But then Prigozhin lost his nerve halfway through.”
The losses were real
Prigozhin claimed no Russian blood was spilled. Toveri lists otherwise: around twenty aircrew died, and exceptionally valuable equipment was lost — two Mi-8 electronic warfare variants, of which Russia has perhaps twenty and has already lost six in the war, and Il-20 command post aircraft, of which there are perhaps half a dozen in total. As Miettinen puts it, nobody can fake that. These are capabilities Russia has few of.
Why Prigozhin was allowed to shout
The episode’s best structural explanation concerns why Prigozhin could publicly rage about ammunition shortages and insult the defence minister at all. Toveri’s answer is the good tsar, bad boyars model: the tsar is good and wants fine things, but the boyars beneath him ruin it. Playing the cliques off against each other ensures no power centre forms that could turn on Putin — they spend their energy fighting each other. Putin sits above the fight and becomes the referee when needed.
And there is a second function, the episode’s sharpest single observation: Prigozhin served as a lightning rod. When the war goes badly and people are angry, he is allowed to attack the military leadership — the accusations do not reach Putin, and Putin applauds him for doing the dirty work.
Miettinen’s addition: the capture of Bakhmut personalised to Prigozhin, while the inability to advance personalised to Shoigu and the army. When Shoigu then demanded Wagner be folded into the army, it was simply, on Toveri’s reading, that a line had been crossed — and the best way to take a man’s power is to take away his armed force.
Lukashenko’s deal, and on whose terms
Miettinen notes that Putin’s speech named neither Prigozhin nor Shoigu, and appealed to history — the 1917 civil war and the Russo-Japanese war. Toveri’s explanation is direct: Putin has no future to offer his people, so it is better to talk about the past.
Lukashenko’s motive is, in Toveri’s reading, self-interested and logical: if Putin falls, Lukashenko falls after him, because his power rests on Putin. He simultaneously raises his own profile and earns a debt of gratitude.
The deal had two tiers, and that is its problem. For Prigozhin: financial wellbeing and position secured, no prosecution, permission to continue operations in Africa and Syria. For Wagner’s men: you may join the defence ministry’s forces. Toveri says this has caused bitterness, and a video came out of the Wagner ranks — “what the hell, we set off to take Moscow and this is the result”.
Miettinen’s summary of what Putin’s word is worth is the episode’s most quotable line: relying on it is “quite a leap into the void without any kind of parachute” — he is not known for keeping promises, except the promise that he will come and kill you. Toveri agrees that Shoigu and Gerasimov are not about to change jobs quickly, and that rather than immunity the likelier outcome is that no trial is sought at all. He also does not expect Prigozhin to stay long in Belarus, because Russia’s security and intelligence services operate there freely.
What the mutiny revealed about Russia
This section carries furthest.
First: the rear is empty. The bulk of Russia’s operational ground forces are tied up in Ukraine, and Prigozhin knew it. Toveri’s dry observation: “a traffic policeman is poorly placed to stop a tank.” Russia has not been able to protect even its border areas from raids by Russian volunteer fighters.
Second: nobody defended. For Toveri the most striking thing was not Prigozhin’s popularity but that dozens of officials, governors and generals did not appear in the media to affirm their loyalty — everyone watched to see what would happen. In Rostov the public supported him, but Toveri’s reading is that this is not about love for him: it is that Putin is not liked, and here was someone who dared trip up the dictatorship.
Third: information does not move. In the Russian administration the service branches do not talk to each other, nor do the levels of army command, nor the ministries. There is no culture of cooperation, because information is power and is kept. Which is why even the news that a column was crossing the border did not reach the right people.
Fourth: the dictator’s information problem. A leader long in power and surrounded by yes-men does not get accurate information, because things can go badly for the messenger. Toveri adds a further turn: now that there is some unrest, information may also be withheld deliberately, because there may be advantage in it.
A staged coup? Toveri dismisses it
Miettinen raises the conspiracy theory that this was a Putin–Prigozhin play to flush out traitors, with Erdogan’s Turkey in 2016 as the comparison — which Miettinen himself considers a genuine coup attempt, after which the armed forces, education system and administration were purged.
Toveri’s answer has two parts and is convincing. First, the motive is missing: Putin lost face here and looks like a weak leader, and now has to take measures to shore up his position. Second, the means point the other way: Putin has tens of thousands of operatives in the FSB and entirely unrestricted ability to tap phones, read email and use facial recognition to see who meets whom. “Is there really no other way to expose traitors than to stage a play like this?”
And he adds an argument that generalises: if Putin were a cunning long-game schemer, why has the war in Ukraine been sixteen months of one blunder after another? “You have a leaking boat that keeps taking on new holes.”
What Ukraine gained
Less than one would hope. Toveri’s assessment is that at best the mutiny would have pulled forces off the front and offered an opening — but because information did not move, units simply carried on with their assigned tasks. The front is in practice where it was. One likely lasting effect is that Wagner’s men — backed by a billion, better paid and better supplied — will not be keen to return to the trenches under the defence ministry. Toveri’s observation about mercenary firms is bluntly balanced: discipline is merciless and people are executed without trial, but equipment, logistics and treatment are better than in the armed forces, which is why recruitment works better too.
The state of the counteroffensive
The closing half is a military assessment, and is best read as a forecast rather than a verdict.
The destruction of the Kakhovka dam shifted the centre of gravity east. Ukrainian forces had previously operated across the river with light infantry; the dam’s destruction blocked attacks for a time, and although the flow has settled, a larger operation would require substantial pontoon and ferrying equipment that Ukraine may not have in sufficient quantity.
The Russian defences between Zaporizhzhia and Mariupol get the episode’s most thorough description: at worst a position 20 to 30 kilometres deep. Forward reception positions and company strongpoints two or three kilometres back, extensive obstacles and minefields; then the first defensive line with anti-tank obstacles, ditches and trenches; behind it an intermediate zone with reserves, artillery and command posts; then a second, equivalent defensive position; and behind that, in depth, reconnaissance areas and command centres. Ukraine has not, on Toveri’s understanding, yet broken through even the first line.
On equipment: Leopards have been seen; Challengers are in country at one or two companies, 20–30 vehicles in a single brigade; Abrams are not yet in country and delivery was promised to be accelerated into the summer. Bradleys are plentiful. Britain’s Storm Shadow is, in Toveri’s view, more significant than HIMARS because range and warhead are larger; it is used against operationally significant targets — bridges, command posts, logistics hubs — and in one video a Pantsir system fired at it twice and missed both times.
On reserves: Toveri estimates around a dozen mechanised brigades, some with Western equipment, plus ten or so national guard brigades — a force of around twenty brigades, of which far from all have been committed. Meanwhile partisan and precision strikes continue against Russian logistics and command systems, probing for weak points. As he puts it: the main attack has not begun.
Miettinen offers an alternative — abandon the Zaporizhzhia breakthrough and push on the Donetsk eastern front below Bakhmut to the Russian border. Toveri points out that September’s Kharkiv success came against a substantially thinner and less fortified defence; the comparison does not hold.
Liberated villages and the timescale
The liberated area is around 7 per cent against the 11 per cent Russia took after 2022. Toveri sets the scale honestly: a dozen or so villages and a few hundred square kilometres, against tens of thousands still to be liberated — at this rate it is a long project. The symbolic value is real all the same: in Donbas, areas lost nearly a decade ago have been retaken.
An MP’s first weeks
The episode closes personally. Toveri thanks his voters and says politics has so far felt more positive than he expected — though he suspects the realities will show in the autumn. He has been placed on the defence committee, which he considers fortunate, because there he can work on things he knows well.
His reason for entering politics is direct: Russia is a long-term threat and there is an unstable nuclear state next door, so readiness must not be allowed to fall in either internal or external security.
And the episode’s last thought is the one he raises as most important. At the defence committee’s inaugural meeting everyone stressed that things are done together for the country and that party politics has not intruded. If common defence were turned into a party-political question and unity were lost, that would, Toveri says, be a very bad thing — and unity is an important signal outwards.
A note on the source
There are no gaps in the transcription, but this episode’s automatic transcription is clearly the weakest in the batch: Russian and Ukrainian names and military terminology are badly mangled. The cleaned cue file corrects the names against the publisher’s own chapter list — Prigozhin, Shoigu, Gerasimov, Bakhmut, Lukashenko, Voronezh, Rostov — and the identifiable terms (Kakhovka dam, Zaporizhzhia, Mariupol, Donbas, Kharkiv, FSB, Storm Shadow, HIMARS, Pantsir, Stryker, Bradley, Abrams, Il-20, Mi-8).
Numeric values were not corrected, because an imprecision of speech cannot be distinguished from a transcription error. At least one figure in the episode is clearly wrong (Storm Shadow’s range), and this article does not repeat the episode’s numbers except where they are internally consistent. Individual unclear expressions were likewise not guessed at.
The episode was transcribed with MacWhisper and the transcript carries no speaker labels; with a single guest the speakers are reliably distinguishable.
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Prigozin vs Vladmir Putin | Pekka Toveri | Neuvottelija 199.