Putin has been exposed as a 'lame duck,' experts say: 'I have the feeling he is not really running the country'

• Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion is over but the damage to Vladimir Putin is irreversible, experts say.
• The Wagner boss showed that the Russian president no longer enjoys a monopoly of force in his country.

Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion may have abruptly ended before Wagner's forces entered Moscow, but the very fact that a warlord and thousands of his soldiers were able to threaten the capital — and that a foreign leader had to step in to negotiate a peace deal — is a humiliating blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin from which he will never fully recover, experts said in the wake of a remarkable 48 hours.

The mutiny was not, ostensibly, about Putin at all.

In his public remarks, Prigozhin directed his criticism at Russia's military leaders, accusing them of mismanaging the war in Ukraine and undermining his private military company — the culmination of a months-long feud, coming just days before the Ministry of Defense was set to formally take over control of groups such as Wagner.

But, experts say, Russians will not soon forget the sight of mercenaries seizing military installations, capturing a city home to more than one million people, and marching to within striking distance of the Kremlin, prompting emergency "counter-terrorist" measures and a desperate attempt to thwart Wagner's advance by tearing up the road into Moscow.

Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and author of the book, "All the Kremlin's Men," told The New Yorker that Prigozhin, a former prisoner whose brand of populist "straight talk" has won him a massive following on social media — and who may have larger political ambitions — effectively exposed Putin as the sort of out-of-touch elite he used to decry. The student became the master, or at least threatened to.

"There came a moment when Prigozhin was no longer Putin's puppet," Zygar said. "Pinocchio became a real boy."

Zygar added that, while the crisis was staved off following the intervention of Belarus President Alexsandr Lukashenko, the damage is done:

"Putin is weaker. I have the feeling he is not really running the country. Certainly, not the way he once did. He is still President, but all the different clans now have the feeling that 'Russia after Putin' is getting closer. Putin is still alive. He is still there in his bunker. But there is the growing feeling that he is a lame duck, and they have to prepare for Russia after Putin."

That assessment was shared by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank. Researchers with the group said the mutiny, though it did not topple the government, embarrassed Putin before friend and foe alike, revealing that he no longer enjoys a monopoly of force within his own country:

The optics of Belarusian President Lukashenko playing a direct role in halting a military advance on Moscow are humiliating to Putin and may have secured Lukashenko other benefits.

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Suggestions that Prigozhin's rebellion, the Kremlin's response, and Lukashenko's mediation were all staged by the Kremlin are absurd. The imagery of Putin appearing on national television to call for the end of an armed rebellion and warning of a repeat of the 1917 revolution — and then requiring mediation from a foreign leader to resolve the rebellion — will have a lasting impact. The rebellion exposed the weakness of the Russian security forces and demonstrated Putin's inability to use his forces in a timely manner to repel an internal threat and further eroded his monopoly on force.

A senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, Andrew Kolesnikov, told the Wall Street Journal that both Prigozhin and Putin, his erstwhile ally, were harmed by Saturday's aborted march on the capital. Prigozhin's tough talk was followed by an apparent deal that will see him exiled to Belarus, with Putin also now seen as a man whose actions cannot live up to his rhetoric, according to Kolesnikov, who was in Moscow on Saturday.

"The entire system has lost yesterday, including Prigozhin, who is also part of the system," Kolesnikov said. "Turned out that the czar is not a real czar because he couldn't control a man from his own system who's supposed to be under his full control."

Mick Ryan, who served as a major general in the Australian military before joining the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Insider's Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert that the mutiny signals the beginning of the end for Putin's regime.

"Putin's authority has been challenged openly and he hasn't come out looking very good," Ryan said, adding that, "somewhere down the track when we look at the fall of Putin, this was where it began."

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