Adam Tooze: How Putin Overstretched His Military in Ukraine

Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder and leader of the private military organization Wagner Group, said he had 25,000 soldiers under his command last weekend as he mounted a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin. That compares with up to 1.15 million active-duty personnel estimated to be in the Russian military. And yet that disparity in size didn’t stop Prigozhin and Wagner from organizing a march on Moscow that started in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and nearly made it to the doorstep of the capital. Fears that the Putin regime could collapse were exaggerated in retrospect—but the events were an indication of how the state might eventually come apart.

Who were the decisive actors in resolving the mutiny? Is Putin weaker now than he was prior to the mutiny? And has Putin overcommitted his military to Ukraine?

Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts.

LISTEN HERE: For the entire conversation, and episodes in the weeks ahead on this subject and others, follow Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. 

Cameron Abadi: So, Adam, when we’re thinking about Prigozhin, is it best to essentially think of him as a warlord, although that’s a term that seems typically applied to far-off developing countries? And if he is a warlord, was the emergence of such a role an inevitable outgrowth of Putin’s divide-and-rule strategy at home, of having competing power centers in his government? Did that always imply some potential breakdown of the state’s monopoly of force?

Adam Tooze: Yeah, it’s a great question. When I think of a warlord, I think of 1920s China or a situation like that, where you’ve got generals with substantial forces competing for power in what is essentially a civil war situation. So in one nightmarish scenario, Russia descends into a situation in which one could imagine a Prigozhin-style figure as a warlord. But that really isn’t the situation that he grew out of. I mean, he was always pretty clearly an agent of the Russian state. In fact, I’m a little bit uncertain about whether one can really call the Wagner Group a private military organization. It’s a lot more like the kind of off-the-books black-ops group the CIA would run in setting up an air transport company so as to filter things in and out of Central America or Vietnam, Southeast Asia. That kind of a setup. It’s not even like Blackwater, a Western-style commercial, private military contractor. It’s something much closer to the state. I think broadly speaking, Wagner was just regarded as a sort of more or less deniable arm of Russian state power with the direct wire to Putin himself. And to that extent, it challenged the monopoly of force in the sense that it was part of the fragmentation of violence within the Russian state. But the key phrase in the Max Weber definition is the monopoly of legitimate force. And to the extent Prigozhin and Wagner were clearly doing the bidding, highly successfully, say, in Syria, of Putin himself, they were uber-legitimate. They were, in a sense, playing this weird dance of the seven veils where they were both there and not there. And the crucial thing everyone knew about them was that they had the say-so of Putin himself. So to that extent, they were the most legitimate of legitimate force, within the terms of the Russian power structure. And that’s flipped, and that’s why, in part, this is so damaging, though, obviously, it took time to develop this rift.

CA: As the mutiny came under way, who were revealed to be the key actors in the state whose allegiances would determine the final outcome? I mean, it seemed like this was a question of the allegiance of military and intelligence and other security agencies. And I wonder, does the relative irrelevance of economic actors at that kind of moment reveal something about the primacy of violence in state formation?

AT: Yeah, violence is clearly essential to state formation, but I don’t think it’s a matter of primacy so much as, you know, the particular role of violence at particular moments. And we think of a state as kind of continuously being made, and unmade, and remade, and so on. There are certain moments when violence is absolutely at the core of everything. And clearly, we know one of those moments is when you’ve got a column of 25,000 armed dudes rolling toward your capital city, and somebody has to stop them, and you’re drafting in mechanical diggers to build improvised tank traps on your motorways. At that point, obviously, violence is the key thing. But if you just step back one moment and ask, why does Wagner have tanks? As soon as you ask that question, you realize that economics comes roaring back. And I mean, Prigozhin, after all, has a much better claim to be a businessperson than he does to be a soldier. I mean, he was basically in his very first iteration a violent criminal, an armed-robbery kind of guy. And then he graduated into a politically connected business and then back into the violence business. I mean, I think his firm prospers, in part, because they’ve got a $1 billion contract to supply the Russian military with rations. So, you know, he’s turned military catering into a highly lucrative business. And apart from this, he is well-known to have used his influence in Africa to secure lucrative concessions there. So this really is very much in the manner of a private military contractor who’s in this for both political power but also with an interest to make money. And apparently, at least one truck has been confiscated with about $50 million in cash on board, which maybe was Wagner’s payroll. You know, you can’t do this without cash. And then say you succeed in seizing power, a military coup comes off. Then you have to negotiate with the central bank. You have to negotiate with the treasury. You have to negotiate with the business interests to figure out who’s going to pay taxes. So I think in the cycle of power, violence has its place. And there are moments where, you know, in the middle of a battle, violence is the decisive thing. But maintaining the battle, as we know from any modern war, is eminently an economic business.

CA: Yeah. Obviously, the central figure in all these events of the past week still is Vladimir Putin himself. And there’s been plenty of commentary about how Putin himself now seems weaker. And I wanted to ask, what does image—you know, because it does seem like we’re talking essentially about image and reputation—what exactly does that have to do with effective control of a country? I mean, is that just a mistaken understanding of what power really consists of?

AT: Yeah, I was thinking about this. Putin clearly feels the pressure, right? Because he’s gone out to the people now and had these televised sort of meet-and-greets, which are very unusual for him, because he clearly doesn’t enjoy it. And I think part of the derangement of his regime is to do with the self-imposed isolation that he’s gone into since COVID, which plays to part of his personality. And I don’t really quite know what image we’re left with. I mean, clearly a regime shaken. And this is not the frankly brilliant young Putin of the late ’90s and early 2000s, if you’ve seen this video of him giving a speech to the Bundestag and he comes across as one of the more lucid, eloquent, personally charismatic politicians of the early 21st century. It’s really quite striking. He’s a very, very powerful figure at that moment. And he doesn’t seem like that now.

CA: I guess, finally, I wanted to ask whether Putin has overcommitted his military to Ukraine. Is that one of the conclusions we can draw from this past week? I mean, how much military does a normal country need at home to respond to domestic instability or invasion along these lines?

AT: So, I mean, why don’t we just compare regimes with regard to the number of folks in uniform, soldiers, for want of a better word, they have in relation to population. And so can we do a spectrum here? And I mean, if we start with the U.S., you’re in the ballpark of 330 million inhabitants, 1.5 million in uniform, roughly speaking. So you’ve got a ratio of about 200, maybe 230 civilians per soldier. I mean, that kind of gives us an idea. Of course, you’d really want National Guard and police and all these kinds of numbers. It’s quite a complicated equation to this, but let’s stick with the soldiers, because that’s what we’re talking about here, because they’re the people that could be used in that way. So America has a ratio of one uniformed soldier for 230 civilians. And then you go to what you might think of as more classical European military powers. One of those is Russia. So the number you cited early on gives us an idea, right? So there’s about 143 million Russians. So if there’s about 1.2, 1.3 million Russians in uniform at any given moment, that’s a ratio of about 1-to-100. And that’s the same for Turkey as well. So it’s got conscription; it fights border wars. It’s also a regime that’s obviously entrusted with internal security. So that’s your kind of ratio. And that’s the kind of ratio classic conscription-based states would have had in the 19th or early 20th centuries, about 1-to-100. So Russia doesn’t stand out compared to that benchmark. But if you’re committing a substantial fraction of those to a war, you are dramatically weakening your domestic control capacity. If you go to really repressive regimes, like North Korea—so North Korea has a population of 26 million and 1.2 million men and women under arms. So that’s a ratio of 20 inhabitants for every soldier. So that’s 1-in-5. Eritrea, I think, maybe many people regard as perhaps the most repressive regime in the world: 3.6 million inhabitants, 200,000 soldiers. So that’s a ratio of 1-to-18. So that’s a nation at arms, really. That’s really extraordinarily intense. Many people may be wondering where China is on this scale. Well, the thing with China is it’s just so big. I mean, how big could its army possibly be? And so China’s ratio comes out more around 1-to-500. So about twice the number of civilians that there are in the U.S. But I think that’s the result of having 1.4 billion people, so even with an army of 3.3 million or whatever, the ratio is still different from the United States. So I think Russia is kind of in the middle of this. It’s kind of in the classic conscription-based European military power. And so for a society like that, yes, when it is committed to the kind of scale of effort that Russia is making in Ukraine, it’s not by any means an all-out war, because if it were, all of the troops would be at the front, and they’re clearly not. But a very large percentage is. And that definitely means you’re stretched thin. And I think it did become pretty obvious that the resources that Moscow had at its disposal to immediately stop the Wagner column was pretty light, actually.