5 July 2023

Adam Tooze: How Putin Overstretched His Military in Ukraine

Cameron Abadi

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.

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