Well, what a few days it was for weekend soldiers and armchair generals. I suggested when Yevgeny Prigozhin started his mutiny that he may find himself like the revolutionaries in Les Miserables, isolated with no one else rallying to his banner and so things turned out. I warned that he might end up like the Grand Old Duke of York, marching his men up to Moscow and back again. Well, as quickly as it all kicked off, it ended with a negotiated settlement that had Prigozhin standing down his men and heading off into semi exile in Belarus.
It still seems uncertain as to whether he got anything he asked for. One suspects that a wily player like Putin will in fact have given nothing away in the end and Prigozhin will be watching his back from now on. Many suspect that his days are numbered. However, things don’t look brilliant for Putin either. Russian leaders don’t tend to survive long after coups, even aborted/failed ones. Putin looks even further weakened today than he did by his failure to complete the invasion of Ukraine. Watching Generals will have noted how easy it was for a small private army to get that close to Moscow. Indeed, their own mobilisation of troops on the street and the arrival of Chezhen mercenaries too may well enable other key players to plan for their next move.
What was fascinating though over the weekend was the ability of people to see what they wanted to see and to stick with that in the face of all evidence and all events. Now, this may well have included those who were over optimistically announcing the immediate collapse of Russia but there were others too.
There has been a significant, vocal body in the US, especially among Donald Trump supporters who have seen the West’s support for Ukraine as a terrible error, or worse. They argue that American military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine is a waste, that they’ve been conned and that they should be prioritising America first. Some of those people spent much of Saturday insisting that the whole event was engineered by the CIA. They could only conceive of one reason as to why Wagner might turn on Putin, Prigozhin must have been bunged some serious cash to do it.
Even when the mutiny was called off, they were still insisting that the CIA had been involved. Progozhin by this stage had decided that having collected his pay packet from the CIA that it was time to accept a better offer to return to Putin’s fold. All of this seemed to presume that the CIA having staked a lot on this coup would not have foreseen such an eventuality, hadn’t prepared the wider ground for a coup and had thrown all of their eggs in the one unstable mercenary’s basket.
Not only that though, the hypothesis seems to ignore longer term Russian history and particularly what has been happening in Ukraine and Russia over the past year, months and weeks. It has been obvious for some time that the war hasn’t been going well for Putin. There were also obvious tensions and divisions growing amongst the elite and Prigozhin has been especially vocal in expressing his frustration at how his men have been let down. There really weren’t any surprises in terms of what happened. I’m not saying that the CIA couldn’t have plotted or that they definitely didn’t. It just seems unlikely and there are more obvious and likely reasons for Wagner’s actions.
Yet, too often we prove capable of choosing to believe what we want to, even when all of the evidence points the other way. We commit to our own narrative so strongly that it is very difficult to shift us.
There are some implications here for evangelism and apologetics. The whole story of human sin is that it is foolishness. We choose to believe Satan’s lies in the full face of contrary evidence that points to God’s greatness and goodness. This means that if someone’s heart isn’t turned by the inner work of the Holy Spirit then all of our brilliant apologetics arguments will be to no avail.
It also means that we need to guard our ow hearts and minds especially in church life. We can choose what we want to see and believe in church. We can choose to believe the worst of others and we can choose to disbelieve truth when it suits us. It’s important that we ask the Holy Spirit to open our eyes to see what is really happening.
Faithroots 