What’s Really Going On in Russia?
About this episode
Recorded days after Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner Group marched on Moscow, Ezra Klein asks Stanford historian Stephen Kotkin what the mutiny reveals about Vladimir Putin's Russia. Kotkin describes Wagner as a private business doing state business — African gold mines, social-media influence operations, and a mercenary army — and calls the revolt an 'improvised coup' born of Prigozhin's opportunism. He argues Putin's mystique was already shattered by the Ukraine invasion; the mutiny was an 'unintentional referendum' exposing the regime's brittleness. Authoritarian regimes, he says, are powerful but fragile, hollowed by corruption and mistrust. He credits Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko with a shrewd intervention, warns that Ukraine's path to the West is a multi-decade project, and concludes that Putin has damaged Russia's strategic position more than Gorbachev ever did.