Russia will remain a threat, no matter how the war in Ukraine ends

The growing tension between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin, the mercenary Wagner Group’s boss, shows no signs of abating. The Kremlin reportedly told state media to stop promoting Prigozhin and his fighters, although a Kremlin spokesman has denied any rift. The Defense Ministry has taken over the recruitment of convicts, a key source of Wagner Group manpower. And it appears in some reports that Prigozhin has been restrained from engaging in domestic political activity.

All of the foregoing is for the moment, however. Prigozhin is too important a vehicle for the Kremlin to be sidelined for very long. He has enabled Russia plausibly to deny sending troops to Syria and Crimea, employing the Wagner Group’s “little green men” alongside the Russian army’s Spetsnaz, or special forces, to achieve its objectives. He has extended Russian influence in Africa, notably in the Central African Republic.

By his own boastful admission, Prigozhin also founded and financed the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA), which sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the Treasury Department put it when sanctioning the IRA two years later, “it managed a vast number of fake online personas that posed as legitimate US persons … [and] through this activity … posted thousands of ads that reached millions of people online. The IRA also organized and coordinated political rallies during the run-up to the 2016 election, all while hiding its Russian identity.”

Prigozhin’s forces have played a major, if somewhat exaggerated, role in the Kremlin’s efforts to subjugate Ukraine. For that reason, for the time being, he is too valuable to Putin for the Russian autocrat to remove him from all positions of responsibility.

Yet that does not mean Prigozhin might not, at some point, preempt Putin’s efforts to sideline him.

Prigozhin surely knows that, in October 1957, then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev dismissed Defense Minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s greatest military hero. Yet, only a few months earlier, Zhukov had saved the Soviet leader from exile — or worse — by airlifting Central Committee members to Moscow to outvote Khruschev’s enemies in the so-called “Anti-Party Group” within the Soviet presidium.

Zhukov was forced into retirement; Prigozhin’s fate could well be far worse. For that reason, Prigozhin — perhaps by acting in concert with others, including a disgruntled Russian military — could participate in a coup that results either in Putin’s exile, à la Khrushchev, or his elimination, à la Stalin’s rivals and, most likely, Stalin himself.

Even if it is not Prigozhin or one of his allies who succeeds Putin, that successor may well be as aggressive as the Kremlin’s current leader — or worse. Were Russia to outlast Ukraine and emerge victorious to any degree, even if that means just hanging onto Crimea, it could evoke a sense of popular triumphalism to undermine or invade other of its neighbors. Indeed, it appears that Moscow only just failed to engineer a coup in Moldova, whose territory called Transnistria already is, for all intents and purposes, under Russian control.

On the other hand, should Russia suffer defeat at the hands of the Ukrainians, Moscow would be consumed by revanchist irridentism that likewise would render it a danger to its neighbors and, indeed, to all of Europe for years to come. Moreover, however much wartime losses and economic sanctions may set it back in the immediate future, Russia surely will reconstitute its military, as it has so many times in the past. Those states bordering Russia therefore have good reason to express their fear of an aggressive Moscow, no matter the outcome of the war in Ukraine.

Many Washington politicians, policy makers, analysts and pundits seem to hope that whatever the outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States will be able to return to its main national security preoccupation — namely, the threat that China poses to American interests in the western Pacific and elsewhere around the globe. The recent balloon incident has reinforced the arguments of those who assert that deterring China is not only America’s top priority but virtually its only priority.

Acting upon this argument would constitute a serious strategic error, however. Whether it wins or loses the war with Ukraine, Russia’s threat to European stability will not disappear. Biden administration policy makers, in particular, seem wary of conceding as much, because to do so is to acknowledge that current defense budgets are simply insufficient to allow for viable deterrence of both Chinese and Russian aggression on opposite ends of Eurasia.

That, however, is the reality which both the Biden administration and Congress must accept, however grudgingly. And in doing so, it is imperative that the White House propose, and the Congress authorize and appropriate, defense budgets that go well beyond mere minimal real growth in military expenditures — that could only whet the insatiable, ongoing territorial appetites of both Moscow and Beijing.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.