Betrayal is something Vladimir Putin has seen a lot of during the three-year war he started against Ukraine.
The men the Russian president thought were loyal to him have let him down left and right. His personal “chef” Yevgeny Prigozhin turned tanks full of Wagner mercenaries away from Ukraine to attack Moscow in a June 2023 coup attempt. Russian policemen sold the addresses of Russian officers to Ukrainian authorities. Seven of Putin’s army commanders were arrested for stealing from the state. And on Friday, two Russian Orthodox Church employees with far-right views admitted they were preparing to blow up Putin’s spiritual adviser, Tikhon Shevkunov, in the center of Moscow.
But now there’s an even bigger problem: Putin himself is being accused of betrayal. Russian nationalists are furious at Putin’s flirtation with President Donald Trump. The leaders and propagandists of Russia’s so-called Z army did not take kindly to Trump’s threats to the BRIC countries over their plans to create their own currency. Nor were they happy about Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and especially the deal for rare mineral resources that Trump was planning to sign with Zelensky. “That is how they are selling our land,” Russian army colonel Zakhar Prilepin wrote on Telegram before the meeting.
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Even Friday’s meltdown at the White House did not convince the Russian pro-war activists. They do not believe that Trump is really Putin’s friend or that the U.S.-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia in February were productive. The so-called Z bloggers expressed frustration about the resumption of phone calls between Putin and Trump, who once again was softening on Zelensky in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
“I have always said you are going to let ‘charitable’ Trump rape you,” Vladimir Levdansky wrote on Telegram, addressing Russia’s decision makers. A Russian blogger called Sinner used an expletive to decry Trump’s “bulls--tting.” “Ignore Trump, let’s talk about the front line. He’s just words. How come you guys don’t get it?” Sinner wrote.
A bestselling novelist turned army officer, Prilepin called Russian decision makers “traitors and thugs” and “American floor polishers” for anticipating a peace deal or even a ceasefire agreement orchestrated by Trump. Just like Putin, Prilepin has been betrayed many times during the war. A soldier from the Russia-controlled Donetsk army, Alexander Permiakov, blew up Prilepin’s vehicle near the city of Nizhny Novgorod, in the heart of Russia. Permiakov admitted his guilt in court and said he attempted to kill Prilepin “as vengeance for inciting hatred” in the war.
In August 2023 Prilepin’s friend Prigozhin was killed in a suspicious crash of his business jet less than 300 miles from Moscow, two months after his attempted coup. The Wagner boss had previously accused Putin’s friends, then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, of “betraying the country” with their unprofessional conduct during the war.
Moscow hawks have tried to prevent more military coups, prosecuting dozens of people for “discrediting” the army. Some in the military are happy to hang more officers. But Putin had few to choose from. “There is a huge deficit of professional officers, but the situation is obviously too critical to think of the army’s reputation,” a former KGB officer, Gennady Gudkov, told the Daily Beast. “Putin is struggling to prevent another coup attempt, but his vertical of power is held up by generals who are currently deeply offended.”
Russians are aware the cost of Putin’s war is higher than any money stolen from the state budget. One of the Telegram channels that aggregates news of slain soldiers is called Goryushko, which translates as A Little Trouble. Every day Goryushko posts photographs and biographical information of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. There were 101,483 faces and names of slain soldiers on Thursday, well documented but an undercount. The Telegram channel features Shoigu’s face on its profile and the former defense minister’s famous quote: “We have no losses.”
“This is just a half of the real number of fallen. We have not seen such a horrific toll since World War II,” one of the leaders for the now closed Soldiers Mothers group told The Daily Beast in an interview. “We are dealing with a huge number of complaints from relatives; and of course everybody understands neither [new Defense Minister Andrei] Belousov nor any of the new appointees will be able to change it—the entire responsibility is on the commander in chief.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his longtime defense minister Sergei Shoigu take in some rays while on a fishing trip.
Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/AFP via Getty ImagesPutin does not execute generals like Stalin, but he humiliates them. Early in the morning on May 13, 2023, military counterintelligence came to arrest sleepy Gen. Yury Kuznetsov at his luxurious mansion in the outskirts of Moscow. Kuznetsov, 55, had been responsible for classified documents at the General Staff; he knew a lot of secrets about Putin’s Russia. Special unit soldiers dragged the general out of bed and confiscated about $1 million in cash from his home, as well as gold coins and a collection of expensive watches, state media reported. Russian propaganda claimed that all of those arrested, including Kuznetsov, deputy head of the General Staff Vadim Shamarin, and Shoigu’s deputy, Timur Ivanov, and Col. Vladimir Vertiletsky took millions of dollars of bribes in cash, houses, and vehicles.
Generations of Russian soldiers have been left feeling disillusioned and let down by the Kremlin. The main question soldiers have asked is “What was this for?” Veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya lived frustrated and bitter lives without much appreciation from the public or compensation from authorities. The veterans from the Afghan war drank, led poverty-stricken lives, or joined the criminal wars in the 1990s. The mothers of Russian soldiers killed fighting in Chechnya struggled to get compensation from the authorities, sometimes for decades.
How is Putin going to sell his deals with Trump to the soldiers who have been dying for the goals he had originally set up for them, “the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine?”
On Friday, the Kremlin propaganda Telegram channel the Two Majors began a discussion with the subject: “Trump’s verbal diarrhea is flying in all directions.” One user with the nickname Ossetin wrote a long post about the purpose of the war in Ukraine, expressing bitterness for the soldiers, who as it turns out “have not been dying for the Motherland but for the (Russian) state’s place in the new world’s order.” Russia’s military was feeling disillusioned; there were doubts that Russia would keep the Ukrainian territories that Putin had officially absorbed into Russia.
Prilepin and Russia’s other far-right military men see Ukrainian land as Russia’s own, and Zelensky’s potential mineral deal with Trump threatens that. “Nobody will ever be able to mine any rare earth minerals without our permission. It does not matter whether we control the deposits or not. We are simply not going to allow this to happen, we have different methods,” Russian political technologist Marat Bashirov declared.
