Just when I had assumed that the Ukraine war was settling into a stalemate in which each would try to bleed the other dry until some sort of negotiated settlement became preferable to lobbing artillery at each other, came news that Wagner PMC founder Evgeny Prigozhin has instigated some sort of coup. I do not have any definitive information about what provoked this extraordinary (and probably suicidal) gambit, but it proves yet again that wars that do not end quickly will take unexpected turns against the power that starts them. It is not fate or karma repaying the aggressor for their crimes but the result of the unique political pressures generated by war.

Wars play out on both the battlefield and civil society. The satisfaction of the need to mobilize the population to support the war physically, with their bodies, and morally, with their minds, requires the war be justified. The typical justification takes the form of the claim that there was no choice but to go to war (necessity) and that the prestige and dignity of the nation is at stake (justice). The longer the conflict goes on, the more of the second plank of the justification becomes dangerous for those who ordered the war.

Putin’s playbook has leaned heavily on the anachronistic idea of Russia as a great power. As the whole world can now see, it is a regional power dependent upon an extractive economy, with all the political-economic vulnerabilities to the customers for the products of its forests, wells, and mines that entails. While Russia’s economy did not collapse in the way that Western powers had hoped, it is in recession and the longer term effects of technology embargoes will continue to cause damage, possibly for decades. Markets especially dislike uncertainty, and armed insurrections, even if put down fairly quickly, are about as uncertain as societies can become.

I will be interested to see what China’s reaction to this coup attempt will be. Russia is uniquely dependent upon the Chinese market after being cut off almost completely from Europe and if there is one value above all that the Chinese leadership cherishes, it is stability. China has adopted a very cautious approach to the war, not condemning it but hardly vocally supporting it. Access to the US and European markets remains essential to China’s development (witness the productive talks between China and Blinken last week). This clear split in the Russian political and military leadership will most likely cause China to further distance themselves from the growing debacle.

Whatever the precipitating cause, it seems clear that the stalled war underlies the problem. Putin has staked Russia’s reputation on victory, but since the opening month of war has only lost ground (Kharkov and Kherson). His only “victories” since the first month have been, how shall we put this, pyrrich conquests of Melitopol and Bakhmut that required the total destruction of the cities at the cost of tens of thousands of lives on both sides and did not change the strategic balance on the battlefield. Nothing Russia does short of using nuclear weapons will change that strategic balance, because they are not fighting Ukraine, they are fighting the combined economic, political, and military might of NATO. There is no chance that NATO will abandon Ukraine the way that the US abandoned Afghanistan. There is simply too much, ideologically, at stake in this conflict for them to walk away. Weapons will continue to flow into the war zone until something that they can sell as victory has been achieved.

The coup attempt will also comes as bad news for those who, naively and without historical foundation, believe that Russia’s war in Ukraine is some sort of heroic anti-imperialist struggle. Putin has tried to sell it as such, but how reconquest of the lands of the Tsarist empire counts as anti-imperialism is beyond me. As the great American realist international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau wryly noted decades ago,the surest sign that a government is pursuing an imperialist policy is their claim to be anti-imperialist. Genuine anti-imperialist struggles are waged by popular forces struggling to free their nation from domination by foreign powers. The Russian speaking population of the Donbass could more plausibly claim to have been engaged in a legitimate national struggle, but Putin largely ignored it until he felt his struggle against NATO forced his hand. What we are witnessing– tragically, for civilians and soldiers on all sides– is an inter-imperialist conflict wasting lives for the sake of expanding or maintaining its sphere of influence.

Until this morning I had assumed that the conflict would end, grotesquely, with something like a reversion to the status quo ante of 2014. Russia would keep Crimea and claim victory on those grounds and some sort of federal relationship would be established between the Donbass and the Kiev government. Not formally losing those oblasts would allow Ukraine to claim its share of victory. Grotesque because it would have been an outcome that could have been achieved through negotiations now it is anyone’s guess how Prighozin’s move will affect the war. I cannot think of any possible world in which this fracture helps Russia.

Banal though the conclusion may be but it is nonetheless true: war is the ultimate destabilizer. It may be, as Von Clauswitz argued, politics by different means, but it is a means best avoided.