Mutiny in Russia: The dog didn’t bite but a hornet’s nest awaits.

The Wagner militia’s mutiny against Russia’s Vladimir Putin turned out to be the dog that didn’t bite but its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin could still be a dead man walking because Putin has a reputation of hunting down persons he sees as traitors.

Putin handled Prigozhin’s rage deftly and crushed the mutiny within hours without bloodshed. But it has dealt serious damage to perceptions of major non-Western countries that had leant towards Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine.

Non-Western countries were taken aback by Putin’s failure to avoid being slapped in the face by a showy warlord whose mercenaries were armed around the world on Putin’s orders by the Russian military. He bred a hound he couldn’t keep leashed.

Some influential Americans suggest that the mutiny fissured Putin’s hold over power and he may be ousted if the Ukraine war goes badly for him. Hardly anyone in non-Western countries thinks that is likely. What they expect is that he will pull out all stops to prolong and turn the war into hellish attrition at least until the November 2024 US presidential elections.

Major countries like India, Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil think that China’s Xi Jinping will not abandon Putin regardless of mistakes in Ukraine and Prigozhin’s mutiny. Xi needs time to add more muscle to confront Washington in worsening technology and economic wars and a probable military clash over Taiwan. For that, he will do whatever he can to prevent anti-Putin upheavals inside Russia and Putin’s humiliation in Ukraine or diplomatic isolation in the non-Western world. He will also try to prolong the Ukraine war to stop Washington from focusing fully on China.

The only influential friend that Biden has among major non-Western countries is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He would not favor toppling Putin because that would endanger India by throwing power balances in disarray in all its neighborhood of Eurasia, central Asia, west Asia, south Asia and parts of the Far East.

Although Modi is leaning in strongly towards Biden, his influence in geopolitics stems from the Global South. There, Putin has lost some respect but still retains credibility. Modi’s influence would be helpful for Biden because Wagner’s breakup could open a hornet’s nest in the Middle East and Africa.

That would happen if Putin ensured that dead man Prigozhin stopped walking. Leaderless, Wagner’s greedy mercenaries could reduce several weak countries to chaos, including Syria, Libya, Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan, Madagascar, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Chad, Venezuela, Moldova, Serbia, and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Wagner is financially independent in Africa because of extensive criminal activities in gold mining, arms smuggling and other corrupt businesses acquired by helping local authoritarians to fight political opponents and terrorists affiliated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. American interests in Africa could suffer serious damage if the Russian military, weakened by reverses in Ukraine and infighting, is no longer capable of keeping the mercenaries in check.

Non-Western countries are wary of burning bridges with Putin because they suspect he can outmaneuver his American and European adversaries. All he needs is to successfully raise the costs to the US-led allies of providing the massive financial and military support Ukraine requires to continue fighting.

The US and European Union are funding almost all of Zelensky’s annual budget and their extremely expensive weapons, supplied cost-free to Zelensky so far, are the reasons his military is still able to fight. Ukraine will be a very expensive ward of American and EU taxpayers for a very long time, including funds for its reconstruction.

Against this backdrop, all Putin has to do is to keep bleeding Ukrainians (and his own soldiers) for as long as possible while ensuring that the war’s large-scale destruction does not enter Russian cities. That is doable unless the US and NATO join Ukraine in the war.

Biden’s call for democracies to come together to vanquish autocracies sounds incongruous to many non-Western countries since prominent democracy analysts, including the Varieties of Democracy project, note that at least half the world’s countries are ruled by some form of autocracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2022 Democracy Index lists only 23 countries as being “full democracies” and places the US and France in the “flawed democracy” category. Our World in Date reports that 20 democracies are just 18 years old.

Many in Washington support a narrative that Putin would invade other former Soviet possessions, like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland, if he is not stopped firmly in Ukraine. They have also fed a narrative that China could occupy Taiwan by invasion if the US does not provide military support for its self-defense. Most large non-Western countries are unconvinced. So, none is willing to stand firmly with Biden so far.