Is This a Coup in Russia?

Tom Nichols: “Right now none of this looks organized enough to be a coup. But coups sometimes look ridiculous in the offing—the 1991 coup against the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a complete clown show—so the possibility remains that Prigozhin has friends in Moscow who are working with him. Military failure has been known to threaten the stability of Russia’s governments in the past, as Russian imperial leaders endured in 1905 and then again, for the last time, in 1917.”

Dan Drezner: “My political science gut tells me that Progozhin’s movement will collapse like a house of cards if the Russian military applies actual force against it. That said, a lot of people have overestimated the competency of the Russian military in the last 18 months.”