Vladimir Putin's uncertain future

WHEN VLADIMIR PUTIN DELIVERED A SPEECH JUST DAYS after surviving the greatest challenge to his 23 years in power, he sought to strike a defiant tone.

- YASMEEN SERHAN

The Russian President described the armed convoy of thousands of Russian soldiers led by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin as a "mutiny" designed to foment domestic turmoil, and its organizers as plotters who "betrayed their country." Yet in that June 26 speech, Putin did not reveal plans for punishment or retribution. He said that Prigozhin and his men would be free to go into exile in Belarus, Russia's vassal state next door.

This is not the traditional Putin playbook, according to Bill Browder, who would know better than most. The London-based financier has spent more than a decade exposing corruption and human-rights abuses in Russia. Browder has personally faced the ire of the Kremlinwhich declared him a threat to Russian national security in 2005 and he has seen his friends and colleagues jailed and even killed for their activism. One such friend, the prominent Russian journalist and Putin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, was sentenced in April to 25 years on charges of treason.

Speaking to TIME by phone the day after Putin's address to his country, Browder discussed the aftermath of the failed Wagner rebellion and the future of the man who has led Russia longer than anyone else since Joseph Stalin.

Prigozhin was able to get within 124 miles of Moscow before his forces turned around. Is Putin the omnipotent autocrat observers believed he was?