Vladimir Putin vowed to punish Yevgeny Prigozhin for “treason” over the warlord’s armed uprising. Instead, the former Kremlin caterer and his Wagner group have got off all but scot free after launching the first coup attempt in Russia for three decades.

Prigozhin’s failed putsch ended abruptly, but it still exposed deep flaws at the heart of Putin’s regime, called his invasion of Ukraine into serious doubt, and raised the spectre of state collapse if unrest were to boil over again, people close to the Kremlin told the Financial Times.

“It’s a huge humiliation for Putin, of course. That’s obvious,” said a Russian oligarch who has known the Russian president since the 1990s. “Thousands of people without any resistance are going from Rostov almost to Moscow, and nobody can do anything. Then [Putin] announced they would be punished, and they were not. That’s definitely a sign of weakness.”