In the wake of this shocking series of events, an important question lingers: How will Russians view Prigozhin's brief rebellion?

To understand that, CNN Opinion interviewed Jade McGlynn, a research fellow in the War Studies Department at King's College London, whose new book "Russia's War" delves deeply into Russian opinion and how it is formed against a backdrop of state repression and propaganda.

Some of McGlynn's takeaways: Opinions are divided over whether Prigozhin's coup was a good idea, but some Russians are sympathetic to his motivations; it's likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin will react by ordering more attacks on Ukrainian civilians as a show of strength; and it's not quite the case that this brief rebellion signaled the beginning of the end of Putin's reign.

The following interview, which took place by phone on Sunday, has been edited for length and clarity.

Chris Good: You have spent a lot of time talking to Russians and developing a deep understanding of Russian public opinion. How will Prigozhin's rebellion resonate in the Russian public consciousness, in your view?

Jade McGlynn: Partly it depends where we're talking about, but in the geographically European part of Russia, there's clearly a division of opinion on whether or not this (rebellion) was a good idea, to put it mildly.

But there's a considerable amount of sympathy, or at least understanding, of why not just Prigozhin but also the Wagner fighters did what they did. There's a sort of implicit understanding, even among those who condemn the actions, that they did this because they're unhappy with the way the war (on Ukraine) is being waged and with the corrupt elites who are in charge of the military and who have siphoned away all of the funds, and now ordinary soldiers don't have rations.

I've gotten that sense from talking to people who live around the areas Wagner marched through on their way toward Moscow, from local media coverage and comment boards, and from local Telegram channels.

I think there's really an understanding of what the problems are that Wagner are angry about, or were angry about. But especially now that it's all sort of failed in the dust, there's certainly opinion that it's very good that it ended. The fear of a civil war, of brother killing brother, is very real.

Good: Throughout Russia's full-fledged war on Ukraine, aside from some small protests at the beginning, the most forceful criticism of the Kremlin has come from people who are pro-war, from so-called 'mill-bloggers' who complain that the war is being waged incompetently or not aggressively enough. Prigozhin has railed at military leaders and has echoed some of those ideas. What Russian public sentiments does or can Prigozhin tap into?

McGlynn: It's interesting, and it links back to the reason why we saw people from Rostov (the southern Russian city seized by Prigozhin's Wagner forces) bringing bread, baked goods, refreshments to the (Wagner) fighters. One of the points that comes up again and again on local media, on local chat boards, with people I speak to, is the sense that whether or not people agreed with what the Wagner fighters were doing, they saw them as ordinary people, as being from or of the narod, which is like 'ordinary folk' in American English.

I think these sentiments speak to a perceived authenticity on Prigozhin's part, which is obviously an attribute in short supply in politics generally, especially in Russian politics, and to the estrangement of many Russians from the political elite. Prigozhin has cultivated this persona.

But it's funny, because it also carries many echoes of Putin's own image-making, especially if we go back to the early days of his presidency. It's as if, to a certain extent, Prigozhin almost dislodged Putin from that role of what I would call muzhik-in-chief. The muzhik is like a real man; in British English we would say a 'bloke.' And he taps into a sort of anti-elitism, but also a nationalism, and more of an ethno-nationalism that, in my view, will prove very potent forces once they're unleashed from the stranglehold on political life that currently exists. And we saw glimpses of that on Saturday.

Good: What do you think this means for Putin? According to the best polling we have, he's popular, although it's hard to poll accurately in authoritarian countries. The independent Levada-Center reports Putin's approval at 82% and Russian support for the war on Ukraine at 76%.

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• Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is 'not a fool', wouldn't lead mutiny without support, expert says

Even before the rebellion ultimately failed and Prigozhin and Wagner turned around, it was being suggested that however this might end up, it wasn't good for Putin--that the fact it had gotten to this point would make him look bad and weaken his hold on power. Do you agree with that?

McGlynn: If we turn to the polling point, yes, there have to be a lot of caveats with polls. It's difficult to know exactly how real the figure of, say, 80% is, but what we do know is that since the full-scale invasion began on the 24th of February last year, Putin's approval rating went up considerably, by around 20 percentage points.

So it suggests, at the very least, a rallying around the leader. In general, there have been other kinds of studies, and the consensus is that Putin is pretty popular. However, whether or not that would change quite dramatically, were the circumstances to change quite dramatically, I think that's much harder to guess.

It reminds me of a story about an old lady in 1995, where they ask her, 'Who would you like to be president?' She says, 'Oh, it's (Gennady) Zyuganov, the Communist candidate.' And they say, 'Okay, who are you going to vote for?' She says, 'Yeltsin.' 'But why aren't you voting for Zyuganov?' She says, 'Well, I'll vote for Zyuganov when he's president.' You just vote for people who are already in power, and there's obviously a whole history of political life and autocracy hidden within that. That would be one point.

But the second point is: It's pretty hard to see any winners right now from this. And I certainly don't think that Putin is one. I don't really share the assertions some are making that this is definitely the end, or the beginning of the end, of Putin. I think it's definitely the beginning of a new phase--whether that phase ends up being the end of Putin or a further entrenchment of an even more repressive atmosphere.

I think we'll only really know over the next days, maybe even weeks. It's also a question what happens in terms of the war on Ukraine. If I were a leader whose authority had just been shaken considerably, and I happened to already have a pre-prepared war ongoing, I would probably turn to prove how much of a strong man I am in that field. So I imagine that will be where he will turn to prove his might, by once again killing Ukrainian civilians no doubt.

But whilst it's very hard to see any winners, this does paint a rather morose picture of what any potential post-Putin Russia would look like, at least in the short and probably medium term, just because there aren't really any democratic forces on the ground.

Good: Even before this rebellion, some had said that whoever comes into power after Putin in Russia--either when he reaches his natural longevity, or if he loses power before that--could be more nationalistic and more aggressive even than Putin. It sounds like that might be your view of it too.

McGlynn: Obviously it's very hard to make any predictions, but it will be the elites that decide (what comes after Putin). We know who the elites are. They're not nice guys, and they're going to want to defend their wealth and their interests.

Let's say there's a competition between some of the more reasonable elites, the so-called systemic liberals who may be facilitating this war (on Ukraine) but are not especially enthusiastic about it, against the securocrats, the true believers. In that case, if you have competition, people are going to need other forms of legitimacy. In that case, they're going to then go to the people.

And this is probably one of the cases where it actually matters what the Russian people think. In this circumstance, (elites jockeying for power) are going to have to appeal to a nation that is going to be pretty traumatized by the fact that they're really not going to win this war, certainly not in the manner in which they've been promised, that has lost tens of thousands of young men, that is quite a poor country in many of the regions outside of Moscow, and they're going to have to appeal to that sense of aggrieved nationalism, that sense of loss, that sense of humiliation, that Putin has not only whipped up, but also that was there anyway and that will probably be even worse now that they're losing a war to Ukraine, which in their view should not be an equal adversary. And they're going to feel obviously besieged by the West. Of course, it doesn't matter that there's a reason why the West is besieging them, they're just going to feel it that way.

That's where I think the nationalism will come in. I imagine that anyone who comes to power after Putin will want to look to ethno-nationalism, because it will be there, and it will be a way of kind of managing and whipping up support, and it will also build that sense of victimhood, of aggrievement, of resentment.

Good: In the book, you talk about public opinion in Russia as involving a set of contradictions.

I'm not sure that any country has public opinion in that sense. Of course there are specific issues, which Masha makes clear, to do with Russia and to do with the atomization of Russian society that perhaps make it especially difficult to speak of public opinion.

For instance, that the war on Ukraine can be viewed as both existential and dismissible. Putin is popular according to polling numbers, but you mention a perception by Russians that 'the crimes go unpunished and the criminals stay in power.'

You write that the head of the Levada-Center's sociocultural research department, Alexei Levinson, has observed that whenever Putin starts a war--be it in Chechnya, Ukraine the first time, Ukraine this time--his approval rating rises in the neighborhood of 20 percentage points. A war is being fought but is not going very well, and now you have Prigozhin calling attention to that and criticizing it.

The New Yorker's Masha Gessen has talked about the loneliness of having an opinion, inwardly, when it's a totalitarian society and there are pressures to comply.

Do you think of Russia as having public opinion, per se, and how you would characterize that public opinion, or the state of mind of Russians, throughout this war?

McGlynn: I'm not sure that any country has public opinion in that sense. Of course there are specific issues, which Masha makes clear, to do with Russia and to do with the atomization of Russian society that perhaps make it especially difficult to speak of public opinion.

But I think it's possible for us to say with some certainty that there is not, for example, a strong desire for hyper-liberal market reform in Russia.

There is not a strong desire in Russia to see, for example, a liberalization of LGBTQ rights. These are things that existed before Putin. Similarly, we can talk of an enduring dislike of Ukrainian national identity or Ukrainophobia. So we can talk of certain tendencies.

In terms of having an opinion, yes, it is pretty lonely. Let's say you're trying to make up your mind: Is this a good thing, or is this a bad thing? You might feel, 'I think it's a bad thing that we're bombing Ukraine.' But you then think about what happens if you go down that road. Do you say something, and then put not only your life, perhaps, into a lot of bother, but also, you know, your child's place at school, your child's place of nursery? Or if you even act in a more outrageous way, let's say by putting up a Ukrainian flag, then your children can even be taken away.

And just the knowledge of that, when you're still at the point of forming your opinion--that's a heavy burden. And it's hard to be a hero at the best of times, but it's especially hard to be a hero if you're not just dealing with your own life, you're dealing with other people's lives--you know, your children's lives, your elderly mother's life.

And then at the same point, what you have is the propaganda system kicking in. The propaganda system is not really trying to necessarily convince people. What it's trying to do is to give them good reasons why they can think, 'You know what? I'm not sure if we should be bombing, but Ukraine is in the wrong, and we have to do something. We're really just defending ourselves.'

And that comes up, you know, in some really human ways. For example, the number of people I've spoken to who don't approve of the war but who will still say, 'What did they expect though, the Ukrainians, by allowing Nazi collaborators to be in power and to stay in power? What were they thinking?' (Note: The false notion that Ukraine is governed by Nazis has been a prominent element of Russian propaganda about the war.)

Good: So I wonder of this aborted rebellion: What will Russians see and hear of it? Putin addressed the nation. You can't ignore military vehicles on the streets of Moscow. I wonder if it punctures any of the bubble that Russian propaganda creates.

McGlynn: I think that this bubble is misinterpreted slightly in the West. There is an information bubble, but 40% of Russians use Telegram every single day. (Note: According to the Russian media-monitoring firm Mediascope, as of May, 40% of Russia's 143 million people use Telegram daily, and more than 60% use it at least once a month.)

I mainly follow Russian channels on Telegram. And you still get a basic idea of what is happening and some of the things that Russian fighters are doing, including, you know, the bombings of civilians, of residential buildings in Kyiv. That's on pretty much most of the popular Telegram channels.

Good: We should pause to note that Telegram is a favorite medium of Prigozhin. So he's been on there lodging these complaints in a medium that Russians can access.

McGlynn: Sure, but Telegram is pretty much the most favored medium of a lot of people. Like I said, 40% of Russians--so the opposition use it too. I mean, everybody uses it who's interested in news. So it's not kind of Prigozhin's thing, but he does use it. And he has followers, but there are people with more followers than he has--for example including (Chechen leader) Ramzan Kadyrov, who has the most followers of any political Telegram channel. So in terms of the bubble, rather than an information bubble, it's more kind of like a cultural framework and way of meaning-making.

Maybe I'll use an anecdote from my own life here. When I was 18, it was the first time I went to Russia, and I was really surprised, because I got into a conversation with somebody who just said that they hated democracy--they were just, 'Well, I hate democracy.' And to me, that was just insane, just the idea that anybody would hate democracy, because it didn't make any sense to me, you know, like in my upbringing. Why would you not want at least the right to--you could say, oh well, democracy doesn't work, or you could have lots and lots of complaints about democracy, but just the idea that you wouldn't agree with democracy as a principle, that you have a right to have your say, that seemed completely alien to me. It didn't really make any sense, because it didn't fit with anything that I knew about the world, or values or just anything that I had heard growing up--my entire framework of understanding the world.

And I think the reason why I would use that example is because, you know, to many Russians, the idea that Ukrainians would just, of their own volition, not want to be part of Russia, or not see themselves as culturally close to Russia, or indeed are not culturally close to Russia, that is similarly alien to them.

The idea that Ukraine would be doing any of this out of its own agency, rather than the West trying once again to destroy Russia just like it destroyed the Soviet Union--in that sort of revisionist version--that's much easier to understand. That makes much more sense, not just because it's a nicer narrative, though it is, but also it just makes much more sense to them in terms of everything, in terms of popular culture.

So it's also about that element of resonance. If you're going to tell somebody a story, you need to make sure that story, you know, makes sense in the way they live their lives--in the same way that it's boring to read a book if you start and it's got loads of words in italics (denoting a foreign language), and it's referring to a culture that you really don't understand, you've never come across before, it's very easy to become disengaged and for it to just not sink in. It's a similar issue.

As a final point on the information bubble--look, the information bubble isn't that tight, because if it were, first of all, Russia wouldn't have had all of their debates over taking the coronavirus vaccine. Because there was this huge campaign across all of the state-aligned channels to get people to take the (Russian-made) Sputnik vaccine. And secondly, there wouldn't have been so many people believing very British and American conspiracies about Bill Gates and whatnot. You could easily see Russians were not cut off from the West. They can pick and choose, but again, they'll pick and choose what makes sense within their own framework.