2023-06-29 05:00:00
Nothing is what it seems. Everything is decorated and lies. The only truth remains hidden. We don’t even know the number of fatalities from Saturday’s clashes. Vladimir Putin pays tribute to them with a minute of silence but amnesty in the next minute to those responsible for his death. The dead do not count where death reigns.
The claimed victory is the civil war that has been averted. Attention must be paid to the significance of such a feat. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s column reached 200 kilometers from the Kremlin, without anyone blocking their path by land. Some of the planes and helicopters that tried to do it from the air were shot down, in a toll worse than a day in the Ukraine.
A massacre that would have forced the Ukrainian front to be unguarded has been avoided. It was certain defeat, perhaps in a few hours. The high price paid to prevent it is understood. The presidential authority is on the ground. The initially nameless war has penetrated Russian territory. Its citizens perceive it. The capital of stability and predictability that autocracy was presumed to have gone down the drain, exactly what is most valued by that Chinese neighbor who declared an unlimited friendship with it. Russia is at war.
Putin has the consolation that it has not been the classic civil confrontation that precedes the fall of the regime. Winner in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and, above all, in the Crimea, he is now going from defeat to defeat. He is a credited loser. Even Bakhmut’s bloody and pyrrhic victory has become alien, since it was obtained by the now exiled Prigozhin at the head of his mercenaries.
No one may believe his nuclear bravado, though the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam and the threat to the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant point to the unsettling doomsday drive in his head. Now the nuclear fear has moved to the chaos and lack of control that may result from its fall or even from an implosion of the Russian Federation.
The day of the mutiny was good for Ukraine, but it could have been even better. It distracted Moscow’s attention, but it did not distract its troops. Putin has dissolved the most feared and cruel legions of him. The legionnaires who fit into his bureaucratized and corrupt army will be able to contribute little. We do not know what those displaced to Belarus will do, nor those deployed in Africa and Syria, nor if they will be under the control of Prigozhin or Sergei Shoigu, a defense minister who could have direct command over African territories, like a former imperial viceroy.
Putin comes out weakened, but hasn’t lost yet. He alone has avoided a decisive fall. He is surrounded by losers. Aleksandr Lukashenko, the peacemaker and apparent winner of the day, is just a survivor in his service. He endures thanks to Putin and will fall with Putin. Once the civil war rears its inhuman snout at him, it’s hard for him not to come back with more momentum and spill more blood.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#Vladimir #Putin #brink #precipice #Opinion