Putin reacts with repression to criticism from his circle of like-minded people for the march of the war

2023-07-22 20:51:10

The slowness and difficulty with which the so-called Special Military Operation in Ukraine and the recent armed uprising by the mercenaries of the Wagner Group led by their boss, Evgeny Prigozhin, have weakened the authority of President Vladimir Putin and triggered criticism against him. from within what had been his circle of unconditional.

After the arrests and dismissals of generals and the banishment of Prigozhin in Belarus, the repression, purges and judicial persecution are now beginning to take place with prominent supporters of the invasion of Ukraine dissatisfied with the progress of the war and the lack of prospects for that war. end in victory for Moscow.

Such is the case of Igor Guirkin, alias Strelkov (a term derived from the verb to shoot), who was arrested this Friday in the Russian capital and, by order of the judge of the Meshanski court in Moscow, confined in preventive detention until September 18 under the accusation of “calling for actions of an extremist nature”, a crime that, if found guilty, could cost him up to 20 years in prison. This situation, according to different analysts, is causing dissensions within the Russian power.

Messages against “cowardly mediocrity”

But it seems that the real trigger for Guirkin’s arrest has been the comment published this week on his Telegram channel, which has more than 800,000 followers, assuring that, given the possibility of Putin running for the presidential elections in March 2024 , “the country will not survive another six years of cowardly mediocrity in power.”

Strelkov, considered a true hero among many of the Russian ultranationalists or “patriots” as they define themselves, participated in the annexation of Crimea and later led as Defense Minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) the war in Donbas against the Ukrainian Army from spring 2014 to early 2015. In 2022, he was one of three people sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a Dutch court, for his role in the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 when It flew over Ukraine in July 2014. In that catastrophe, 298 people died.

After the signing of the Minsk agreements in February 2015, which ended the war in Donbas, despite the fact that the death toll on the so-called “contact line” continued, Girkin, colonel of the Russian Federal Security Service ( FSB or former KGB), went into reserve and almost disappeared from the public scene. As there is an international search and capture order against him, in recent years he has not left Russia.

But, once the invasion of Ukraine was launched, on February 24, 2022, the colonel in the FSB reserve became especially active on social networks, on his Telegram channel and frequently giving lectures on the course of the offensive in the neighboring country. At first he took it for granted, as did the Kremlin leadership, that the war would be little more than a jaunt and kyiv would be taken in a matter of weeks, if not days.

However, as the conflict progressed, Strelkov became increasingly critical of the slow advance of the Russian troops, the high number of casualties, the poor organization of the units, the insufficient supplies of arms, ammunition and victuals, the practically non-existent medical assistance to the wounded at the front and “the very low combat morale” of the Russian soldiers. In all this, he largely agreed with the reproaches that Prigozhin also leveled against the military command, in particular against the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu and the chief of the Central General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Guirkin received an offer to join the Wagners that ended up not materializing due to incompatibility with Prigozhin. Nor, according to his own account, did Strelkov manage to be enlisted in the Russian Army with the rank that he, in his opinion, deserved.

So what the colonel has done in recent months has been to report on Telegram about the development of the war and to disapprove of everything that seemed wrong, incorrect or unwise. In fact, for a long time many have been wondering how it is that the Kremlin did not shut his mouth. He also created the “Club of Outraged Patriots” in May in an attempt to articulate a political alternative to “save Russia” from the effects of a possible defeat by Ukraine.

Last Tuesday, in one of his most vitriolic tirades, he said on Telegram that Putin “should hand over power to someone truly capable and responsible (…) the country will not survive another six years of cowardly mediocrity in power.” Given so much impunity in his attacks against the head of state, some political scientists came to believe that he has been enjoying the protection of someone powerful within the secret services.

Guirkin was always one of the most ardent supporters of attacking Ukraine. In 2015, he considered the signing of the Minsk peace accords a mistake, since, in his opinion, “the war will reproduce itself later.” He said that as early as 2014, Russia should have entered Ukraine with its troops, captured Kiev and installed a puppet regime, taking advantage of the then-weakness of the Ukrainian Army and the mess in power after the Maidan revolt and, according to the narrative of the Kremlin, the negative effects “of the coup perpetrated by supporters of Stepan Bandera”, the historic Ukrainian nationalist leader.