2023-05-03 05:15:00
The Russian government has warned people across the country to stay away from military installations on Victory Day, while the event in which ordinary citizens march across Russia with portraits of loved ones who died in World War II has been moved online.
“Terrorist threat” allegedly coming from Ukraine – Russian media reported on April 24 that a crashed Ukrainian drone was found 30 kilometers from Moscow. It must be hard to come to terms with the fact that the Russian air defense is unable to guarantee the safety of Moscow’s skies during the country’s biggest patriotic celebrations of the year.
A Ukrainian drone attack on Red Square during the Victory Day military parade would be humiliating for Putin, but it seems more likely that he is more concerned about the possible humiliation of thousands of civilians marching with portraits of their fallen sons and husbands in Ukraine.
While official Russian officials have indicated fewer than 6,000 military casualties in Ukraine, Ukraine claims that around 150,000 Russian military personnel have been killed. Even conservative western estimates are heading towards the 60,000 mark.
Holiday parades have their risks. Despite the cancellation of official events, some small gatherings were held in cities across Russia on May 1, where people came with anti-war flags.
The ban on public events over the May holiday likely has more to do with Putin’s paranoid obsession with quashing any criticism of the war, even if open support for Ukraine is slim and the threat of popular uprising remote, says The Guardian’s Samantha de Bendern (with the Russia and Eurasia Program “Chatham House” and is a political commentator on LCI television in France).
At the same time, the conflict in military circles continues to grow. In a 90-minute interview with a military blogger on April 29, the founder of the militant group “Wagner” Yevgeny Prigozhin spoke about the disastrous state of the Russian army and said that “the time has come for us to stop lying to the people of the Russian Federation, saying that everything is fine.”
Prigozhin also threatened to withdraw his men from the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which Russia has been trying to capture for nine months.
Conflicts appear not only between the Russian private army and the Ministry of Defense. On April 25, soldiers from Gazprom’s private army “Potok” sent Putin a video complaining that they had been transferred to another private army (“Redut”) and then threatened by soldiers from the “Wagner” group, who said they would be shot if will resign from their positions.
At the beginning of April, the soldiers mobilized by the regular army of the Luhansk region disappeared after their relatives were told that they had been sold to the “Wagner” group by their commander. When Prigozhin denigrates the disastrous state of the Russian army, he knows what he’s talking about.
Putin is also criticized by Russian nationalist pro-cardinal military bloggers. The most famous of them is Igor Zhirkin, who openly condemns Putin’s reluctance to use Russia’s full military power in Ukraine.
On April 2, Russian propagandist Vladlen Tatarsky, the so-called war correspondent, was killed in an explosion in a St. Petersburg cafe (formerly owned by Prigozhin), the Russian government blamed Ukrainian “terrorists”.
Prigozhin said the attack may have been sparked by a fight between what he described as Russian radicals.
Russia is not on the brink of a popular revolution, but Putin still feels sufficiently threatened by public anti-war protests to shut down the first signs of peaceful civil discontent. This shows a fundamental fear of showing any weakness that his armed critics might exploit.
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