A classic frame from an old fifties black and white thriller: the bank raid goes hopelessly wrong. The cops are called and come in guns blazing. Meanwhile, back at the hideout the thieves fall out with one another.
Switch to the gold coated halls of the Kremlin, an ornate palace that Shakespeare would have recognised. Mastermind of the Ukraine campaign, Vladimir Putin, having secured the throne, paces to and fro after his bloody deed, trapped in Macbeth’s dilemma: “to have but not to hold.” He has Donetsk and Crimea, but for how long? President for Life, but for how long?
Putin has finally been challenged by his most ruthless enforcer, the man who did all the dirty jobs for him without quibbling; the man you don’t want to meet in an alley in the dark of night: former caterer and hardened criminal Yevgenii Prigozhin, bearing a face to sink a thousand ships; a Frankenstein monster of Putin’s own creation. Putin began privatising his wars nearly a decade ago after his little green men seized Crimea with the creation of Russia’s very own Foreign Legion. Those dirty wars were “wet” jobs – mercenary operations in Syria, Libya, Mali and the Congo – where the Kremlin could claim “plausible deniability” as Russian troops pillaged and brought home the bloodstained loot to subsidise a forward policy that looked more and more like Belgian imperialism in the Heart of Darkness. Once invited in to provide protection for oil wells, uranium and gold mines, somehow Prigozhin’s men never showed any interest in leaving and they were paid on performance. Putin in blind desperation had called in Prigozhin’s Wagner Group as “Protection” to help sort out the mess left by Defence Minister Shoigu in Eastern Ukraine. But, as in Africa, once called in, somehow they take no interest in leaving or, worst still, taking orders. And now the Kremlin switches to a scene from a Pinter play, pervaded by a hit of unspoken menace that seems impossible to dispel. Who else thinks Prigozhin is right; that the war is a fiasco irresponsibly unleashed by sheer incompetents and that it is time to remove them? It is hard for Putin to know for sure. So he threatens the harshest measures for mutineers.
The “businessman”, as the Russian media ridiculously calls Prigozhin, has brazenly taken his troops to occupy the centre of a southern city, Rostov, evidently as hostage. The growling bear of a general, Sergei Surovikin, scourge of Syria, who led the charge into Ukraine, is now threatening Prigozhin, who claims his forces were fired on from the rear by missiles from regular Russian forces, leaving many dead, and appeals to the Wagner group to reverse course. “I call for an end to this, the enemy has just been waiting for this moment when our domestic political situation deteriorates. One must not play into the hands of the adversary”, Surovikin all too predictably intoned. Meanwhile Prigozhin is being threatened with 12-20 years imprisonment for mutiny. The FSB claims Prigozhin is inciting civil war. Lt General Vladimir Alekseev calls it a stab in the back. Some readers of the deep state newspaper, Vzglyad, however, are not afraid to say they think Prigozhin is right.
It is interesting to note that in a television address four hours ago Putin compares the situation to that in 1917 when Russia was stabbed in the back and thus failed to secure victory in the First World War! He might of course have asked whether everything was well with Russia in 1917 and whether the competence of its officer corps from 1914 could not have been called into question. I am afraid on all this Lenin was right.
Vzglyad ru, 24 June 2023
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Through Russian Eyes 