The countdown to the demise of Vladimir Putin’s 23-year reign “has started”, senior Ukrainian officials have claimed, following a damaging Wagner insurrection over the weekend.
While the Russian autocrat attempts to recover from the humiliation of the mutiny, one that met little resistance from his own Armed Forces and allegedly had the backing of high-ranking officials, including the second-in-command for the “special military operation” in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s offices have spoken with confidence about the beginning of the end for Putin.
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin exposed to Russians the baselessness of the Kremlin’s reasons for their full-scale invasion of Ukraine; if those seeds are not unsown, it will be increasingly difficult for Putin to hold onto power.
Vladimir Putin’s autocracy is founded on overseeing the lethal competition between rival factions beneath him, as shown by his silence during the months-long public arguments between Prigozhin and the Kremlin defence minister Sergei Shoigu, as well as the head of the Armed Forces in Ukraine, Valery Gerasimov.
While the public feud grew evermore bitter and damaging, Putin refrained from commenting to ensure that, should anything happen, he was above the problem.
But his role as the overlord of an armed truce backfired after the Wagner mutiny last Saturday (June 24); it showed the Pyrrhic consequences of allowing his loyal underlings to fight one another in the name of consolidated authority.
To undermine the power of Prigozhin, he has been forced to admit that the Wagner Group is a Kremlin-funded enterprise; in doing so, he has acknowledged that he was the purveyor of his own problem and his image as the infallible autocrat has been undermined.
This new reality has inspired senior Ukrainian officials, such as Andriy Yermak, President Zelensky’s closest adviser, to conclude that “the countdown has started” to the end of Putin’s reign.
Following the events of last weekend and the reaction inside Russia in the days immediately afterwards, Mr Yermak said: “This [Russia] is a terrorist country whose leader is an inadequate person who has lost connection with reality.
“The world must conclude that it’s impossible to have any kind of serious relationship with that country.”
What’s more, Putin must now find a way to purge the Armed Forces of those that did not oppose the Wagner insurrection while also subsuming the insurgents into his Armed Forces to avoid further conflict, as well as ensuring he does not comprise the cogency of his “special military operation” in Ukraine.
This exitless maze is why the Putin regime “cannot be saved”, according to another Ukrainian official who wished to remain anonymous.
And Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, told the BBC that Prigozhin is “not [even] the most senior” dissenter.
Mr Danilov said there were members of the security forces, as well as officials and representatives of Russia’s oligarchs, who believe that Mr Putin’s decision to launch a full invasion of Ukraine in February last year has been a personal disaster for them as well as a threat to Russia.
When asked to give evidence of who these people were, Mr Danilov said: “I’m not speculating. We know who these people are, we know about their lives.”
