A former UK ambassador to Russia has said former Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “bizarre” march on Moscow seriously rocked the Kremlin leader’s regime.
Rodric Braithwaite, who served as the country’s official envoy to the Soviet Union and Russia between 1988 and 1992, said he believed the incident “marked the beginning of the final stage” for the Russian strongman’s leadership.
In August, former Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin perished in a plane crash months after leading an aborted “march on Moscow” which ended with him fleeing to Belarus.
Many suspect the Kremlin engineered the crash to make an example of Prigozhin.
“I thought there must be something wrong if somebody like Prigozhin could do what he did,” he told Daily Express US. “No one came out to support Putin. That shouldn’t have happened if the regime was working properly.
“But Putin stopped Prigozhin in his tracks and then fixed him. He’s evidently still the ruthlessly cunning politician he always has been.
“Of course, he’ll go in the end. But I’ve given up trying to predict when and how, or who will succeed him.”
Throughout the conflict, rumors have persisted that Putin is in ill health, with reports that the Russian leader had suffered a heart attack, and even that he had died.
Braithwaite has always been skeptical of these reports and dismisses the theory that illness incentivized Putin to launch the invasion of Ukraine.
But after two decades in power, he thinks it’s likely the 71-year-old has grown acutely conscious of his historical legacy.
“He’s been in charge for 20 years,” Braithwaite says, “He surely wants to leave his mark as the man who made Russia great again.
“Many of his fellow countrymen share his belief that Russia is destined to bring Ukraine and Belarus back under its wing.
“If he could engineer that, lots of Russians would put him up there with the other Greats of Russian history, Peter and Catherine.”
Braithwaite also says a Donald Trump presidency is a “terrifying” prospect for Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky and could see his country’s defenses reduced to “guerrilla warfare”.
The former diplmat said that if Trump ends Ukraine funding in a second term, as he has been threatening, Ukraine would be put “in a much less advantageous position” on the battlefield.
Since the Russian invasion of the country began in February 2020, the United States has provided over $75billion in assistance in the form of military aid, equipment and $25billion to bolster its economy.
But Trump, who remains far ahead of his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination, has been fiercely critical of the level of spending passed for Ukraine, and many Republicans share his view.
“If Trump won the election and cut the funding for Ukraine, I don’t think the Ukrainians would say, ‘Well, you win some, you lose some. So we better surrender to the Russians,” Braithwaite said.
“I think they’d go on fighting, but they would fight in a much less advantageous position.
He added: “It might soon develop into more like some kind of guerrilla war, than the kind of war they’re fighting at the moment, a full-scale battlefield war.”
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