After 20 years in absolute power, Putin is faltering
Saturday's rebellion by the Wagner mercenaries, who had been carrying out some of the most vicious Russian attacks in the war against Ukraine, has unleashed a confusion that no one has been able to clarify. Perhaps the first conclusions to be drawn from the crisis of unpredictable consequences that has erupted in the Kremlin is that Putin's dictatorial power has been shaken, while the positive side is that it opens up better prospects for the heroic Ukrainian resistance and more favourable forecasts for quicker and more optimistic peace negotiations.
As is logical, given the Russian regime's capacity to lie and intoxicate both its own and other people's information, the details that have been disseminated are scant, leave many gaps and give rise to abundant doubts and speculation. The official version denies that the advance of the forces of the criminal organisation, as the US press has described it, which is Wagner, was neither an attempt at a coup d'état nor an attempt to overthrow or undermine Putin's power. On the basis of this thesis, it can be deduced that it was an attempt to exert pressure in order to obtain greater benefits.
One of the reasons given is that the Russian army does not have good relations with the militia with which it shared the war, since Wagner's militiamen claim that the military on the Bajmut front had denied them ammunition and even killed 30 militiamen with their missiles. All this after being tasked by the Kremlin with holding back the Ukrainian advance, being its best ally in the area. Putin's always well-behaved Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, was the mediator who managed to get them to drop their protest.
The leader, or perhaps better, owner of the mercenary troops, Yevgeny Prigozhin, threatened with departure by Putin, had taken refuge in Belarus, which has not been confirmed, although everything seems to be true. Throughout Monday, the organisation assured that it would remain active both from Belarus and in other countries, such as Mali and other African countries where it acts as a champion of Russia's claims to a foothold in the new continent.
The latest news about Prigozhin was a fourteen-minute radio message broadcast from an undisclosed location, in which he reiterated that the rebellion was not intended to overthrow Putin but to protest the treatment they were receiving and to oppose the Kremlin's intentions to integrate them into the army on 1 July. He also anticipated that they would continue fighting from Belarus. He accused the Russian army and claimed that in the advance of his forces, which reached three hundred kilometres from Moscow, they had avoided bloodshed at all times.