It is a real embryo of civil war, in yet another repetition of history, where an imperial military operation turns to disaster, is coupled with serious internal divisions and can announce the fall of a dictatorship.
Vladimir Putin himself directly mentioned this possibility – with nuances in the phraseology – in his Saturday morning television intervention.
Denouncing “a stab in the back of our country and our people”, he declared, referring to 1917: “The intrigues, the quarrels, the political politics in the back […] had caused the greatest shock, the destruction of the army and the disintegration of the state. […] The result was the tragedy of the Civil War. »
However, the content and even the tone of this message – the non-verbal, more imploring than vengeful – allowed a strange restraint of the capo di tutti capi, Kremlin version. A bit as if he was still trying to spare his former cook who had become a mercenary chef, despite his spitting and his excesses in crescendo for 10 months, despite the fact that he had just shaken the Muscovite power for a few hours.
Do not trust the pseudo-resolution of the crisis, Saturday evening, in this hazy “agreement” according to which the rebels would not be prosecuted, and the leader Evgueni Prigojine would obtain a safe conduct in Belarus… By the way, funny “ safe third country”: quasi Russian province, whose president is a vassal of the Kremlin.
Let’s talk at most about a truce, a ceasefire on one front, the other being the one we know about, and which we have been following for 16 months now.
Why this sudden about-face during the day on Saturday? The question arises on both sides…
From Prigozhin’s point of view, what could have made him decide to turn around? Was he told: “Stop, you’ll get shot and the Wagner group will be destroyed…”?
This is not necessarily what would have happened, considering the incredible ease, as in soft butter, with which his men-at-arms had progressed, Friday and Saturday.
First by seizing, almost without firing a shot, the military command of Rostov-on-the-Don, then crossing three quarters of the distance towards Moscow (more than 1000 km)… We can also mention the attitude ( abundantly filmed) of the local populations towards the rebel leader and his troops, full of warmth and applause.
From Putin’s point of view, why this strange restraint, this apparent leniency, this infinite patience?
Admission of weakness of power? Fear of defections in the ranks, in front of the popularity of the Wagner group? Or even the idea that, even “traitor” and author of “stabs in the back”… Prigojine remains useful and must still be spared? Still, we never sent an aerial fleet of Sukhoi or MiGs to go and decimate the column of Wagner tanks!
Perhaps the argument of “fratricidal war” and “flowing Russian blood” provoked, in these two delicate beings, a burst of morality and humanity? Perhaps a strategic calculation made the Kremlin think that an active defense of the capital could have stripped the Ukrainian front?
The Russian power came out weakened, even humiliated by this episode. Incredible revelation, which had already suggested the episode of Belgorod, at the end of May: the rear protections of Russia are bare, powerless, real sieves.
As if the “second army in the world” – an expression that has now become comical, ironic and mean – had put everything it has in Ukraine (apart from air fighters and atomic bombs)… stripping the rest in a catastrophic fashion.
Last element to cap it all: Evgueni Prigojine, killer, sadist and liar like his master Frankenstein, nevertheless becomes, by an incredible inversion, an extraordinary revealer of truth in this Russian-Ukrainian crisis.
With the famous military bloggers, Prigojine allows us to know what is really happening on the ground, and also to confirm Western diagnoses on Russian power, its nature, its weakness, its divisions.
“It’s going badly” on such a front, says, in great detail, the mercenary cook. “The Ukrainians are fighting very well, they are washing us down. “We’re out of ammunition. “The Russian system is corrupt to the core. “Shoigu (the minister) and Gerasimov (the chief of staff) are incapable and cowardly, whose children are hidden away, while my men are swimming in mud and blood. “The Ukrainian counter-attack is working better than they say. » Prigozhin in the text (with Google translation).
And then, his last salvo, just before the attack on Rostov, goes so far as to dismantle the propaganda which preceded the invasion. He had never gone this far.
“The excuses for the invasion are false, this war was started to protect the interests of the elite, […] not because NATO was going to attack us, nor because there would have been (the supposed) genocide of the Russians in the Donbass. »
We all knew that… but when it comes out of that mouth, “the horse’s mouth”, it’s devastating.
The Russian wound is open and purulent, with a worse prognosis. The aggression against Ukraine has caused new metastases in the internal tissues of the Empire.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. This column is off for the summer. Back on August 14. [email protected]