15. Tanks Riding Towards Moscow

Started to reel off all the achievements of the Putin government. And Putin said rather disappointedly, Is that it? And then a few years later, in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea, Vinedikov was once again in the Kremlin and Putin said, Well what will they say now? And Vincent said, What will who say? Like, Well the history books. So clearly Putin sees himself as this sort of world historical figure.

They got to within around a hundred miles of the capital before their leader, Evgeny Prigozin, ordered them to stop and agreed to leave for Belarus. Vladimir Putin praised the people of Russia for their national unity, And claimed he had averted disaster. But how badly is his authority shaken and can it be recovered?

Is it possible to weave what happened on Saturday into those stories, or does it just shatter the narrative that has been presented to us?

I remember var very well that twenty years ago, almost twenty years ago, in two thousand and four when the small republic of Engushetia fall to Chechen militants for two days. They invaded and they took control this region for two days. Immediately, the same day, basically, the same day, Putin fired several FSB generals, just like that, because he felt really, really frightened.

And I expect well the same thing happened to now. But instead Putin decided to well to award his security services, which did absolutely nothing. And I think his most favorite thing completely failed and failed the

So in in this sense it's actually a sort of no win situation for Putin. He I think would prefer to play it down, to pretend it never happened. But at the same time he's under pressure to actually say something and do something. But heads did not roll. The the FSB did not do their job. The Wagner fighters were not resisted. And uh most crucially and staggeringly, stunningly, the m people or

some people, hundreds of people on in Rostov on Don, came out to cheer Wagner as they as they were moved out of the city. And they treated Pregorzin like a rock star and you have crowds shouting Wagner, Wagner and Wagner's troops joy firing into the air. I mean and in in the centre of a Russian city. And when the police showed up, they were jeered by the crowd. There was there they shouted Pazor, Pazor, shame, shame and pelted them with uh with with debris. So

I mean it's this is an absolutely shocking scene for Putin and it completely shatters several narratives. In fact, firstly the narrative that Putin is the the ultimate guarantor of the security of Russians. He utterly failed in doing that. And furthermore, that Putin is this sort of universally popular, invincible leader, because when a rebel general shows up in a city of over a million people, takes it over with barely a shot fired.

and the people cheer him. I mean, that is shows an extraordinary fragility in what we had hitherto assumed was, you know, a pretty solid of structure of support for Putin. You know, clearly that's not the case and that's profoundly worrying. And what could Putin possibly say? He's handed out some medals, including to Sergei Shoigu, ironically.

who was in fact the proximate cause of this mutiny. He's handed out some medals, you know, uh to reward soldiers for averting civil war, which is ridiculous and looks looks uh profoundly weak.

Uh it would be a speech that would be definitive for the history of Russia. You know, this was really going to be a big deal. And that came from the Kremlin press secretary. It was reported in Interface, which is the state news agency. It was put out across uh Russian state TV channels. and this community of what we call the Zed bloggers. So the people who are kind of very pro war, hyper nationalistic.

really uh kind of aggressively m against Ukraine started getting really hyped up and saying this is gonna be an extraordinary speech by Putin and then Putin comes on air, says a few things that he's already said. The speech lasts very unusually for Putin all of six minutes, and it appears almost abruptly cut short and then it goes back to normal programming. And you can just see

All the Z bloggers reacting saying, uh wait, hold up, there must be more coming. Surely, surely something's about to be said. That was a letdown and this kind of thing. Bubbles seemed to have completely burst. And then afterwards the Kremlin press secretary actually said that. his own statement that this would be a momentous speech was actually a fake that was put out on telegram and was a lie, which uh is really one way to kind of try and crawl that one back.

Um so you can only imagine what kind of uh scramble was happening behind the scenes at that time. And a lot of members of the elite stayed very noticeably silent on Saturday, not knowing what to do or what to say and I would point to the case of Margarita Simanian, the editor of Russia Today, who is very well known and very outspoken and usually knows exactly what to say on every occasion, stayed absolutely silent on Saturday, reappeared

maybe twenty four hours after the coup, with a statement saying, kind of lightly, that she was on a Volga cruise, a cruise along the Volga River, and uh didn't really notice what was happening, but now has an opinion that she can share. So uh that highly uh unbelievable statement uh just goes to show how everybody was kind of knocked a bit speechless and didn't know what the Kremlin script was.

And actually what we are getting today, what we are getting with all these uh strange well events in the Kremlin, it is a stage two and it's probably it's gonna well unfold for a period of time.

you know, the criminal underworld, as well as being a criminal himself, and is five feels himself entirely at home addressing prisoners. He's extraordinarily foul mouthed, although I have to it has to be admitted very articulate. and very hard hitting in his speeches. So but Pegorzin is not really a Putin insider. On on the other hand, he is a billionaire who has made his money through official contacts and contracts

to supply the Russian army. He was very useful to the Kremlin. He's been serially useful. He was the one that founded a troll farm in St. Petersburg that was uh instrumental in the various uh election hacking and social media influence campaign in twenty sixteen in the US presidential election. And uh most crucially he founded Wagner. Since two thousand fourteen, he's founded this group of fighters.

who have been very useful as a way of projecting Kremlin power in Central African African Republic, in in uh Libya, in Syria and so on. So a useful tool of the Kremlin, he's grown rich contacts there, but I don't think he's can be really described as a close Putin crony or insider in in a significant political sense.

and um after that he starts taking on more and more of a public role and you can see the support for him building because he's the sort of antithesis to the defence establishment, to the bureaucratic paper pushers who run the army, this kind of thing.

the people who he accuses of corruption and um being slow and making poor decision making. And he is this sort of cruel, efficient, brutal leader who is willing to, you know, get his soldiers to do anything and and, you know, commit horrific war crimes or to just send tens of thousands of them uh to the slaughter to achieve his goals, which the Russian public, especially the very pro war element of Russia, but the Partian public really get behind.

And that builds and builds, as does his conflict with the armed forces. And um at some point it starts looking like it's tipping over the edge. I just have this picture in my mind of a video Prigozhin recorded quite recently where he's standing over rows and rows and rows of corpses of Russian soldiers and he's sort of pointing a flashlight at them and uh

Talking about how Girasimov, the head of the army, Shoigu, the defence minister, are responsible for the deaths of all of these soldiers. And it starts. clearly going over a line. Something that I thought is zer very interesting from um Tuesday morning this recording a speech by the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who stepped in on the day of the insurrection as a sort of negotiating figure.

helping Putin resolve the situation, speaking directly to Prigoshin. Something Lukashenko said a few hours before us recording this is that Prygoshin wanted to speak to Putin. That was one of the th points of his insurrection, of his march on Moscow was that he wanted to actually get the president kind of get his ear, which is a big shift from a few months ago when we understand that Purgosh's contact with Putin was quite regular. So clearly there was some sort of split.

and Pragoshin was frustrated that Putin was taking his general side in this conflict and also not communicating with him. Putin was in some way procrastinating through the situation, and Pragoshin decided to march on Moscow.

At the same time we see that in Rostok, which is, I d I just want to remind you, is a nervous center and a logistical hub of the Russian military effort in Ukraine. Nevertheless, uh they decided not stop prigozhan, they let them in and two highest level generals who actually are in charge of the war effort in Ukraine.

Yevkrov, the deputy minister of defense, and most importantly, uh the first deputy head of the Russian military intelligence, Alexeyev, who is in charge of uh the entire intelligence operation in Ukraine. They decided to remain in Rostov and to talk to Prigojan. Basically they agreed to become his hostages. It's absolutely incredible.

somehow make some kind of gesture and doesn't know quite what to do. I would not be surprised if he launches some kind of purge or, you know, s security crackdown on dissent in the army and society. I can't imagine that he's anything other than than shock. As long as, and this is very important, as long as we assume that actually he is

informed of what is happening. And that part is something we actually can't assume because what we have seen right from the beginning of this war is that he is is strongly detached from reality. I mean he's began the war in February twenty two because he thought he could win it easily. He just bought the words of the sycophants that surround him at face value. And that was the major approximate cause of his massive overreach and miscalculation in in in in in launching the war.

So um I think we can also assume that uh the you know the sycophancy continues, that the information bubble continues. When he congratulates uh generals and soldiers for averting the civil war, I mean Perhaps he actually believes it. Perhaps he thinks that everything is now going to be fine. You know, we just don't know.

how much of you know whether he's seen those scenes in Rostov. I mean we we we don't know w what information he he gets. Uh we do know that he famously doesn't use the internet. He th he I literally thinks it's a CIA project. We should also bear in mind that

for many people around Putin in his inner circle who are thinking towards elections scheduled for march seventeenth, twenty twenty four, the next Russian presidential elections, and that's strangely enough not very often discussed. But in fact he does face

re-election in eight months' time. I think for many members of the elite who are thinking of Russia win or without Putin, another candidate and so on and so on, see that there are forces in Russia who are beyond the Kremlin's control, who are outside the the elite. who are violent, who are effective, and are willing to take advantage of chaos.

So in a paradoxical way, actually, those forces of chaos I think will give pause to a lot of people who are kind of considering an alternative to Putin or someone who is going to change tack precisely because the system has been proven to be so fragile and so brittle. The idea of revolution is terrifying to the Russian elite.

And clearly their main interest is to hang on to their their yachts and palaces and privileges rather than find themselves swinging from lampposts by the light of burning Mercedes.

stability and this is what he promises. And obviously the past year has shown that that stability is crumbling and Saturday's insurrection was a very, very clear sign of that. For me, the most stark image of it is, you know reporting on the day, the tanks of the Wagner militia are kind of moving north, heading along the motorway. I'm talking to people

in Varonez, which is a town on the way, or in Moscow, which is sort of waiting for the militiamen to arrive, the mercenaries to arrive to the city. And the anxiety and anxiety is building and building And um then suddenly the local authorities of regions just south of Moscow start sending out, you know, these diggers

to go out onto the motorway and start literally tearing holes into the Russian motorways in tearing up the infrastructure in order to prevent tanks from going through. And you can't really get a picture that is a more obvious sign of or kind of a a metaphor for the weakness of the state than having to kind of send out your

diggers to dig up motorways to stop the tanks from reaching Moscow, um, at the last minute. And that's also something that I think kind of blows holes in the argument that it was a staged false flag. It's just too this stuff is is too humiliating in a way.

It also shows a lot of incompetence and the idea that an armed force can make its way seven hundred and eighty kilometers across Russian territory without being stopped is obviously going to be noticed in Kiev, in the West, in China. It's substantial. And another thing I would mention is that of course we uh all sort of talk about this and know that Putin um does not

He does not like his enemies, but he hates traitors. And so that is also something that's going to kind of I think define the the coming weeks, days, months, who knows?

And I think it's uh it would have a profound psychological effect on him. The second thing which is might be even more important is that Putin has been paranoid about his personal security and safety for all these years. Remember that he boasted about

thirteen or fourteen assassination attempts on his life, so clearly he thinks a lot about his personal security and yet he built a system where you have his security services uh being very hesitant at reaction to the crisis when the threat is coming From inside. When you have some dispute in his internal circle, nobody knows what to do. And everybody now is uh asking themselves this question like what if tomorrow it would be Kadir?

Or some guy on the Security Council issuing a statement that, for instance, I'm just speculating that our Vladimir Vladimirovich got ill and now we need to take things into our hands What would be the reaction of the FSB, of the National Guard, of Kadyrovs and all these people who are paid to protect and preserve the political stability of Russia?

unless something very radical changes or some other internal uprising is launched, ultimately what you the Russian public was just presented with is an option between Putin and Prigoshian and uh some people did cheer him on, but ultimately I think the fear of chaos and the fear of instability will be sort of the choice of of of Putin instability in some way still wins out, I think even if it's just inertia. But yeah, his support is looking um