"But anyone who thinks that killing a rival to reassert control is a show of strength, not weakness, is delusional."
In Putin's case, he is stronger, only because he has been severely weakened by this war. The bulk of the article is regarding the disagreeing or arguing with with a dictator, but Prigozhin didn't just disagree with him, he tried to lead the army against him. He cannot be allowed to live after that for Putin to remain in power. And the only way Putin leaves office is in a box.
As well as increasing paranoia levels among the Russian elite, there's the direct threat from what's left of Wagner.
A lot of Wagner people were willing to follow Prigozhin to Moscow. Many of them are serious people who know how to use extreme violence. It only needs a few of them to decide to take revenge for Putin to be in real peril.
If they succeed in offing Putin then the world is in for a period of frightening instability.
Won't this event strengthen their resolve to deal with Putin? People such as these tend to be beyond the fear of death.
I don't know if I agree the world would be in for a period instability. I suppose it depends on how aligned this Wagner group is with Russia as a whole? Or is Russia similar to the U.S. - highly polarized such that any violence at this level will only beget more violence?
that opinion took a lot of words to miss the mark.
pierogi did far more than just disagree. he went against pupu, with weapons. he failed. then he waited. and waited. dead man walking. then falling from the sky.
pupu could, in just the right light (takes a tremendous amount of work) be described as patient, calculating, and strong, from these actions. he didn’t tolerate this upstart, but he didn’t lose his temper. he cleaned up a mess.
that’s far easier to sell than cloak-and-dagger poisonings and balcony falls for otherwise unknown “threats.” pierogi loved to mouth off on camera, and it’s not like it was the pope on the plane.
the linked opinion piece, on the other hand, goes on and on about how pupu is zugzwang - it smells like the sweaty, crinkled term paper for a political think tank homework assignment on attempts at influencing geopolitics via shitty social media pieces.
I don't understand why anyone thinks Prigozhin is dead. Of course they had to make it look like this, this is obvious to everyone, there was no other way, but given the complexity of the situation I'd be extremely surprised if he was actually dead.
That seems silly. Weaker by what measure? Russia is weaker than before the war in many measurable ways. Putin is weaker in connection to that. He couldn't even leave to visit an ally because neither wanted to be in a difficult position re arrest. That looks very weak.
Killing Prigozhin I don't think it goes one way or the other.
Not entirely. He also loudly criticized the rationale for the invasion, at least in his last few months [edit] (although carefully blaming the MoD for the deception while excusing Putin for being misinformed):
"The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block," the Russian businessman [Prigozhin] said. "The special operation was started for a completely different reason."[0]
In general, a state maintains order by monopolizing violence = army, so it is clear that the Wagner Group, which claims that Putin is responsible for Prigozhin's death, is unlikely to follow Putin, resulting in a very politically unstable situation since there will be two armies in Russia.
There are more armies there than two. But not sure if this will move any against each other. This and what caused the mutiny was attempt to take control of Wagner by Russian MOD or someone else. Time will tell how it will turn out. Probably not in another mutiny. Maybe just weakened position of Wagner - and Russia in Africa.
Prigozhin's feud was not with Putin. It was with the Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu. Prigoshin was unhappy with Shoigu's prosecution of the War in Ukraine. Prigoshin wanted to go in harder against Ukraine. He was also unhappy about the supply of armaments to his troops.
There is a strong sense that almost anything would be better than Putin. Putin leans heavily into a Russian tradition of confusing your enemies into making a mistake. That tactic necessarily means confusing your allies as well, and you're just as likely to make a mistake as your enemies are.
A successor who is more brutal but more "rational" can be reckoned with. Sometimes you really can just pay a bully to knock it off. Everybody hates it, and it would leave Ukraine paying most of the price, but they can be told that they won't get any more military aid. And then everybody goes back to undercutting each other diplomatically and economically instead of conquest (until the next time).
Right now all anybody knows is that a successor will be different. And since Putin appears to be capable of preserving an unacceptable status quo indefinitely, a lot of people would rather guess that the situation will improve without him.
Which sucks. That's Putin's goal: to make it suck. He'll play what happens from there by ear, which sounds stupid but it "works" from his own point of view.
> I think people wishing for the death of Putin have a real lack of imagination for what comes immediately after.
Well I'd suggest in the continuum of latter-day Andropov to Putin he's the most authoritarian, so we have a couple of decades of less oppressive examples.
But we're now at 20 years of this. And the world has gotten more authoritarian and more autocratic on the whole, much of the backing for which has emanated from Russia. People call Russia a gangster state, but that's not really true; it's a secret police state, run by a KGB man. And its favored tools of assassination, secret trials, disappearances, silence through fear, domestic mass mind control and international information warfare reflect that. The chances of something less malevolent crawling out of that swamp seem highly unlikely, since the country has functioned for over a century as an evolutionary experiment in eradicating anyone who shows a shred of conscience.
> At some point, the impulse to develop an insurance policy for self-preservation is going to grow stronger. And in dictatorships, that impulse — when shared and coordinated between elites — leads to the downfall of dictatorships.
