![]() This would be good news for the West, which has bankrolled and armed the country’s fight for its life. Schisms in Moscow and between the government and Prigozhin’s Wagner Group – the only Russian fighting force that has enjoyed much recent battlefield success – might also now conjure an opening for Ukraine, which wants breakthroughs against Moscow’s already demoralized and poorly led troops in its new counteroffensive. “Putin has been diminished for all time by this affair.” It’s like Prigozhin is the person who looked behind the screen at the Wizard of Oz and saw the great and terrible Oz was just this little frightened man,” former US ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Moscow has stepped back from civil war with Wagner. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters The rest of the world must now deal with the implications.įighters of Wagner private mercenary group pull out of the headquarters of the Southern Military District to return to base, in the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, June 24, 2023. There’s now no doubt that the war Putin unleashed to wipe Ukraine off the map poses an existential threat to his political survival. But Prigozhin’s defiance – and the retreat by Putin, who accused him of treason but then agreed to a deal to let him apparently escape to exile in Belarus hours later – punched the deepest holes in the Russian president’s authority in a generation in power. The Kremlin strongman seemed to blink at a military confrontation with Prigozhin’s Wagner Group fighters – in an act that might preserve his grip on power. Ultimately, a civil war that seemed about to burst out was averted – at least for now. Meanwhile, efforts by the White House and its foreign allies to find out exactly what was happening underlined the volatile nature of a war that could rewrite the map of Europe and modern history. The Western stakes in the Ukraine war rose significantly as a result.Ī mutinous weekend that saw mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin flagrantly mock the Kremlin before aborting his march on Moscow evoked Russia’s blood-soaked history of revolutions and coups. The world just got a hint of a tantalizing but possibly even more dangerous future without Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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