Is Putin’s power creaking? Here are the signs of the difficulties of Mosca-Corriere.it

Imagine the dictator of a warring regime that he hasn’t won in the field for a year, that he hasn’t recruited new soldiers for fear of a revolt, which threatens the arrest of his officials if they resign, while elites in the country grow increasingly skeptical of him. In addition, his government relies on a band of mercenaries whose leader insults the defense minister, the army commander and probably the dictator himself.

Would you bet on the future of such a regime? Why that of Vladimir Putin is like this. Since last summer it has suffered only defeats and had to give ground in Ukraine, while the Russian offensive on Bakhmut has essentially failed despite the enormous cost in human lives, war material and devastation. As for the new mobilization, prepared for months, it continues to slip because the Kremlin fears a wave of hostility in public opinion towards the war and towards Putin himself. Meanwhile, it has been discovered that the army is sending armored vehicles from the 1950s onto the field, for lack of anything better.

It is in this framework that in recent weeks there have been small creaks in the vertical of Russian power. In late March, someone intercepted two oligarchs loyal to the regime, Iosif Prigozhin and Farkhad Akhmedov, and then released the contents of their exchanges. The two say that the Russian leadership is made up of “stupid cockroaches” who are “dragging the country down” and “destroying the future”. What’s interesting is that nothing happened to the two: they didn’t fly out a window, nor were they poisoned or imprisoned. The regime has pretended to believe that registration was false, perhaps because it lacks the energy at this stage to initiate a purge within the elites.

Not even the Kremlin escapes that Russian oligarchs remain passively loyal, but they do not share Putin’s imperial lure. Billionaires like Alexei Mordashov of Severstal or Mikhail Fridman of Alfa-Bank continue to collaborate with the regime and its military-industrial apparatus, accomplices to the end, but only for opportunism and for money. They would end the war tomorrow, if they could, because it harms their interests; and they make their Western interlocutors understand it.

The cynicism towards Putin in the Russian business elite is now so evident that in the United States they are beginning to reflect on how to undermine the relationship between the dictator and his oligarchs. One of the proposals under study at the moment concerns the sanctions: could be suspended in favor of oligarchs who stand in line for troop withdrawal and pay 75% of their frozen assets to Ukraine. Probably not even this will be enough to shift the balance, yet in Moscow the seizure of power seems less solid than a year ago. This week it became known that senior bureaucrats, members of the FSB secret services and even two regional governors they were threatened with arrest if they resigned: not really a test of strength, when a regime has to guarantee its loyalty by these means.

Finally, the most blatant case broke out, that of Yevgeny Prigozhin (namesake, not a relative of the oligarch intercepted). The founder of Wagner, the irregular militia besieging Bakhmut, publicly insulted and treated as incompetent Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Supreme Army Commander Valery Gerasimov. Again no one reacted. Then Prigozhin seemed to raise the bar: “How do you win a war – he wondered on Telegram – when it turns out that the grandfather is a total head of c.?”. Sergey Radchenko, Russian-British historian and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has no doubts about the meaning of the joke: “grandfather”, he points out, is the term by which the opposition refers to Putin; Prigozhin could not ignore this, although he later denied that he was referring to his president.

Here too the remarkable aspect is the total lack of reaction from the Kremlin, which continues to need Wagner. «We are witnessing a disorganization of the armed forces, in the moment of danger, which it reveals how something is working profoundly wrong in the state», notes Radchenko. “From the outside we don’t know what’s happening, but we see the smoke coming out: there are symptoms of malaise and the signs of a destabilizing situation”. Not all observers agree, actually. Dmitri Alperovitch, of the Washington-based think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator, was the first to predict aggression against Ukraine in 2021. Now he thinks Putin’s grip on power remains firm. «Fostering divisions among collaborators is typical of a dictator – he says -. But there are no signs that the security services or the army are against him: his position is secure and the Kremlin today is betting on a long war, of which it hopes that the Westerners will tire sooner or later».

But not even Alperovitch excludes what he defines a “black swan”: a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the coming months that cuts off Crimea from the rest of the Russian occupation. Because a dictator who draws his prestige on the use of force can lose it when the use of force finally humiliates him.

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