FRF statement on the "Prigozhin's mutiny"
What we have warned many times has happened. Putin’s aggressive, invasive war against Ukraine has begun to escalate into a mafia war between the various clans of Putin’s regime. The Prigozhin’s mutiny is only the first flare-up of this war, which may soon escalate to the scale of an all-Russian conflagration.
Being only the first, fleeting episode of this mafia war, Prigozhin’s rebellion has nevertheless exposed the rotten stuffing of Putin’s regime.
It became clear that in Russia, there is no state and no law, but instead, there is just a sticky ball of gangster groups, fighting among themselves, but united in their predatory attitude toward Russia and its citizens. While Prigozhin’s fighters were marching on Moscow, it turned out that Russia no longer had a combat-ready army capable of stopping the gang of thugs marching on the capital, nor any state security or police force capable of restoring order. The Russian Federal Guard, which has spent years training in dispersing peaceful demonstrations, was completely unable to fulfill its direct responsibilities at a critical moment for the country. Most importantly, the “popular support” for Vladimir Putin acknowledged by many experts turned out to be a fiction. No one came out to defend the Russian dictator.
For years we heard from many experts, including those from the liberal camp, that Putin’s regime was not that bad, that we should fight for its evolutionary development from authoritarianism to democracy in the framework of the existing political system. Putin’s war unleashed against Ukraine showed us the true, brutal grin of this regime, and its “evolution” in fact turned out to be a consistent degradation of the state system, the end of which we saw in the course of Prigozhin’s march on Moscow.
We have said many times that Putin’s foreign policy defeat would put an end to his regime. The events of the last few days confirm this thesis. There is no global defeat yet, but the failure of the war, combined with other factors accompanying the aggression against Ukraine, is already having a negative impact on the stability of Putin’s regime. A Ukrainian victory, which could happen very soon, would undoubtedly bring down the rotten edifice of Russian statehood, which would have to be reassembled on different grounds.
