Vladimir Putin's Last Days

The beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin

As if the world needed just one more reminder about the depths of the Russian military’s endless depravity in its vicious campaign to annihilate Ukraine, war crimes investigators uncovered yet another mass grave brimming with murdered civilians near Izium yesterday, some 534 men, women, and children. In Pisky-Radkivski, investigators discovered 22 makeshift detention sites where evidence of medieval barbarism was readily apparent, including a home’s basement turned torture chamber with plastic containers filled with extracted gold teeth and dentures, alongside various accoutrements of torture.

It evoked nothing less than Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps, horrors wrought by the regime of the last madman who’s armies ran amok in Europe, Adolf Hitler.

The grotesque tableau captured the savage conduct of Vladimir Putin’s war, yet another nightmare in a conflict that has had no shortage of human suffering and moral degradation. But as Ukraine’s advancing military steadily erodes what remains of Russia’s atrophying forces, and pushes them further back on the battlefield, the chances of this genocidal conflict becoming a global catastrophe are now undeniable.

But like the blazing inferno that is consuming the Kerch strait bridge tonight in Crimea, a massive project that served as a powerful symbol of Vladimir Putin’s attempt to subjugate Ukraine and bind her to Russia by the force of his will, his efforts are going up in smoke, along with the remnants of Russia’s already shattered supply lines.

With Putin increasingly isolated in the Kremlin, and his war effort in tatters, his political power structure is looking more fragile by the day. How long until elite Russians find that Putin’s continued service at the apex of power no longer suits them? Amid muted celebrations of Putin’s 70th birthday today, it can be assumed that there are powerful players in his orbit, security and military officials who are tired of suffering his mistakes, and who would love nothing more than to be rid of their vicious leader.

As Putin openly contemplates nuclear war, perhaps they will finally feel emboldened to act. Certainly, one hopes his successor isn’t worse than himself, a terrifying and surreal possibility.

A rupture in the Kremlin

Indeed, the whispering in Moscow has suddenly become a torrent of bitter criticism, as what was promised to the public as a limited engagement with certain victory, a “special military operation” in the Kremlin’s Orwellian propaganda, becomes an utterly lost cause, and one that is increasingly pulling young Russians into its lethal vortex.

The mobilization order has been plagued by dysfunction, and ordinary Russians are suddenly feeling the pinch of their autocratic leader’s insane foreign policy on their own lives. While the war didn’t touch them, apathy reigned supreme, but as it comes home to Russia, along with young men in body bags, the anger and humiliation are palpable.

It’s an explosive combination, and quite dangerous for Putin, who likes Russians silent, pliable, ignorant, and spoon-fed his propaganda.

The brilliant journalists at Meduza published a remarkable video of numerous armed troops in Belgorod (near the border with Ukraine) milling around, faces covered in balaclavas, bitterly complaining of the sordid conditions suffered by Russian soldiers. The point seemed clear enough: politicians should be careful about how and to whom they hand machine guns, particularly in the midst of a lost war.

Meanwhile, Putin has been firing and hiring Russian general officers, in a vain attempt to fix what are chronic and worsening maladies in the Russian military, while pinning some of the political blame for his catastrophic war elsewhere. While the Russian army appears to be irreparably broken, he’s had more success shifting blame onto the Ministry of Defense’s admittedly poor performance, and his embattled defense minister Sergei Shoigu.

But how long will that last? After all, Vladimir Putin has been running the show since the beginning, dictating strategy, while calling tactical plays on the battlefield. Ultimately, elite and ordinary Russians alike know who is responsible for this cataclysmic war, along with the rest of the world.

The responsibility is entirely his, of course.

Politicos

As political infighting and instability begin to overtake the Kremlin’s carefully curated propaganda, there are powerful political players around Putin who essentially have their own standing armies, and who could turn on him, and potentially make a run at power in Moscow.

The risk of armed insurrection inside Russia is real and growing. Last week, Yevgeny Prigozhin (owner of the Wagner mercenary group) and Ramzan Kadyrov (Chechen strongman) mercilessly and publicly criticized Russia’s Ministry of Defense after the debacle at Lyman, after Russian forces retreated following Putin’s deluded televised annexation ceremony.

It was exactly one step removed from criticizing Vladimir Putin himself.

Perhaps next week they’ll begin holding back their forces from what is quite obviously a lost cause in Ukraine, and put those forces to work inside Russia itself. Certainly, these thoughts have occurred to Putin, no stranger to coups, and hidden political intrigues. As the specter of a humiliating defeat makes itself known inside Russia, Putin will be desperate to salvage this war by any means possible, before it claims him.

Thus, these next days are perilous ones. With the Russian army verging on collapse, about to lose a war Putin simply cannot afford to lose, there is a real chance that he deploys a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, at which point all bets are off. It’s a terrifying scenario, leading President Joe Biden to speak of the “prospect of nuclear armageddon” not once but twice in the last 24 hours.

Biden’s clearly as preoccupied as the rest of us, as humanity contemplates the unthinkable.

Finale

As Ukraine presses its counteroffensive toward the Russian border, and Russian forces find themselves in fatal disarray on the frontline and in the rear, this war may be coming to its terrible conclusion. With Russia nearing a catastrophic collapse on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin may be enticed to use his massive arsenal of nuclear weapons to reverse outright defeat.

With Putin facing the beginnings of dissent in his uppermost ranks, and perhaps a million ordinary Russians fleeing the country to escape military service, amid massive roiling protests, this war is quickly coming to a head. Putin’s regime faces growing political pressure from within Russia to somehow salvage this war, something nobody could accomplish, at least not with Russia’s broken conventional military, obliterated by casualties, corruption, and despair.

At best, it was thought that Russia might stabilize its frontlines with its massive ongoing infusion of troops, though that seems more and more unlikely, as the roll-out continues to be botched at every level. Rather, Putin’s nuclear weapons appear to be his last card to play, a desperate gamble that would imperil the fate of the entire world.

As officials in Washington, Brussels, London, and Kyiv feverishly attempt to decipher his plans, Putin has shown no inkling of backing down, or giving up at all. Instead, he has shown a willingness to escalate, to gamble with lives to achieve his geopolitical ends. It’s a terrifying predicament.

On one hand, Putin is surely counting on his nuclear blackmail to pay dividends on the battlefield, to prevent the most sophisticated and devastating Western weapons from reaching Kyiv. On the other hand, it’s too late. The Russian army is currently facing cascading collapse, and the Ukrainians seem to be accomplishing the task of routing Russian forces just fine with the weapons at hand.

Thus, we’re at a moment of supreme danger. We’re in a window between Russia’s total collapse on the battlefield and Putin’s political collapse at home, where any horrific thing is possible. As the gap between those two eventualities closes, this war is likely to become even more perilous still.

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