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JEROME STARKEY
Putin’s cronies are eating each other – but even if Mad Vlad is toppled it may not stop the war in Ukraine
The coup attempt in Russia is good news for Ukraine.
It is too early to tell how the armed uprising will end.
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But it means Putin’s generals are distracted. His soldiers are confused.
And the despot in the Kremlin has been forced to admit a crisis in an emergency TV address.
When Putin spoke to the nation this morning he talked of treason, terrorism and an armed military uprising threatening his regime.
It is not just a crack. It is a chasm in the diet of daily propaganda force-fed to ordinary Russians.
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They must realise the war in Ukraine isn’t going quite as smoothly as Putin would have them believe.
The truth is his henchmen are eating themselves.
Ukraine’s supporters might be wishing for total collapse in Moscow.
But even if Putin is toppled – and that still seems like a long shot – don’t expect a dove in his place.
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Most of Putin’s internal critics want to fight the war in Ukraine harder.
Western officials have warned there are no obvious successors who would wash their hands of the bloodbath.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of the Wagner mercenary group, leading the insurrection has long complained at the Army’s incompetence and corruption of its generals.
With the right people in charge, he claims, Russia would not have been humiliated by 17 months of grinding defeats.
The row which led to Wagner’s uprising has been a long time coming.
For months the billionaire boss Prigozhin – who made his money cooking children’s school lunches – has been launching furious attacks against the defence minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of Russia’s armed forces General Valery Gerasimov.
His main complaint was that they starved his Wagner troops of ammunition as they fought their way through Bakhmut, the meat grinder town in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas that was the epicentre of the war for most of the last nine months.
This week Priozhin accused Russian generals of stealing soldiers’ salaries in gargantuan corruption.
Then last night he claimed they had rocketed one of his bases slaughtering countless Wagner troops.
How Prigozhin has lasted so long – despite these outspoken attacks –has baffled many Kremlin watchers.
At times he even dared to criticise Putin directly.
Yet Prigozhin, a former convict to oligarch, remained in place because Moscow thought he had Putin’s favour.
And he was useful. He had a vast private army drawn largely from Russian prisons, that had thrown its bodies at Bakhmut.
It had succeeded where Putin’s army has failed.
But Wagner finally captured the city and handed the ruins to regular forces.
Perhaps the Army thought he had served his purpose and now he was expendable.
Over recent days Western intelligence sources detected nervousness amongst Putin’s officials that something was afoot and the Kremlin regime was genuinely concerned for its survival in a way it hadn’t been before.
Putin might not be ruing the day he allowed an oligarch to build a vast private army of ex-convict rapists and murderers.
He has turned to his most trusted FSB intelligence service to secure the capital Moscow and put down the insurrection.
While Moscow is engulfed in the whirlwind Ukraine May see an opportunity to make gains on the battlefield and to make gains in public opinion – among the ordinary Russians who might see the disaster of Putin’s invasion more clearly for the first time.
But there is also a risk to Ukraine.
Succeed or fail, the coup could be an excuse to impose martial law and total mobilisation, flooding the army with cannon fodder troops to overwhelm Ukraine.
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Putin could also use it to sack his top tier of commanders and ministers and replace them with someone worse.
The chance for Ukraine is chaos while Russia devours itself.
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