Vladimir Putin is locked in fight for his survival after loyal attack dog Yevgeny Prigozhin turned on his old master

TERRIFIED tyrant Vladimir Putin is locked in a fight for his very survival after loyal attack dog Yevgeny Prigozhin turned on his old master.

The lightning advance of the Wagner Group mercenaries has shattered the Kremlin’s illusion of a steadfast iron-fist leader.

Prigozhin had Putin scared.

After more than two decades in power, Putin’s authority has suffered a humiliating blow as he was forced to negotiate with rebels racing towards Moscow.

There is no obvious means of succession and Putin must have always known that he might face a coup d’etat.

His most likely route out of the Kremlin is still in a wooden box.

And the coup was always likely to come from someone in or near his inner circle, because they have the money and power.

The big questions now are will Wagner try again or will someone else get there first?

If the sharks smell blood in the water it won’t be long before they strike.

We know that Putin is scared because he compared the uprising to the events of 1917.

Then, war-weary Russian troops fuelled the Bolshevik revolution and the once all-powerful Tsar Nicholas II was toppled and shot in a cellar alongside his wife and kids.

Putin said military plots a century ago led to “the destruction of the army, the collapse of the state and the loss of vast territories, ultimately leading to the tragedy of the civil war”.

Yesterday it looked as though history was about to repeat itself.

Wagner Group mercenaries came within hours of storming the capital Moscow before calling off the assault in an 11th hour climbdown.

Hours earlier Putin had accused his old pal Prigozhin of treason, treachery and betrayal.

And in a stark admission of his own vulnerability he said the Wagner rebellion could fracture Russia and lead to defeat in Ukraine.

In other words, wreck the legacy that Putin craves.

In an emergency TV address yesterday Putin said: “This is a stab in the back of our country and our people. A blow like this was dealt to Russia in 1917, when the country was fighting in World War One. Victory was stolen from us.”

He glossed over Russia’s horrific defeats on World War One’s Eastern Front, which fuelled widespread anger against the Tsar.

He accused Wagner of “pushing the country towards anarchy and fratricide — and ultimately, towards defeat and surrender”.

Then suddenly they were not. Putin cut a deal with the traitor.

Wagner troops made a U-turn and ordinary Russian soldiers were left wondering who was in charge.

This is good news for Ukraine. Putin’s generals are distracted. His soldiers are confused.

And ordinary people are getting a glimpse of the chaos. It is not just a crack.

It is a chasm in the diet of daily propaganda force-fed to ordinary Russians.

They must realise the war in Ukraine isn’t going quite as smoothly as Putin would have them believe.

As Putin’s henchmen are eating themselves, Ukraine’s supporters might well 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.

Many of Putin’s fiercest critics want to fight the war in Ukraine even harder.

Western officials say there are no obvious successors who would wash their hands of the bloodbath.

Most of his inner circle are the so-called siloviki, or men of force, drawn from the military and secret police.

These are the people Prigozhin blames for Russia’s defeats in Ukraine, for the humiliating retreats from Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson last year.

Surely Prigozhin still wants them gone. Was that the concession he won?

His nemesis, defence minister Sergei Shoigu has been “taken into protective custody”.

It is hard to see how those left such as armed forces chief General Valery Gerasimov can earn their soldiers’ respect after allowing a bunch of Wagner rebels to charge 400 miles into Russia without offering a shred of resistance.

The row that led to Wagner’s uprising has been a long time coming.

For months Prigozhin has blasted the generals as incompetent and corrupt.

His main complaint was that they starved him 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 past nine months.

Last week Prigozhin 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.

But the speed and scale of his coup attempt suggests it had been planned for months.

Indeed, Western officials sensed fear in the Kremlin that trouble was afoot last week.

The Kremlin was scared, sources said, in a way it hadn’t been before.

How Prigozhin has lasted so long — despite his often foul-mouthed, outspoken attacks — has baffled many Kremlin watchers.

At times he even dared to criticise Putin directly.

Yet Prigozhin, an ex-convict, 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.

Wagner finally captured Bakhmut in May and handed the ruins to regular forces.

It seemed Putin may have thought he had served his purpose and was expendable — and ordered all mercenaries to be absorbed into the Russian army.

But Prigozhin refused, reiterating yesterday: “They wanted to disband the Wagner military company.”

Putin may well be regretting the day he allowed an oligarch to build a vast private army of ex-convict rapists and murderers.

Unsurprisingly, Putin has turned to his most trusted FSB intelligence service to secure Moscow and put down the insurrection.

But they were the same spies who told him the war in Ukraine would be easy.

So far Russia’s regular army has not put up much resistance.

Prigozhin claimed they captured the military bases in Rostov-on-Don without a shot being fired.

Videos on social media showed civilians greeting his troops and handing them bottles of water. That has Moscow terrified.

Soldiers there are building defences. Trucks have dumped sand to build barriers. Troops are putting out mines.

As long as the Kremlin is engulfed in this whirlwind, Ukraine may see an opportunity to make gains on the battlefield.

It can also make gains in public opinion.

This is a rare chance to reach ordinary Russians who can see the disaster of Putin’s invasion 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.

Putin has had to deny allegations that he has high-tailed it out of Moscow.

His spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted he was working hard in the Kremlin, where he had called neighbouring leaders yesterday to update them on the chaos.

If Putin is toppled, then all bets are off. He could well be replaced by someone worse.

If he clings to power and crushes Wagner he may use the attempted coup as an excuse to clear out his commanders.

There is no reason to think they will be any better at leading a broken army, but they are unlikely to want to retreat from Ukraine. They could be even worse.

The chance for Ukraine is now, in the chaos, while Russia devours itself.