Global Courant
Regime change in Russia has been a major goal of the globalist wing of US foreign policy since the 2014 Maidan coup, carried out at the behest of then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, now the undersecretary for policy of the US State Department. President Joe Biden embraced the demand for regime change on March 26, 2022, declaring that Putin “cannot stay in power” after the February 24 invasion of Ukraine.
The Wagner Group mutiny over the weekend sparked a firestorm of editorial and social media comments that the Russian president might be impeached after all. After Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin accepted the deal proposed by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, broke off his march on Moscow and retreated to Moscow’s closest ally, Putin was still in place.
But the political sands have shifted to Russia’s ultra-nationalist right, posing serious strategic risks, including a greater likelihood of using tactical nuclear weapons.
Russia has been shifting since Maidan to a nasty form of nationalism, which Nuland and her colleagues saw as a prelude to Putin’s overthrow. The US-sponsored coup against President-elect Viktor Yanukovych threatened Russia’s tenure in Crimea, home of its Black Sea fleet, and led to Russia’s annexation of the peninsula, which has been Russian territory since the reign of Catherine the Great.
Prigozhin reflects a growing consensus in the Russian armed forces and key segments of civil society that Putin has been a weakling in the face of Western plans against Russia. This consensus also includes Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, who persuaded Putin to send troops to defend Moscow against Prigozhin’s mutinous march on the capital. Kadyrov and Prigozhin have been allies against Putin’s military leadership, demanding more aggressive and decisive action in Ukraine from a Kremlin perceived as cautious.
Remarkably, Prigozhin was able to assemble a military column over a period of more than a week without Putin’s knowledge – although Western intelligence agencies have observed this, according to press reports. Even more remarkably, there were no Russian forces between Moscow and Rostov as the convoy approached to within 200 kilometers of Moscow, with the exception of a few helicopters, three of which were shot down by Wagner forces.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group, speaks in Bakhmut in a video released earlier this year. Photo: Telegram channel / @concordgroup_official
Most notably, Putin had to call on Prigozhin’s ally Kadyrov to defend the capital, before reaching a compromise with Lukashenko that dropped all charges against the mutineers. It seems that Russia’s regular army sat on its hands and let Prigozhin send a message to Putin.
The ultra-nationalist “Great Russia” movement in Moscow believes that Putin is soft on the West. Putin petitioned then-President Bill Clinton in 2000 for Russia to join NATO, and was denied; he got a pledge from Washington not to intervene in Ukraine, which the Bush administration violated when it sponsored the 2004 Orange Revolution.
And he struck a deal with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel to guarantee the security and rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority through the Minsk II Agreement, which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected in 2022 with Anglo-American support.
The Prigozhin mutiny now makes Putin dependent on Russia’s far right. If he is overthrown, his successor will not be a liberal Democrat of the kind Washington dreams of, but rather a Russian nationalist bent on absolute victory in Ukraine, probably even if tactical nuclear weapons are required.
There is no liberal current of interest in Russia. But Russia’s ruling elite forms a powerful group of right-wing nationalists, who dream of a revived “Greater Russia.” Ominously, this stream is merging from several disparate groups.
It includes Liberal Democratic Party leader Leonid Slutsky, “Eurasian” philosopher Alexander Dugin, popular TV anchors Vladimir Solovyev and Dimitri Dibrov, Chechen leader Kadyrov, Moscow Patriarchate television channel SPAS, and neo-tsarist Union of the Russian people.
It also includes former Russian flag officers forced into retirement by Putin and Wagner boss Prigozhin, who have grumbled about Putin’s military shyness and the poor performance of his hand-picked commanders. What holds this motley coalition together is one idea, that Russia must defeat Ukraine at all costs and that the war can only end with victory on the western borders of the former Soviet Union.
The potential of using Russia’s 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, which start at 1 kiloton, is not merely a matter of media speculation. The most prominent mouthpieces of “Great-Russian” nationalism demand their commitment.
The ultra-nationalist hydra has many heads, but one has a louder voice than the other, the self-proclaimed “Red Nazi” Dugin. In a March 2023 viral post on Telegram, Dugin demanded a general mobilization of all Russian military manpower, militarization of the economy, internment of war opponents, and the use of tactical nuclear weapons if other measures fail.
Dugin suggested “doing everything” to avoid using “non-strategic nuclear weapons”, but using them if necessary. Russia should also be “ready to use strategic nuclear weapons,” Dugin stated. Dugin’s daughter died in August 2022 when a bomb destroyed the car she was traveling in, possibly intended for Dugin herself.
The bomb that killed Aleksandr Dugin’s daughter, the aftermath shown here, was probably intended for the self-proclaimed “Red Nazi.” Image: Twitter
Dugin, a self-proclaimed disciple of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, has denounced Putin for putting the Russian polity above “Russky Mir” or Russianness. “He puts the Russian state first, while I think of Russky Mir. This Russian world is much bigger than the Russian state. Putin violates Russian identity and has disappointed many patriots,” the ideologue told a news agency. Dutch newspaper in 2018.
Russia’s war with Ukraine is practically a war between the Russian Federation and NATO. Russia is fighting an army of Ukrainians armed, trained and paid for by the United States and other NATO countries. The sanctions against Russia, including the unprecedented confiscation of about $500 billion of its foreign exchange reserves without a full declaration of war, were designed to destroy Russia’s ability to fight.
All major schools of Russian opinion believe that the Western goal of this war is to force regime change in Russia and possibly fragment the ethnically diverse and geographically dispersed Russian Federation itself.
The Russians are not paranoid about it. Regime change in Russia has been on the agenda of some senior Biden administration officials for a decade.
As Secretary of State Nuland, then head of the East European Department of the State Department, told a congressional committee on May 6, 2014: “Since 1992, we have provided $20 billion to Russia to support the transition to the peaceful, , democratic state that its people deserve.” The same theme is dutifully repeated in the major Washington think tanks and the editorial pages of the mainstream press.
Secretary of State Nuland. Photo: Global Courant Files
There is no effective democratic opposition waiting for the current Russian regime. Before 2022, alleged Democrat Alexei Navalny had the support of some opinion groups.
But even before the invasion of Ukraine, Russian security forces forced most of Navalny’s supporters to emigrate or threw them in prison. Another wave of immigration followed the February 24, 2022 invasion, effectively clearing the landscape of any liberal opposition.
Putin’s most likely policy response to the mutiny and its temporary solution will be to increase the mobilization of Russian manpower, a key element of Dugin’s program. This is all the more likely after the government of Ukraine announced on June 19 stricter mobilization standards in several oblasts, starting with Kiev.
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