After the surprising (and brief) weekend uprising in Russia led by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prighozhin and the mercenary's exile to Belarus, speculation was rampant over what would happen next to Vladimir Putin.
Almost to a person, Kremlin-watchers and the U.S. press agree with the headline in the Wall Street Journal Monday: "Revolt Puts Putin in Weaker Position."
But Newsmax spoke to three sworn enemies of the Russian strongman now living abroad and they were not so certain of his imminent demise.
"Only a madman would seriously answer your question now and make a prediction as to whether Putin will stay in power for more than a year or less," Sergei Parkhomenko, publisher and radio commentator, told us, "No one knows that, and no one has any basis for calculating the timeframe left to Putin."
He did add, however, that "Putin and his group do not have any serious forces at their disposal to counter an attack involving a large — several thousand people — and well-organized and well-armed military formation. Such a formation can move freely across the territory of the European part of Russia without meeting any serious resistance."
Parkhomenko, now a Senior Advisor at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, also pointed out that "[I]nitially, Putin makes serious threats of persecution and punishment for disobedience to him, but all these threats turn out to be an empty sound and are easily cancelled at the first attempt to make a deal.
"One thing remains unclear: what is the potential for a deferred threat, for deferred coercive pressure, that remains in Putin's hands after the crisis is over? This is the proverbial consideration that 'Putin will then terribly avenge himself and kill everyone, when everybody has somewhat forgotten what it was all about and how it was done.' Since the ideas about the power and diversity of forces that Putin and his group possess at the very moment of forceful confrontation are greatly exaggerated, and in many ways simply false, it is still unclear whether he has any resource left over, or whether that resource has already been wasted."
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man and a prisoner of Putin's for 10 years, said that "Prighozhin's mutiny dealt a significant blow to the legitimacy of Putin and his regime, both in the eyes of the elite and the entire Russian society. Putin has shown himself as a weak leader who poorly controls his inner circle and security forces."
Khodorkovsky, who now runs a foundation in London, said that "[T]his time Putin managed to weather the storm, but it is not excluded that he has suffered fatal damage. Prighozhin's mutiny has become the most serious revolutionary situation throughout Putin's reign, and it is unfortunate that the democratic opposition was unable to fully capitalize on it."
Grigori Chkhartishvili, best-selling novelist who writes under the name "A.K.A. Akunin," said that the attempted mutiny "came as a shock revelation to the majority of Russians and even more importantly to Putin's elite, which feels very insecure now."
"In a highly volatile situation like this no one can predict when everything collapses," the novelist told Newsmax, "The only salvation for Putin would be a close partnership — a junior partnership — with China. This is, alas, highly probable if Washington-Peking relations lead to a serious political confrontation and a new Cold War. So the fate of the war, of Ukraine and Russia will probably depend on how things go on your side of the planet."
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