If Prigozhin bends Russia to his will, the war in Ukraine could be plunged to new depths of horror says MARK ALMOND, director of the Crisis Research Institute

Vladimir Putin thought he could seize Ukraine in just a few days. But now, suddenly, his grip on power in Russia itself is wobbling after 48 hours of chaos.

Even after the sudden decision of the rebel leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to turn back his troops from their march on Moscow, the brutal truth is that this mutiny has dramatically destabilised Putin’s 23-year tenure in the Kremlin. It could collapse now that his aura of invincibility and control has been shattered beyond repair.

For two decades, the 70-year-old’s word has been law in Russia. Yet the decision of his former protege Prigozhin to rise up against his master, combined with the Ukrainians’ heroic resistance to invasion, have exposed how incompetent and corrupt his military machine is.

Not since the Russian army went on strike in 1917 and abandoned the First World War has the Russian state faced such a challenge to its authority from the armed basis of its power.

Putin is haunted by history. Proof of this was how, in yesterday’s TV address, he said the grim years of revolution and civil war after 1917 were threatening to return. But what he did not admit was that Russia’s slide into crisis is a direct product of his own policies.

MARK ALMOND: Vladimir Putin thought he could seize Ukraine in just a few days. But now, suddenly, his grip on power in Russia itself is wobbling after 48 hours of chaos

Behind the facade of serried ranks of soldiers goosestepping across Red Square next to intercontinental nuclear missiles, Russia has been a morass of corruption and cronyism.

READ MORE: Wagner coup fails: Prigozhin abandons march on Moscow and will be EXILED to Belarus

A Russian Police officer guards the Red Square near the Kremlin as forces brace for an attack before the sensational retreat of Prigozhin’s forces

Far from modernising Russia, Putin has allowed a repeat of the internal struggles for power between warlords that date back 400 years. The fact is that his former crony Prigozhin was able to carve out a lucrative fiefdom for himself and then establish his own mercenary army alongside the official Russian army is an extraordinary insight into how Putin hollowed out the authority of the Russian state.

Putin thought he was being smart giving Prigozhin such freedom and a fighting force to deploy in the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine after 2014 and in Africa where several regimes have employed Wagner mercenaries to stay in power.

Such freelance activities also served the Kremlin’s efforts to reduce Western influence on the African continent. However, that strategy has come back to bite Putin.

The promotion of Prigozhin as a warlord was designed to protect the president against any possible coup against him by the Russian military. But it turned Prigozhin into a Frankenstein’s monster.

What’s more, the Wagner Group is not Russia’s only private militia. Ramzan Kadyrov, the boss of the southern Chechen Republic, has tens of thousands of armed men and says he’ll support Putin – but at what political price?

The huge gas business Gazprom says it is recruiting a private militia to fight in Ukraine but may actually be doing so to give its billionaire bosses some leverage in Russian politics. By sponsoring these warlords as guarantors of his power and then by failing to smack down Prigozhin’s increasingly loud-mouthed insubordination, Putin has let this crisis grow out of control.

Few will weep if he falls from power. But it is too soon to crow.

Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin ranting against Russian army leaders in a video post 

No one should be naive and think that any new Russian leader would automatically be better.

For their part, it is understandable that Ukrainians hope that liberation may be at hand if Russians fall out among themselves. But the chilling truth is that Prigozhin has made it clear that he is rebelling because the aggression against Ukraine has been mismanaged, not because it is a war crime. Prigozhin’s unrestrained brutality means that if he succeeds in bending the Russian state and army to his will, the war against Ukraine could be plunged into new depths of horror.

So far, Putin has used bluster about using nuclear weapons but don’t count on a criminal such as Prigozhin to show restraint. For this is a man who has used a sledgehammer to smash the head of an insubordinate soldier.

Would such a beast bother considering the consequences before unleashing nuclear weapons on the world?

Make no mistake, the fate of Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal is now in play. As bad for Russia and the world as Putin’s regime has been, a new power struggle for control of the Kremlin risks putting the world on the brink of atomic catastrophe. We have never witnessed a civil war inside a nuclear-armed state before.

MARK ALMOND: However much Putin deserves a grim reckoning, those who may yet topple him are even less predictable and self-controlled

Sadly, Russia’s people are passive onlookers to this power struggle. TV images of a street-cleaner diligently brushing up rubbish between the rebel tanks in the city of Rostov, without looking up, embody the political passivity of so many Russians.

Until the Russian people assert themselves, the fall of Putin will not liberate the country’s 143 million population, or their neighbours, from the threat of arbitrary and brutal acts by whoever rules in the Kremlin.

Nuclear-armed anarchy is a terrifying prospect. But there is little in practice that the West can do to control the situation.

However much Putin deserves a grim reckoning, those who may yet topple him are even less predictable and self-controlled. Yesterday’s chaos suggests his coming fall would still set in train a worse time of troubles for all of us.

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