Russia’s elite want Vladimir Putin to be gone: ‘Wagner chief succeeded as…’

Russian military blogger Igor Girkin said that the country’s president Vladimir Putin may face a move from within his inner circle to end Ukraine invasion. It could lead to his removal as president, the blogger who played a key role in the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region from 2014, said.

Igor Girkin said that the mutiny by Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, in which his troops seized military facilities in Rostov-on-Don and marched on Moscow, succeeded by redistributing power among the Russian elite and weakening the positions of Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu, Moscow regional governor Andrei Vorobyov and Moscow city mayor Sergei Sobyanin.

A group of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle known as the “Ozero (Lake) Cooperative” and based in the Leningrad Oblast wants to oust the presiden, Igor Girkin said. The group also wants to sabotage Russia’s military operations and its defense industrial base as well as control of rear areas in the war, he claimed, adding, that they would also target the Ministry of Defense, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB and other government structures.

What think tank ISW said on challenges that Vladimir Putin faces?

Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said that there should be a continued grinding war effort and no freezing of the lines in Ukraine. Igor Girkin’s claims try to portray the Wagner founder as a threat to Putin’s regime “to encourage harsher Kremlin action against Prigozhin and discourage any efforts to freeze the front in Ukraine”, the think tank said.

What expert said on Russia and Vladimir Putin’s leadership?

“The mutiny exposed disagreement and instability among Russia’s elites, including military leadership, and Putin’s own leadership is predicated on the idea that he is a guarantor of stability,” Tom Roberts, assistant professor of Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at Smith College, said, adding, “Putin’s actions since June 24 also seem to confirm this, as the president has been eager to project his control of the armed forces, and to declare that national unity ensured the defeat of the mutiny.”