The slow demise of Putin

Well. I was going to write about Spring, that wonderful time of hope and renewal. And I will for later this week. But, this caught my eye the other day:

BREAKING: As reported by @KyivIndependent, Ukraine’s military intelligence claims Russia’s elites are plotting to OVERTHROW Putin to restore economic ties with Western countries. Aleksandr Bortnikov, head of FSB security agency, is allegedly being considered as Putin’s successor.

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) March 20, 2022

Now. This may very well be Ukraine mindfucking Putin to get him to take certain measures to guarantee the preferred outcome, which is a bullet in the head. However, as this video from Beau of the Fifth Column, one of the most awesome Southerners on the intertubes, says: Vladimir Putin's already gone down that rabbit hole:

Now, obviously, Putin's first and most egregious error was invading Ukraine. This enough would have secured his downfall if he weren't a delusional paranoid. And make no mistake: this was Putin's error, and his alone. He can scapegoat anyone he wants, but the fact is that he was given the casus belli he wanted because those around him feared him too much to give him, as one used to say, the brass tacks. Ukraine was not going to be a cakewalk, Ukrainians were not awaiting salvation from Russia, Ukraine's military was not going to fold up and melt away like Afghanistan's. He was fed the intelligence he wanted to justify the decision he had already made.

However, once the enormity of the cock-up became evident, he could have taken any number of steps to rectify the situation. Not to win the war; no, that was never in the cards. But to at least make the humiliation less.

The question was: Would Putin be Stalin or Hitler? 

Stalin, like Putin, had his own firm prejudices. He believed that Hitler wouldn't attack before 1942. He refused to listen to any warnings that the invasion would be in 1941, and punished those who brought him such information as threatening his timetable to prepare for Hitler's attack, worrying that it would goad the Nazis into attacking sooner. However, once disaster was averted in the cold winter of 1941, he stepped back. He allowed his generals to fight the war, with him setting broad strategic aims. 

Hitler, on the other hand, chose the opposite path. As the war degenerated and turned against the Axis, rather than stepping back and letting the generals fight the war under broad parameters he set, he instead assumed personal command of all theaters of conflict. He never trusted the Prussian military aristocracy; his distrust was justified, of course, with the events of July 20, 1944 proving it. Stalin was cagey enough, and perhaps sufficiently self-aware, to know that his generals would do a better job of conducting the war than he would. Hitler's different sort of paranoia didn't allow him to rely on the advice of professionals. 

It now seems that Putin is more like Hitler than Stalin, as far as strategic thinking goes. His antipathy towards Ukraine was always personal. Now the war he launched has become his own test of strength. As such, he sees no other way out than to plow on, taking more and more control, and purging those whom he thinks have betrayed him, or not lived up to his expecatations.

Of course, when a dictator starts his purge, that opens up all sorts of possible outcomes. This is a truism of political history. If you think the leader is going to have you imprisoned, or worse, you might start to plot to remove that leader in order to save yourself. No one wants to fall beneath the dictator's knife. If the rumors of Putin purging his inner circle are correct, he's opening himself to the same fate. Russian history is rife with examples of feckless leaders being removed, either to retirement or to the grave. (Rumors abound that Stalin didn't die of natural causes.)

Putin made the cardinal error which many autocrats make: believing his own propaganda. Some survive, some don't. We don't know yet on which side of the ledger Putin will fall. But if the reports are correct, it doesn't look good for him. And, as with all these men, he will have no one but himself to blame if and when he meets his final quietus.

Epilogue

This came across my Twitter:

Komsomolskaya Pravda, the pro-Kremlin tabloid, says that according to Russian ministry of defense numbers, 9,861 Russian soldiers died in Ukraine and 16,153 were injured. The last official Russian KIA figure, on March 2, was 498. Fascinating that someone posted the leaked number. pic.twitter.com/LHrBWIQ49z

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) March 21, 2022

Please note: this is a pro-Kremlin newspaper. Why would it publish such a damning leak? It has no journalistic principles, after all. It doesn't have a Woodward & Bernstein on staff. My only thought: It might be pro-Kremlin, but perhaps no longer pro-Putin. Such a leak, and its publication in a government organ, could indicate that the plot to overthrow Putin is gaining apace. It makes the most sense. At the very least, it's an odd occurrence, with no other rational explanation.

I have a sense that the next few days may be telling.

(UPDATE: The piece was removed from Komsomolskaya Pravda's website. The paper's editor claims it was a "hack". Of course, that tells us nothing of the veracity of the leak, and Pravda was always going to say it was a hack. Hang on to your hats, kids.)