There is absolutely no one worst than Putin, the only thing worse than Putin is Putin himself, Jonathan Saxty declared.
Many western commentators were positively salivating at the imminent demise of Putin, but the dictator’s end would create an even more dangerous Russia, writes Jonathan Saxty.
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In what seemed more like a movie than real life, it looked momentarily as if Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was about to ignite civil war in the country, at least if we are to take Saturday’s events at face value.
Then it seems the mother of all U-turns followed as the Wagner boss headed to Belarus, Wagner pulled back, and things went back to normal or whatever passes for normal in Russia.
For Ukraine, hopes of internal chaos leading to Russian military collapse on the front line seem to have been dashed, while Wagner’s chief is now perched just north of them in Belarus.
Two things seem noteworthy yet remain widely under-reported. The first is the hidden danger and unforeseen consequences of a total break-up of Russia, and the second is what this all means Russia’s ally of the moment, China.
Starting with Russia’s future, while many talking heads in the West seem to look forward with glee to the collapse of Russia itself more than simply Vladimir Putin, they ignore the fact that whatever follows, if not extremely carefully managed, could be even worse from the perspectives of Brussels, London and Washington.
A country with the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons heading into total civil war, with scattered warlords and wannabe dictators getting their hands on a few ICBMs here and there, would be no laughing matter.
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That is before we get to the fact that, unlike China, the Russian Federation lacks obvious ethnoreligious dividing lines to be split along, the exception perhaps being the Muslim-heavy southern part of Russia’s North Caucasus.
As for retribution, tempting as that might be, the West surely learned its lesson after World War I at Versailles, when harsh penalties for Germany led to a chain reaction which ultimately gave the world the Nazis and eventually led to World War II.
