![]() Shoring up public support is a key way to push back against faltering loyalty among the elite, said USIP’s Glantz, and that likely prompted Putin to make a surprise visit and walk among the public in the southern Russian territory of Dagestan, days after Prigozhin’s retreat from his march on Moscow. ![]() “And he won’t be able to hide the fact that he let the rivalry between Prigozhin and the Russian military leadership go on too long and that he had to scramble to prevent a worse outcome.” But, how elites view Putin does matter it matters to how they will act in the future,” he said. “Putin might not care about the perceptions and believe that through control of state media, he can control the narrative. Schroeder called the episode “striking,” adding that Putin could face consequences for not following through on his words. Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, dropped criminal charges against the Wagner head. “The media hit usually precedes the actual hit,” Brian Whitmore, nonresident senior fellow at the Eurasia Center with the Atlantic Council, said during a panel discussion Thursday.īut with the intervention of Belarusian authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, Putin backed off his public threats, saying Prigozhin and his band of mercenaries could take refuge in Belarus. While the Kremlin initially said criminal charges against Prigozhin would be dropped in exchange for him taking exile in Belarus, the mercenary group leader appears to be in Russia. “Showing the wealth that Prigozhin has is a way to undercut his anti-elite message amongst the population,” said Mary Glantz, senior advisor for the Russia and Europe Center for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Those kinds of moves are meant to discredit Prigozhin’s image among the public, who see him as a warrior on the frontline of Russia’s war in Ukraine calling out Russian generals as incompetent and corrupt. ![]() Petersburg - pointing out weapons, cash, gold bricks, wigs and multiple passports in a space filled with ornate furnishings, an indoor pool and a helicopter pad outside. And a Russian state media report published what it said were images from a police raid on one of Prigozhin’s palatial homes in St. Putin has directed the state to dismantle the Wagner business empire, including its military, internet troll farms and gold- and other mineral-mining operations on the African continent. So Putin moved quickly to discredit Prigozhin’s public image.
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