A journalist and Russian political analyst has warned that if Vladimir Putin is deposed as President, Russia will descend into full-fledged fascism. Owen Matthews, author of Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine, was speaking at a time when Putin is still reeling from Russia’s retreat from the strategically important southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.
He retaliated by ordering multiple missile launches, leaving 10 million people in the country without power.
With widespread concern about how the war is unfolding nine months after Putin ordered his invasion on February 24, multiple names have been floated as possible successors, including Yevgeny Prigozhin, who funds the secretive mercenary army the Wagner Group, and Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s 71-year-old Security Council secretary.
Mr Matthews, on the other hand, warned anyone in the West hoping for the demise of Putin’s regime to be careful what they wish for.
“So far, his grip on power is very tight because his grip on propaganda is secure,” said Mr. Matthews, who served as Newsweek’s Moscow Bureau Chief from 2006 to 2012. No obvious successor is present.
And despite the fact that a sizable portion of the Russian political and business elite is dreadfully unhappy about the conflict, the small handful of men at the top seem to think everything is going swimmingly.
What ended up becoming a catastrophe for Russia was not necessarily a catastrophe for the “siloviki” surrounding Putin.
The siloviki claimed that sanctions had also been used to forcibly sever the Russian elite from their competing allegiances and their Western assets.
It’s important to remember that, both nationally and within the Kremlin, Putin’s adversaries are far more dangerous and aggressive than Putin himself, Mr. Matthews said.
In that sense, a regime change in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world is very dangerous. One of the major tragedies and threats of the war’s closing stages is this.
There is no conceivable scenario by which it would help him on the ground, Mr. Matthews said, referring to Putin’s increasingly vehement language in which he has hinted at the deployment of nuclear weapons. Using one would be a military mistake and, eventually, regime suicide.
But it has succeeded in one very important way: many Western leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, are reluctant to support a complete win for Ukraine on the ground out of concern that doing so might spark a revolution in Russia.
If Putin loses, it will be someone from the ultranationalist opposition to him, not a pro-Western liberal.
In that regard, Putin is not Hitler; rather, he is Kaiser Wilhelm II—the conceited moron who led his nation into an unwinnable conflict that, if it were to end in a humiliating peace, would pave the way for the emergence of real Russian fascism.
In his book, Mr. Matthew charts Putin’s evolution from a shrewd and cunning master of political opportunity to an impulsive gambler whose aggression threatens to obliterate Russia itself.
“This book focuses on the most compelling mystery at the core of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – how did the idea of forcibly carving out a Greater Russia, supported by mystical Orthodox nationalism, travel from the periphery of Russian politics to becoming official Kremlin policy,” he said.
“How and why did Putin decide to wage a war so rash and hazardous that the specifics were withheld from even the majority of his most senior ministers up to the precise time of the invasion? Decades of well crafted macroeconomics and diplomacy were thrown out the window.
“Who were the under-the-floor “dogfighters” vying for Putin’s attention, affection, and thought, as Churchill brilliantly put it once?
“Until the conflict is done, its complete tale cannot be recounted. However, Overreach tells the tale of how the war started. I’m thrilled to be writing this history’s first draught alongside Joel Simons and the elite HarperCollins team.”