Anti-Putin rebellion_ Ukraine outlines scenario and timeline of possible coup in Russia

5 months ago
15

#warinukraine
Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksandr Lytvynenko commented on the likelihood of a coup in Russia.
Lytvynenko insists he is not being unrealistic in imagining Russian elites might one day turn on their leader. “There are still quite a few rational people in the leadership. They will think and act when they realise the cost of staying with Putin is greater than moving away from him,” he said in an interview with The Economist.
At the same time, he drew attention to the fact that the priority for Ukraine is to obtain real security guarantees.
As detailed by The Economist, Lytvynenko was a cryptologist cadet in Moscow at the elite KGB academy. And as the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine during two years of war, he was engaged in undermining and obtaining information from his former colleagues. It is noted that not many non-Russians know Russia as well as Oleksandr Lytvynenko. “More recently, as head of Ukraine’s foreign-intelligence service during two years of war, he busied himself undermining and extracting information from his one-time peers. At the end of March, he took over one of the country’s most critical jobs”, the Economist noted.
A year ago, the idea that a renegade militia led by a frothing nationalist could nearly march on Moscow, sending Russian officials scurrying for cover, was fantasy. Not that it hadn’t been done before; the so-called “Kornilov Affair” of 1917, and even the failed hardliner coup of 1991, showed what a move could potentially look like. But under Putin, the idea that Russian nationalists might congeal and storm Moscow long seemed laughable.
And then, last June, militia head Yevgeny Prigozhin did just that. And while Prigozhin’s Wagner Group never quite reached Moscow, that wasn’t for lack of opportunity; if anything, the path was wide open. If Prigozhin accomplished anything, it was that he made Putin look like a tsar with no clothes.

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