“We have to figure out what happened today,” said Vladimir Solovyov, one of the country’s most prominent propagandists, looking uncharacteristically downbeat during his evening broadcast. No crowds had rallied outside the Kremlin in Putin’s defence. Cheering crowds chanted “Wagner! Wagner!” as the mercenaries departed Rostov, with Prigozhin posing for selfies and shaking hands through the window of his SUV. Under the terms of a deal supposedly negotiated by Lukashenko, the Kremlin announced Prigozhin had agreed to leave for Belarus and that the charges against him for leading an armed rebellion would be dropped. Later that evening, with the Wagner fighters 200km from Moscow and road crews frantically digging up the highways around the capital to slow their advance, Prigozhin announced his troops were turning around. Unlike in 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank to confront a coup by Soviet hardliners, or during the mass protests in Belarus in 2020, when Aleksandr Lukashenko was pictured with a rifle and body armour at the presidential palace, Putin was invisible. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov insisted that he was still “working at the Kremlin” but offered no evidence to support his claims, while rumours swirled on Twitter that the Russian president’s plane had left the capital. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.
The new president defined himself in the opposite terms – as power in motion. And it had a terminal disease without a cure – a paralysis of power.” “I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed,” Putin recalled in First Person, a compendium of interviews that was published in 2000. But the officer on duty told him he couldn’t do anything without orders from above. In Putin’s telling, he went out to confront the angry crowds himself before calling for help from the nearest Soviet military garrison. Then, one night in December 1989, the protesters were at his own gates. As a young KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany, he had watched revolution sweep across eastern Europe. When Vladimir Putin ascended to power at the turn of the millennium, he liked to tell the story of the moment when he realised the Soviet Union was doomed.
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