Putin’s failure should be a warning to ‘strongmen’ leaders around the world

The best chance for a favourable outcome for Russia in the Ukraine war is for its leader to resign and allow a freely elected government to make decisions, writes Borzou Daragahi

The truth is that autocracy frequently fails (Sputnik)

The uprising in Russia by Wagner group leader and long-time Kremlin crony Yevgeny Prigozhin’s forces was no anomalous blip. Entanglements between members of Russia’s elite, like those among both Mexican cartels and the Japanese Yakuza or any other criminal organisation throughout history, frequently end in violence. Dozens and dozens of Russian insiders, including defectors, energy executives and diplomats, have allegedly stabbed themselves repeatedly in the back or jumped out of windows after falling out with the Kremlin.

However, some are already pushing to the forefront a distracting story about a uniquely positioned, eccentric, and toxic 62-year-old – Prigozhin – going insane. Simmering grievances and jealousies with defence secretary Sergei Shoigu and chief of staff Valery Gerasimov over supply chain failures and territorial and human losses in Ukraine pushed him over the edge. “He went nuts and flew into a rage,” a former Kremlin official told the Financial Times.

But if the crisis is about one person, it is Vladimir Putin and no one else. It concerns his Russia. It is about the steady erosion of already frail institutions under his authority since 1999. It is a feature, not a bug, of the personalised, dysfunctional, and lawless nation that he not so much built as allowed to metastasise. More broadly, it demonstrates the unavoidable failures of the strongman model of governance, which appears to have captivated and seduced sizeable numbers of voters all over the world.