Putin’s love of turmoil has 'backfired': NYT Moscow chief

According to the New York Times' Moscow chief, Vladimir Putin's great love of pitting advisors and supporters against each other as a way of maintaining power has now come back to haunt him in the worst possible way.

In a column for the Times following reports of the revolt being led by Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin, editor Anton Troianovski wrote that Putin has long maintained power through the type of chaos that keeps anyone who might want to supplant him unable to consolidate power.

But now, "... that approach has backfired."

Case in point he notes was Putin's tolerance of Prigozhin's proclamations which lulled everyone into a false sense of security.

"Mr. Putin’s tolerance of Mr. Prigozhin’s outbursts this year may have served his political purposes, but it prompted officials stunned by Mr. Prigozhin’s verbal attacks on Russia’s top brass to conclude that he enjoyed the president’s tacit support, analysts said. It also further emboldened Mr. Prigozhin," he wrote before adding, "The confusion over Mr. Putin’s personal views only came to an end Saturday morning, when the president delivered a five-minute address to the nation describing Mr. Prigozhin — without naming him — as a traitor and vowing to quell the uprising the paramilitary leader had started. But the damage had already been done."

According to the Times' Troianovski, "People who know Mr. Putin say that the president has always been comfortable with that personalized system, because it allowed him to entrust key tasks to a trusted inner circle while preventing the rise of rival cliques that could undermine him."

He added, "Now, as Mr. Putin scrambles to put down a rebellion that he warned on Saturday could lead to 'anarchy and fratricide,' Mr. Prigozhin looms as the Russian president’s own creation."

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