🧵 Evgeny Prigozhin and Ramzan Kadyrov have recently criticized the army leadership going as far as to name and shame specific generals.
Some suspect they represent the "party of war" within the Kremlin or even nascent hawkish opposition to Putin. I disagree; here's why ⬇️
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This conflict invokes a pattern familiar to any scholar of Russian politics.
Putin sets up two or more centers of power and allows petty feuds between them. By now, this is almost an instinctive move for him.
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One such long-standing feud is between Rosneft, Russia's biggest oil company, and Transneft, an oil pipeline monopoly. Both are headed by Putin's close associates with a KGB background.
Rosneft's Sechin an Transneft's Tokarev often clash over oil transportation issues.
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Another long-standing conflict is between two law enforcement agencies, the Prosecutor's Office and the Investigative Committee (IC). At some point, the IC even tried to interrogate the son of the prosecutor general.
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Both conflicts were public and involved real sources of tension (money, turf wars). Yet neither led to any kind of destabilization of Putinism.
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Putin has been perfectly okay with such conflicts as they make him indispensable - who else can resolve them?
Furthermore, as long as the elite clans are fighting with each other, they will not unite to oust Putin himself.
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As simple as this tactic is, it has served Putin well during his 22 years in power.
To me, Putin's heavy reliance on Kadyrov and Prigozhin during this war represents the same old playbook ("Personalist dictatorship 101"), but there's a catch.
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It is one thing to play such palace games in peacetime and another to do the same during Europe's most brutal war in 75 years.
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As the military experts and war correspondents (including Z ones) point out, lack of proper coordination between Russia's motley crew of ground forces - the regular army, Kadyrov's troops, Prigozhin's PMC, Donbas militias - results in diminished effectiveness.
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Russia's "clan state" or "network state" is ill-suited for war which requires highly coordinated and rational organization that overrules any political feuds.
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Furthermore, Kadyrov/Prigozhin's attacks test the patience of the generals. Unlike Shoigu who is well versed in palace politics, the generals have never played the political games they are now forced to play.
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The generals are also easily thrown under the bus by Putin. They are given the weakest hand in this situation - maximum responsibility and no real political influence.
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Is it smart to alienate the generals during war? About as smart as launching this war itself.
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The bottom line: noises from Kadyrov and Prigozhin are well within the limits of typical Kremlin politics, but this kind of politics itself is out of touch with the reality of war that the Kremlin is waging.
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More defeats on the battlefield are coming and Putin will eventually have to face the political consequences of a lost war.
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