Nothing will bring Russians to the streets. And there will be no riots in the Russian army, it is simply not capable of them. Prigozhin’s outburst was more related to economic issues, or rather to his relationship with the Russian Defence Ministry and financial flows. It was not an attack on the system as such or against corruption in the Russian Defence Ministry. It’s just that at first Prigozhin was built into this system, and then he was, to put it mildly, “asked” to leave. The main problem is that it was not an internal, all-Russian protest.
There can be no general protest in Russia.
First, the Russian Federation is made up of dozens of nationalities and peoples. And if Russians are dying somewhere, but at the same time, Yakuts, Bashkirs or Tatars have nothing to do with the war, they don’t care, let them die. After all, if they burn all the Russians on the front line, the Tatars, Yakuts and others will just rub their hands.
Secondly, the Russian people support Putin’s policy aimed at expanding the empire; Russians are not at all against it. Everyone is not against it for their own reasons. Sometimes everything is decided by a mercantile issue, receiving subsidies from the centre, because most republics are subsidised by Moscow. There, perhaps, only Tatarstan works as a donor to the Russian budget and the entire Russian oil industry. By the way, Tatarstan mostly subsidises the budget at the expense of the oil industry, because the very Druzhba oil pipeline begins in Tatarstan. By the way, the head of the Russian Central Bank, Nabiullina, is a Tatar.
Thirdly, internal protest against the war is currently completely excluded in Russia, also because this war could lead to the creation of independent republics, as was the case during the collapse of the Soviet Union after the war in Afghanistan. After the war in Afghanistan and after failure on almost all fronts, the USSR collapsed and allowed the republics to become independent states. The same process awaits Russia; it just needs to be pushed. And the majority of the federal people are for the war in Ukraine to lead to the collapse of the Russian Empire. Naturally, because Russians are dying, the Russian Empire is falling apart, and Tatarstan gains independence. This is mercantile interest in its purest form.
The only mechanism that allows Russia to collapse is to prevent Moscow from receiving petrodollars to support the republics through them. As soon as the flow of investments from Moscow to the republics stops, the republics will immediately go into free swimming. Then it will not make sense for them to focus on Moscow.
Roman Svitan
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