Et was Vladimir Putin’s second extraordinary speech in three days. The previous one was held by Russia’s president on Saturday morning, at the height of the uprising by Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. On Monday evening, it seemed as if Putin wanted to justify himself, as if he wanted to see what many see as a weakness, namely the reluctance of Russian security guards and soldiers to take action against the insurgents, as a strength. And sending out a signal of unity where there was just division.
As on Saturday and as in his speech on the attack on Ukraine on February 24 last year, Putin spoke in front of brown wooden panels. He thanked “all citizens of Russia” for “the perseverance, unity and patriotism. This civic solidarity has shown that any blackmail, any attempt to create internal turmoil is doomed to fail.” By this, Putin meant the uprising and, in the face of it, made “the highest consolidation of society, the executive and the legislature at all levels” out of. “Everyone was united and united by the main thing: responsibility for the fate of the fatherland.” Many observers wonder how Wagner militiamen were able to drive within a few hundred kilometers of Moscow. Shortly before Putin’s speech in the evening, Prigozhin himself said in an audio message from an unknown location that Wagner’s “march” had covered 780 kilometers and was within 200 kilometers of Moscow.
Serious allegations against the “organizers”
Putin now said that “from the very beginning of events, all necessary decisions to neutralize the threat, protect the constitutional order, life and safety of our citizens were taken without delay.” The president emphasized as if it had not been an armed uprising: “An armed uprising would have been put down in any case.” “The organizers of the uprising” should have understood that, said Putin, who again, as in his speech on Saturday, told Prigozhin not called by name. “They understood everything, including the fact that they committed criminal acts in order to divide and weaken the country, which is currently resisting an enormous external threat and unprecedented external pressure.” By this, Putin means the war in Ukraine , which he stylizes as a defensive struggle against the West. “At the front, our comrades are dying with the words ‘Don’t step back!'”, said Russia’s president.
For Prigozhin and “the organizers of the uprising,” Putin again portrayed them as traitors to the country and people and “to those who dragged them into the crime,” the Wagner militiamen involved. “They (the ‘organizers’, ed.) lied to them, they drove them to their deaths, under fire, to shoot at their own people.” However, “fratricide” was what the “enemies of Russia” wanted Putin lamented, scolding “neo-Nazis in Kiev, their Western patrons and various kinds of national traitors. They wanted Russian soldiers to kill each other, soldiers and civilians to die, so that in the end Russia would lose, our society would split and be suffocated in bloody internal conflicts.” The opponents were only waiting to “take revenge for their failure in the front as part of the so-called counter-offensive”, but had “miscalculated”.
