Vladimir Putin’s authority has suffered a grave blow
, the violent ex-convict and restaurateur who heads Wagner, a Russian mercenary group, published an illustrated fairy tale that he had written with his two children. The story concerns a band of friends who rescue an uncontrollably shrinking king by blowing a magic flute. At first he grows too fast, smashing a hole in the palace ceiling, before they bring him back down to size. “It is a very dangerous toy,” says the king, who takes away the flute.
Under Russian law Mr Prigozhin should face prison terms of between 12 years and life for mutiny, recruiting mercenaries, illegal arms trading and homicide as part of an organised group. According to the unwritten rules of Mr Putin’s mafia state he should probably be dead. Instead, on June 29th, five days after Mr Putin vowed onto crush the revolt, he met Mr Prigozhin and his top commanders in the Kremlin.
This worked in peacetime but faltered under the stress of war. Mr Prigozhin’s mutiny was not an under-the-carpet factional squabble but a public split within Mr Putin’s “pro-war” constituency. On one side stands the conformist elite, trying to keep up a pretence of normal life. On the other is a group of angry military patriots, most prominently Mr Prigozhin. Most worryingly for Mr Putin, the army itself seems split.
The mutiny also showed that Telegram, and Mr Prigozhin’s network of trolls and bloggers on it, have eroded the Kremlin’s monopoly over information, particularly among young people. While television propagandists awaited instructions from the Kremlin, the mutiny unfolded online. Less than a quarter of young Russians trust.
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