TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #46
Whither Putin, whence Prigozhin? … America’s weakness ….France in the crosshairs, again…and cartoonist Rodrigo imagines a new, unchained reality for Putin, for Russia, and their neighborhood.
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, explores how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world. Reporting this week and through August from our base in Paris.
How it might end…episode 2
Rather than beginning with a recap of the events of this past extraordinary week in Russia and its neighborhood, Unleashed believes it’s even more important to suggest some directions of just where we might be going and the forces that would be driving this still most unfocused journey.
Last weekend was only a very first chapter—that Vladimir Putin could very much come to regret—allowing Yevgeny Prigozhin to go into 'exile' in Belarus with his Wagner forces more or less intact. For the powerful forcers that Prigozhin has unleashed will not so easily be put back in any bottle. The outpouring of sympathy for his cause—from ovations to selfies—in the regions his Wagner Group rolled through en route to Moscow suggests strongly that he is suddenly very much a potent political force as well.
We monitor a number of important Russian Telegram channels. Here's what one blogger on such a channel said last Monday night after the vitriolic speech by Putin to his people:
A strange feeling of surrealism in Putin's address. On the one hand, the line on "Prigozhin the traitor" remains. On the other hand, Wagner continues to live its life: the centers open, Prigozhin criticizes again. Not to mention strange words about cohesion and unity, when there is split and vacillation. There is only one bit of news: Prigozhin was allowed to leave for Belarus not alone, but with his comrades. Here there will be a separate intrigue.
Frankly, Putin may have badly misjudged matters. Think about it. He has allowed the head of Wagner and his most loyal forces to take up their lives in Belarus, whose leader Putin has treated as his lapdog for most of his reign. Lapdog no more. Now, Lukashenko has a tiger on his side. His name is Prigozhin.
Moreover, Prigozhin doesn't need Putin very much at all. He now has a military base in neighboring Belarus. He has some 50,000 men scattered across the Middle East and Africa where they are pillaging huge quantities of diamonds, gold, timber and other commodities that are more than able to finance Wagner's activities with little reliance on Russian largesse. And his men are better paid, better fed, better supplied and far more loyal than any regular Russian troops.
Above all, Prigozhin has a vast reservoir of goodwill in Russia that has barely been tapped yet—millions who are becoming fed up with a war that is not being won or even pursued as promised and about which it is forbidden to utter a word of dissent under threat of arrest, imprisonment, or worse. Here's the photo one of these pro-Russian bloggers posted Monday from Rostov-on-the-Don, scrawled on a sidewalk….
“We aren’t 25,000 … We are a million”
“25,000,” of course, was the size of Prigozhin's forces in Rostov, who having seized the city and its military headquarters, began moving north through towns along the way. “Millions,” or certainly multiple thousands, came out to cheer Wagner’s men.
It’s worth recalling, at the same time, the powerful sentiments in Russia that built during the decade Putin’s predecessors chose to occupy Afghanistan, beginning in 1979, and the unrelenting, deadly, and ultimately losing war they fought against the mujahideen.
As more and more body bags began coming home, sentiment turned sharply against this invasion. That helped bring down Gorbachev and communism.
So, while the cover of The Economist this week proclaimed, ‘The Humbling of Vladimir Putin,” the London magazine’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoe quite rightly pointed out, “Whether Mr Putin’s fall comes soon, or in months or years, he stands revealed as a blundering thug—but, as our leader [editorial] explains, it would be unwise to count him out yet.” Certainly he will be a very different leader from the one who swaggered bare-chested on horseback at the height of his power and influence.
What concerns me the most, however, is what I would best describe as a toxic outlier. Reflect on this. As the BBC reported on June 17, “Russia has already stationed a first batch of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Vladimir Putin says. Russia's president told a forum they would only be used if Russia's territory or state was threatened.”
And Al Jazeera quoted Secretary of State Antony Blinken responding, “‘We have no reason to adjust our own nuclear posture. We don’t see any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon.’ Blinken said it was ‘ironic’ that Putin had placed Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus when the Russian leader had justified his invasion of Ukraine on the basis that he wanted to prevent Kyiv from obtaining such weapons.”
All this was barely a week before Lukashenko welcomed Prigozhin and his men onto his territory and a truly toxic mix suddenly appeared along the 770 miles of frontier these two countries share. Few understand how Putin’s mind operates better than Prigozhin. Both fought their way up from the streets of Leningrad. What will most bear watching now is how these two circle each other carefully, while other forces inside and outside the Kremlin are on the lookout for their own opportunities.
Of course, there are others like Ian Bremmer who believe that Prigozhin is “kind of dead man walking at this point,” as he said on Squawk Box Asia. “I would be very surprised that he’s still with us in a few months’ time.” We’ll be back to check.
How others see America
Closer to home, one hand giveth….
This week America has seen its own weaknesses and so have America’s friends and foes alike. “In the most anticipated ruling since federal abortion rights were overturned in America, the US Supreme Court has curtailed affirmative action, barring elite colleges and universities from considering race in student admissions,” reported Farrah Tomazin, Washington correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.
Over a photo of the Harvard Yard where, in full disclosure, my father strolled in the 1930s and I did in the 1960s, in both cases as students, Tomazin observed, “As prestigious institutions began to rethink their selection processes, the decision sparked protests outside the court in Washington, reignited the debate over race in America and raised fears among some employers that they would have a less diverse pipeline of graduates from which to hire in the future.”
In Asia, Bochen Han, Washington correspondent for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post observed, “Asian-Americans opposed to the current practices often cite statistics showing a discrepancy between Asian-American applicants’ ‘personal’ ratings and that of other groups at Harvard.” Some comments by readers at the end of her story were blunter: “Before it was for Asians like a football team starting the league with minus 20 points and another team gets plus 20 points even before the first match.”
But in Europe, too, there was a degree of horror over the decision, Massimo Gaggi, chief U.S. correspondent for the Italian daily Corriere della Serra, describing “a historic decision that will affect the ethnic composition of American professional classes, a defeat for progressive America that arouses indignation in the most disadvantaged minorities, blacks and Hispanics; but also an expected sentence from a Supreme Court whose conservative judges, by now a large majority, had for years been targeting affirmative action: the introduction of the social and economic disadvantages suffered by students raised in the poorest ethnic groups among the criteria for admission to many colleges.” At the same time, Gaggi lamented, “the risk of returning to university without or with very few blacks and Hispanics, accentuating imbalances that are already very strong today.”
Finally, the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung carried a simple and direct headline:
Then there’s lunch with Chris
So, London’s Financial Times thought this might be a good time to have a chat with Chris Christie.
“I arrive a quarter of an hour early at the Tick Tock Diner to discover that Chris Christie is already there,” says Edward Luce. “This is the Bada Bing of diners…. Christie’s generous frame is instantly visible against a back window, where he is seated at a small vinyl table cluttered with bottles of ketchup and mustard.
“The majority of Republicans know two things,” Christie tells his interlocutor. “One that Trump has proved himself too self-consumed to be an effective president, and two that he has been a failure politically. We keep losing….” Then Luce asks, “Do you think Trump would be different as president a second time round? ‘Oh, he’d be much worse,’ says Christie. ‘He’s about increasing his own power and lashing out at those people and institutions that he’s felt wronged by.’”
What more does any FT reader need to know?
How others see the World
Elections … opening some toxic loops
Greece’s right-wing prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, lost little time getting himself sworn in last week by Archbishop Hieronymus following his overwhelming victory in nation’s second election in two months.
However, he plunged immediately into an electoral maelstrom after a somewhat less than congenial swipe at his defeated leftist opponent, Alex Tsipras who resigned the leadership of his Syriza party. As a leading Athens daily Η Αυγή ("The Dawn") quoted Mitsotakis: “After three crushing defeats suffered by Syriza and Alexis Tsipras personally in national elections…I consider that with [his] resignation, a circle closes. Syriza was a party that in recent years, both in the government and in the opposition, was identified with toxicity, with divisive discourse and deafening inefficiency when it was finally called upon to manage the fortunes of the country.” The newspaper characterized the prime minister’s comment as “both small-minded and politically cowardly…and he did not have the courage to admit his foul.”
In Sierra Leone it’s Julius Maada Bio for a second term as president, though none of the problems of his first term have been solved and his nation remains the world’s second poorest.
The nation’s electoral commissioner certified his victory with 56.17% of the vote, barely passing the 55% threshold to avoid a runoff with his main challenger for a second time, Samura Kamara, who polled 41%.
Kamara has rejected the results as tainted—“a frontal attack on our fledgling democracy,” and indeed some international observers suggested a “lack of transparency” in the tabulation. There was some scattered unrest by Kamara followers. But Bio, himself a former military officer, who’s joined in two coups during raging civil wars of the 1990s, briefly leading one of the military juntas, has not lacked for experience in dealing with such issues—coming through relatively unscathed. Not that any of this is likely to improve the lives of his people.
For the results, see Andelman Unleashed: Elections 2023.
France again in the crosshairs
Across the Channel, British papers lined up to warn of the latest round of unrest sweeping France. “France riots,” the lead headlines in The Times of London screamed. “Fears of unrest in holiday hotspots as protests grow. UK travelers warned as radical left exploit French rage to draw out unrest.” More than 2 million Brits head to France for what is beginning to look like a potentially quite toxic summer.
“Riots have flared across the country,” The Times continued, “after Nahel Merzouk, 17, was shot dead by police on Tuesday while at the wheel of a car in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Violence has spread from the capital’s suburbs to its affluent centre [in Paris], and cities including Marseilles, Lyons, Pau, Toulouse, Lille and Bordeaux. Cars, buses and government buildings have been set alight, fireworks launched at police and shops ransacked. There were daytime clashes in Strasbourg yesterday.”
President Emmanuel Macron “ditches EU summit in Brussels to return to riot-hit France,” MacaoBusiness.com proclaimed. The leading Brussels daily, Le Soir, explained his latest predicament: “Emmanuel Macron at the heart of the storm. After the yellow vests, after covid, after the war in Ukraine, after inflation, after the psychodrama of pensions, here is ‘the crisis president’ plunged into the heart of a new explosive and unpredictable scenario.”
One big problem? As Le Monde explained, “fireworks mortars, directed at the police, have become the basic weapon of the riots. In three nights, thousands of shots were recorded, everywhere in France. Stocks accumulated at the approach of July 14 [national day]…nothing seems to be able to stop the phenomenon, poorly controlled by the authorities.”
“The use by rioters,” Le Monde continued, of ‘Roman candles’ against law enforcement is nothing new. But, for three days, it testifies to the existence of apparently inexhaustible stocks.”
Future strike?
“Xi Jinping has yet to decide whether to order Taiwan unification by 2027,” wrote Robert Delaney, Washington correspondent for the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post. “The Chinese leader wants the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] to develop the capability by then, and the Pentagon must modernise to deter him, says Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Mark Milley [who] believes optimised use of AI and quantum computing can help US ‘maintain our current decisive advantage.’”
Bolsonaro … bye-bye
Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, ousted at the polls last October by leftwing challenger Lula da Silva, as Andelman Unleashed reported, is now banned from politics for eight years.
The close friend and ally of Donald Trump, “met with allies Friday,” the leading daily Jornal do Brasil reported, “and criticized the decision of the Superior Electoral Court….The Court condemned him for abuse of political power and misuse of the media in connection with the meeting with ambassadors, at the Palácio da Alvorada, in July last year, in which he defamed electronic voting machines and the Brazilian electoral system.” Sound familiar? But here, an interesting judicial resolution.
Finally, there’s …. Rodrigo
Rodrigo, a Portuguese cartoonist, imagines some of the dynamic in play these days between Yevgeni Prigozhin and his Wagner Group and Vladimir Putin these days.
Rodrigo de Matos has been an editorial cartoonist for the weekly newspaper Expresso (Portugal) since 2006. He lives in Macao (China), long a Portuguese territory, since 2009. He also publishes his cartoons in the daily newspapers Ponto Final. He received the Press Cartoon Europe Award in 2014 for “the best cartoon published in the European press in 2013.” He is a member of the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective.
Here’s how he imagines himself:
You are so very kind …
I am humbled !
😇
I am humbled .
😇