Putin will be killed by his inner circle, Zelensky predicts | World | The Times
President Zelensky has predicted that President Putin will eventually be murdered by his own inner circle, after the Russian leader told his people that they might not survive as a nation if Ukraine won the war.
“There will definitely be a moment when the fragility of Putin’s regime will be felt inside the [Russian] state,” Zelensky said in a Ukrainian documentary. “And then the predators will devour a predator. They will find a reason to kill a killer.”
Putin’s inner circle is made up of hardliners including fellow former KGB officers that he has known for decades. It is unlikely that any of them would move against him because they are obliged to Putin for their own power and influence, analysts say.
President Zelensky made the comments in a new documentary
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS OFFICE/ALAMY
However, the failures of Putin’s army in Ukraine has sparked infighting. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group of mercenaries, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruthless Chechen leader, have lashed out on numerous occasions at defence officials over battlefield reversals.
Over the weekend Prigozhin called for Alexei Stolyarov, the son-in-law of Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, to be press-ganged into Wagner and sent to the front after he reportedly “liked” an anti-war post on social media. The Wagner chief also said that his fighters had captured Yahidne, a key village near the town of Bakhmut, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting of the war. Ukraine disputed the claim.
Although Putin’s 23-year-rule was founded on the promise of stability, he is the first Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin whose rule has featured enemy strikes on Russian territory. At least 25 people have been killed by shelling in the Belgorod region, which neighbours Ukraine, since the start of the war, according to official statistics.
Zelensky has often appealed to Russians in their own language to speak out against the war. “Unfortunately, they do not hear. There is a wall,” he said in the new documentary, which is called Year.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, has criticised the running of the war in Ukraine
CHINGIS KONDAROV/REUTERS
A new opinion poll published by the Moscow-based Chronicles project indicated that almost equal numbers of Russians either fervently support the war (22 per cent) or are deeply opposed to it (20 per cent). The others have no strong feelings either way, it said. “The problem in Russia isn’t fascism, it’s indifference,” said Alexei Miniailo, an opposition activist who founded the polling group. Several dozen people were arrested at modest anti-war protests in Russia on the first anniversary of the invasion.
Zelensky’s comments came as Putin sought to depict the war as a battle for Russia’s right to exist as an independent state. He alleged that western countries would seek to divide Russia into smaller states if Kyiv emerged triumphant.
“I don’t even know if such an ethnic group as the Russian people will be able to survive in the form in which it exists today. There will be Muscovites, Uralites and so on,” he said in an interview broadcast today by the Moscow. Kremlin. Putin television programme. “These plans have been set down on paper,” he added.
Since the start of the war, the Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe, a US government agency, and the European parliament have hosted discussions on the “decolonisation” of Russia, sparking fury in Moscow. “Serious and controversial discussions are now under way about reckoning with Russia’s fundamental imperialism and the need to ‘decolonise’ Russia,” the commission wrote last year.
• Wagner Group chief wages political war with Russian elite
Russia, the largest country in the world, is home to dozens of diverse ethnic groups, from the Yakuts of northeastern Siberia to the Chechens. There have been drives for independence from Moscow in Chechnya and Tatarstan, both regions within Russia, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Putin also said that any future talks on nuclear arms control with the United States should include Britain and France’s stockpiles of atomic weapons. The Russian leader announced last week that Moscow was suspending its participation in the sole remaining nuclear pact with Washington.
“The leading Nato countries have declared their main goal as inflicting a strategic defeat on us,” Putin said. “How can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions?”
President Biden last week insisted that Nato was no threat to Russia. “The United States and the nations of Europe do not seek to control or destroy Russia,” he said during a speech in Warsaw. “And millions of Russian citizens who only want to live in peace with their neighbours are not the enemy.”