now substantially weaker? putin has been quite weak for quite some time and one of the reasons, of course, is the war in ukraine is now almost a year and a half in, russia is not winning despite the expectations and how not weak that power is. the choice that we talk about the cool, potential cool mutiny that didn t work out was that the choice was between hard core nationalists like yevgeny prigozhin who in his calls to to the military, his interviews were talking about cleansing russia with blood, studying a new revolution and defending russia from all enemies putin does the same thing it was more of an insidious nationalism and
objectives in the war in ukraine? it is for putin, david also mentioned about gangster state which putin the relationship are very gangstery so he s in charge sort of the robert deniro in his best roles and we do know when power shows weakness, when it kind of goes and even if they re fighting amongst themselves they re still needing that icon in front of them and that picture in front of them because they don t know who among them is going to win. so the man on top is a very useful tool for them to kind of center around and fight it out while he s still there and the same thing is happening with putin. so if he goes, we don t know what that fight between clans are going to happen and as david said it s not going to be it doesn t look like gorbachev or khrushchev could be a part of that scenario. so it will be the key, and the power ministry and the army and
prigozhin was a critic that was useful for a long time to putin. he balanced out shoigu in the defense establishment and this was his way of seeing the world. i think his elites on. this was a gigantic mistake even though he was fighting the war and in his view, effectively. nina, i ve got to ask you about this issue that you ve raised which seemed to me the central one which is do russians fear instability? do russians fear the alternate testify putin as being a internationalist like prigozhin or the collapse do they still have memories of the 1990s where things really did society almost collapsed and russian gdp contracted by 50%. is all that going to help putin? i think it is helping putin
at least pretends to be the most protective, defense asset that the russian army had and that, i think, sank in and i think and nina can tell us better that these kind of things also reached state television which is very important. the critiques of the war were not reaching state television. now this activity has bubbled up into certainly to the newspapers that i m reading in russian, and i would imagine it s even gotten to the level of the propagandas on television which is very important. nina, david puts it exactly right. do people are people aware that prigozhin argued that the ukrainians did not attack. there was not a nuance that this was all being done by russia and his argument is that the russians who were dominating the donbas wanted to extract even more from ukraine? i mean, according to polls,
for defending the country. there is also war, but there s an aggressor and victor in this country. you see, when a determination is made, and in a situation of war, war is war. everything happens in war. right? somebody starts the war. so that is why it is necessary for us to use the instruments that we have to defend the charter that we all signed up to. you are a chicken seller who became a president. in america, we are used to rags to riches stories, but in kenya for a long time it didn t seem that that was possible. one family dominated for a long time. do you think that gives you a particular perspective on your role? it does, in a very significant way because today we