Vladimir Putin is reportedly panicking about a member of his inner circle scheming against him after his Navy Day parade ended in humiliation.
The Russian president is expected to punish officials after the annual parade known for its displays of maritime might was canceled over fears of Ukrainian strikes, only to be replaced by a dramatically scaled-down event that drew widespread mockery. Instead of the usual sprawling parade featuring 200 warships on the Neva River in St. Petersburg, Putin, 73, posed in front of a giant poster of a submarine and sat for a very awkward televised meeting with Navy personnel.
Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter turned critic, said the Kremlin went into a tailspin after the event went over poorly with the public. He alluded to Josef Stalin’s deadly purges of political dissenters in 1937 to warn of chilling parallels he said are playing out now. Putin is apparently on the hunt for a scapegoat within his administration after former FSB director Nikolai Patrushev, one of Putin’s closest advisers, convinced him that liberals who infiltrated his orbit were to blame.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov is under scrutiny, Gallyamov said, though lower-level press staffers are the ones who are expected to take the heat.
“Panic has gripped the presidential press service,” Gallyamov reported on Telegram.
“An internal investigation has been ordered following that conversation,” he said. “What matters here is the trend: incompetence and sloppiness being branded as a conspiracy.”
Putin’s staunchest allies have bent over backwards to try to hype him up as repeated Ukrainian drone strikes undermine his claims about the war and the economic toll begins to fuel more and more public outrage.
In an interview on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bizarrely hailed Putin as a godsend.
“The fact that Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin found the courage to hand over power early, and that he handed it to the one person who at that moment was the only one capable of preserving Russia—that represents a historic turning point signifying that Russia is, after all, ‘marked’ by God. When things are at their hardest, we receive help from above,” he said.
State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin similarly closed the chamber’s session on Monday by leading a pro-Putin chant.
“Parties are many, the Motherland is one,” he said, before repeating the slogan, “Russia! Putin! Victory!” five times, according to independent news site Meduza. Deputies didn’t join in and opted for applause instead.
Shortly after his Navy Day humiliation, Putin predicted that Ukraine would ultimately fall apart in an attempt to save face.
Apart from the eastern regions of Ukraine that Russia has tried to claim as its own, Putin declared that the western regions are also “a gift from Stalin,” adding that they would “sooner or later” return to Hungary, Romania, and Poland.
But Putin sounded somewhat defeated as he admitted that such a “return” would not happen immediately, suggesting it could take “a year, or two, or maybe even ten or fifteen” before everything would “historically fall into place.”
