‘Putin Can’t Win This War’ Because Corruption Underlying His System Won’t Allow Russia to Hold On, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 10 – “The Putin regime is not capable of standing up to the tensions a long war will produce” because the Kremlin has build a system based on corruption alone and is not willing to address that cancer in a serious way because Putin doesn’t know any other way to rule, Vladimir Pastukhov says.

            The London-based Russian analyst says that Putin isn’t ready to be a Stalin because all of his supporters back him in the hopes of getting more money or other benefits and not out of fear or because they believe in him and the cases of banditry he has unleashed are only confirmation of that (t.me/v_pastukhov/930 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=659F9888E859D).

            Moreover, Pastukhov says, “the longer the war will last, the more obvious it will become that a bandit state cannot rely on more than the imitation of patriotism.” From top to bottom, Russians are only concerned about how much money they can extract from the regime, and there simply isn’t enough to keep everyone happy and in line.

            “No matter how hard Putin tries to convince others of the opposite,” the Russian analyst says, his regime won’t be able to “withstand the stress of a long war. That war has suppressed talk about corruption but it has not suppressed corruption itself. Instead, with the war, corruption and neglect have only increased” as the daily news reports.

            And as a result, the Kremlin leader “in trying to stay on the wave f history has provoked a tsunami that his system is fundamentally unable to cope with. He must either change the system or lose, and those who believe Putin is capable of changing the thieves’ system he created should make a visit to the Podolsk cartridge factory” he has just had to nationalize.