A Real Veterans Party, One that Could Threaten the Kremlin, Will Emerge Only if Several Million Russians Fight in Ukraine and then Return, Milyuk Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 31 – Putin can talk all he wants about promoting veterans of the war in Ukraine into the Russian elite, Andrey Malyuk says. but for regional leaders “Putin is far away and their own comfortable positions are right under their rear ends.” They aren’t going to yield power to any insurgent group without a fight.

            For veterans to form a real power, the Russian political scientist says, there will have to be far more of them than there are now, perhaps several million in all, and they will then have to form “a serious organized political force.” But that would threaten Putin as much as anyone else (svpressa.ru/society/article/427772/).

            The resistance of regional officials to the insertion of veterans into their milieu has already provoked a video message to Putin from veterans who have been excluded from campaign lists to local councils by regional officials; but the more actively Moscow tries to support them, the more resistance that will face from regional officials.

            Consequently, while talk about promoting veterans may be good politics, Malyuk and other Russian political experts say, actually achieving that is unlikely, first because of this opposition and then because of the appreciation of Putin himself that the influx of veterans could easily become a direct threat to his rule.

            And they are quite clear that in the Russia today, any influx of veterans would not work in the same way that the Lenin levy Stalin orchestrated in the mid-1920s to overwhelm the old Bolsheviks and solidify his power. Instead, such a group would likely make the kind of demands that Prigozhin did and thus challenge Putin from the right but challenge him indeed.