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Why Putin’s “Coup” Might be a Staged Event to Win Back the West
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On March 15, 2015 @ 10:38 pm In The Point | 6 Comments
There are three possibilities for what is happening in Russia now.
1. Putin’s supposed absence has an ordinary explanation that falls well short of domestic disturbances.
2. There is some sort of behind the scenes power struggle
or
3. Putin has staged the whole thing to warn the West that the alternatives to him are even more dangerous.
This is an entirely plausible option because it’s easy to do and it relies on the general foolishness of the West when it comes to Russia. Ever since these rumors began, there has doubtless been a frenzy of analysis by Western governments worrying over who might replace Putin and how dangerous they might be. Coups and internal overthrows don’t generally produce more democratic and less totalitarian governments. And with some of the nuttier types around, there’s plenty of worrying material.
When Putin reemerges, Western governments will have more reason to want him in power. This will be the outcome even if nothing happened because the worry over worst case scenarios will already have done the trick.
One of the more intriguing schools of thought is that the coup that brought down the USSR had been staged the same way to buy Gorbachev sympathy and breathing room for the West, before populist sentiment and Yeltsin spun the whole thing out of control. That would be one reason for Putin to avoid pushing it too far. After the Nemtsov murder, playing with populist sentiment could easily spin out of control.
But this way Putin takes a vacation (this time without the photographers) while Western leaders who had been calling for his head suddenly decide that there are worse things than him. It’s a clever move only because the West is so predictable to Moscow and so prone to worry about the wrong things.
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