Did Putin’s thugs ‘Wag’ the dog?

KYIV — What luck, I thought, to be in Ukraine as the world watched the biggest threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin since he took power in 2000 unfold in real time.

Ukraine knows its neighbor’s power politics better than anyone. Experts would tell me just what was happening and why — even as old Russia hands back in America flailed on cable news as they filled time over images of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group inching closer and closer to the Kremlin.

But the Ukrainians are just as baffled.

‘What was it for?’

“It’s very weird. And I can only ask the same questions as you,” Yuriy Sak told me at a café across from the defense ministry, where he’s an adviser. “If you look at the list of these questions, it just doesn’t make any sense. Unless it was an orchestrated something. Which we will still have to see. What was it for?”

Good question. While observers the world over — including here at first — thought Putin was mortally wounded by the apparent would-be coup, the fact is Western media gave him just the sort of the reaction he might have been looking for.

Alicia Kearns, British foreign affairs select committee chairwoman, warned we were seeing a “really dangerous inflection point.” “The risk of a collapsed Russia is not insignificant,” she claimed. “What could come next” — after Putin — “could be a lot worse.”

Prigozhin, all media in America were quick to note, is “a fascist.” The thought of him in the

Kremlin could make even the bloodthirsty Putin look good.

Everyone here, first hearing the news of the mercenary leader’s astonishing march to Moscow, told me Prigozhin would be dead within 72 hours. He’s not. Even the charges against him have been dropped.

But can one really believe the idea Vladimir Putin staged a coup for the world to watch to ensure his own grip on power is anything but a conspiracy theory?

“Sometimes reality is much more interesting than any conspiracy,” an anti-Russia freedom fighter here wryly told me.

Between questions about the counteroffensive and Russian brutality Tuesday, I couldn’t resist asking Col. Khadzhimurat Zumso, commander of the Independent Battalion of Special Purpose of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and on a brief break from the front lines, what he thought.

“We can expect anything from them, and maybe they were just covering up some other story. I’m not really sure, to be honest.”

It might have been “theater” as Russian troops regrouped, for example.

‘The Kremlin madness’

Joe Lindsley, who reports on Ukraine every day for WGN radio, highlights the “total difference between Western panic and Ukrainian calm.”

“Anonymous officials” want us “scared,” Lindsley, an American friend of mine, agrees.

“The Moscow meltdown forces the question so many in Washington, Paris, Berlin have been trying to avoid: Can we envision a world without a tyrannical Moscow? Or do timid Western political elites just want to keep Ukraine on life support, pretending to help but refusing to give Ukrainians the tools to stop the Kremlin madness?”