By Monica Showalter
Somewhere in Moscow, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin must be laughing.
After all, wasn’t he ‘weakened’ by the recent military mutiny by the mercenary group Wagner PMC, which reached a fizzling end?
That was the consensus of the western elites in the wake of that to-do.
According to Joe Biden:
President Joe Biden told CNN on Wednesday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin has “absolutely” been weakened by the short-lived mutiny over the weekend.
…
“It’s hard to tell but he’s clearly losing the war,” Biden told reporters on the White House South Lawn, mistakenly referring to the war in Iraq instead of Ukraine.
“He’s losing the war at home. He’s become a bit of a pariah around the world. And it’s not just NATO, it’s not just the European Union, it’s Japan,” he added.
Asked again if Putin is weaker today than he was last week, Biden said: “I know he is.”
Here’s an tut-tutting analysis from Reuters a few days ago:
LONDON, June 26 (Reuters Breakingviews) – A failed mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin rams home the European Union’s need to protect itself from trouble abroad. Leaders meeting this week in Brussels are already thinking in more geostrategic terms. But until they act as a bloc they will lack clout.
The short-lived uprising by mercenaries led by Yevgeny Prigozhin has weakened Putin, and could help Ukraine in its ongoing counteroffensive against Russia. However, it has also raised the prospect of more chaos, unpredictability and danger on the EU’s frontiers
Really? Europe seems to be doing pretty well on that front on its own.
Here’s what’s doing in one of the big pillars of Western civilization:
France’s President Emmanuel Macron has chaired a second crisis meeting of senior ministers in consequtive days in the wake of a third night of rioting following the police killing of a 17-year-old boy, identified as Nahel, in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
There were more than 800 arrests across the country into Friday. Police and firefighters struggled to contain protesters and extinguish numerous blazes through the night that damaged schools, police stations and town halls or other public buildings. There was also looting reported in a number of locations, including central Paris.
Authorities also re fires or skirmishes in multiple cities overnight, from Toulouse in the south to Lille in the north – although the nexus remained Nanterre and the surrounding areas.
The French government is considering “all options” for restoring order, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said, calling the violence “intolerable and inexcusable” in a tweet.
“The priority is to ensure national unity and the way to do it is to restore order,” she later told reporters during a visit to a Paris suburb.
Sound like maybe that guy has been “weakened” too?
Speaking of “weakened.”
Contrasting the two incidents will undoubtedly be called comparing apples to oranges, they’ll say, but it’s pretty instructive, actually.
Putin had a problem with a military mutiny of mercenaries he allowed to operate in Russia and apparently got the president of Belarus to talk the leader of the revolt, Yevgeny Prigozhin, down from the ledge. Whatever was going on under the surface over there, Putin came out with a speech, spoke in uncompromising terms with no apologies offered, called Prigozhin a “traitor” to the motherland, and compared the disorder to the nightmare of Bolshevism that descended upon Russia in 1917. After that, Prigozhin mysteriously stopped his march on Moscow, turned around, and returned to his army to its “camps” with himself going into exile.
Problem over, and even with whatever else may be going on, at least one can say there was no bloodshed.
Macron, by contrast, who leads France, has allowed in millions of illegal immigrant invaders and stuck then into suburban banlieues which amount to free housing for them, much the same way New York City is doing. One bad police incident, and violent riots are now spinning out of control across his country. Illegal migrants and their teenaged anchor children imported in and are now leading an invader’s mutiny of their own, burning cars and buildings, looting shops, closing transit, prompting travel advisories — this report says they had been hanging out by the Nike store to express their call for ‘justice’ which tells us what this was really about — and residents say they expect at least ten days of this. Macron, unlike Putin, has groveled and apologized to the rioting migrants, as well as arrested the cop involved in the shooting, apparently thinking that that will placate them, which of course is only emboldening them. No Putin-style speech from him.
Tell us again that Putin is the “weakened” one, what with this kind of burning-car lootfest show going on in France?
Seems everyone’s got some kind of problem with allowing certain kinds of invaders to exist which now threaten public order in these countries, with the “weakening” of leaders pretty much all over. Some leaders, such as Putin, have a pretty good idea how to take care of it. Some, such as Macron, don’t.
Bottom line here is that the West has no business smugly claiming that Putin alone is somehow ‘weakened,’ not with these kinds of self-own problems going on, which nobody in the West has the resolution to solve.