Vitaliy Portnikov: Episode Four Of The ‘Wagnerites’ Show Is Being Prepared

The attacks on Lithuania and Poland seem possible.

Why did the “Wagnerites” end up in Belarus? Will the Russian mercenaries accelerate the fall of the Lukashenka regime? Was Putin paralyzed after the mutiny attempt? How many doppelgangers does he have? When will the war in Ukraine end, and how is the counteroffensive actually going? Can the Kalinouski regiment liberate Belarus with arms?

Well-known Ukrainian publicist Vitaliy Portnikov answered these and other questions in an interview with the Studio X-97 show of the Charter97.org website. Host — Yevhen Klimakin.

Subscribe to the Charter’97 Youtube channel — charter97video. Share videos with your friends. Like and comment.

— Vitaly, a new phase of the war has begun. Bloomberg wrote about the offensive in southern Ukraine. What should we expect from this new offensive?

— The direction of the strikes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, even if we are not military experts, is understandable. We know what territory the Russians seized within the period of 2014-2022. This land must be liberated.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces may have a desire to reach the Crimean corridor. This is one of the sacred moments for Putin — a corridor that connects the sovereign territory of Russia with the occupied Crimea, a corridor that allows Russia to completely control Azov.

In this sense, of course, the strikes may go in that direction, but I will not tell you how much this corresponds to reality. After all, this could be another preparatory blow. We do not know to what extent the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be able to break through the defense lines that have been created by the Russian military over these months.

I think we just need to be patient and wait for the result. Rearranging the flags on the map is not a football match. This is a terrible bloody war, where our compatriots are dying. I'm not ready to follow this the way Western journalists do, for whom this is, first of all, a theater of war.

Once again I say that if some significant settlements are really liberated and, for example, the corridor to the Crimea is interrupted, there will be an exit of Ukrainian troops to Azov, and we will see the liberated Melitopol or Berdyansk, it will be a fact, like the liberated Kherson.

In the meantime, we see some trends. We read about them in the Western press. Western journalists talk about such steps, but how much their news, based on conversations with American officials, corresponds to reality, we cannot fully know.

— The “Wagnerites” on the territory of Belarus. Some media outlets even cite a figure of 10,000. What could be the consequences of this?

— I come to the conclusion that the whole Wagner show was prepared as a large-scale provocation so that the Russian Federation and Belarus could evade responsibility in the event of some provocations on the territory of NATO and the EU. It becomes obvious that this whole so-called rebellion was played like clockwork.

The first part of this ballet is the demand of the Russian Ministry of Defense, supported by Putin, that the “Wagnerites” sign contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense.

The second part of the ballet — the “Wagnerites” refuse to sign contracts, start a “march of justice” to Moscow. The third part — they stop their campaign after the “agreement” with Lukashenka, and the part of them that agrees to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense remains in Russia, and the majority that did not agree, after meeting with Putin, goes to Belarus.

But now these are people who have not officially signed contracts with the Russian military department, despite the fact that Putin, Shoigu, and everyone else insisted on this.

Neither Putin himself, nor Lukashenka, who received them in Belarus “solely in order to stabilize the political situation in Russia” and “prevent the battle near the walls of Moscow”, no longer bears any responsibility for their actions.

If after that the fourth part of the ballet happens, for example, these 10 thousand people end up on the territory of Poland in Rzeszów or Suwałki, then the Russian Federation will in no way be responsible for the destruction of civilians, Polish border guards or servicemen of the Polish army. Putin and Lukashenka will remind us that they have nothing to do with this. That they claimed earlier these were criminals who threaten the Russian nuclear component, as Dmitry Medvedev said. They will pretend to be surprised: how is it that when these bandits went to Moscow — you rejoiced, but why are you sad now when they go to Warsaw? We warned you about the danger of these people, but you did not believe us. Let's clean up together.

I think that this is most likely preparation for a new stage of confrontation with the West. Whether Putin will decide on it (I’m not talking about Lukashenka at all, because he’s not a player here), I don’t know. But this is a thorough preparation for a special operation. We must understand that everything we have seen is a performance. With all the talk about “Putin's indecisiveness”. Now it is thrown into the Western press that “he was paralyzed”.

Each such piece of news relieves Putin of responsibility for the actions of the “Wagnerites”. That he was “so afraid of them”, that “he was already paralyzed”, “did not make any decisions” and “was sitting there in his residence in Zavidovo”. Many Russian liberal experts tell all these tales, you know, like clockwork. Which, frankly, worries me too.

If they go to Poland, then what does Putin have to do with this, since he is “afraid” of them? How could he send them to Poland if they “do not obey” him, if he “shudders when seeing them”? It was not he who gave them the order, it was “Prigozhin himself”. We have come to an interesting point. And what will the leadership of Poland, NATO, and the USA do then?

— Poland is already amassing troops and creating new formations along the border.

— It is clear, we do not say that Wagner will capture Poland. Imagine a different situation. They broke into the territory, killed a certain number of people, set fire to something there, destroyed it and left. Russia does not bear any responsibility and no one will do anything to it for this. No one considers it a party to the conflict. Then it is possible to gather not 10 thousand, but 25 thousand “Wagnerites”. Then they can go to take Vilnius.

Putin pushes the limits of the possible every time. It is very important for him now to create a paramilitary formation that can operate on the territory of NATO countries so that Russia is not responsible for this. He's already set up the whole scene. It's just brilliant theatrical preparation. Now the most important thing — will the gun that he has already hung on the stage fire? How many people will die not in Ukraine, but in Poland or Lithuania, or both in Poland and Lithuania?

I say it again, I'm not telling you that tomorrow a “Wagnerite” with a bayonet will come to your house in Warsaw. No. It won't reach you, I assure you. You can sleep peacefully, you will not meet with Prigozhin, but that is not the point. The fact is, if it turns out that such mechanisms work, then they will begin to work in full force.

I want to remind you that in the Crimea and Donbas in 2014 it was exactly the same. There, Strelkov simply played the role of Prigozhin. There were also some “saboteurs”, “volunteers”, Russia supposedly had nothing to do with this. The West swallowed it.

You remember how long they talked about “separatists”. Do you remember that they always called the occupiers of Donbas “separatists”? I kept saying why do you call them separatists? There was no separatist movement in the Crimea or Donbas. These are just ordinary Russian occupiers and collaborators.

The French, who served the German regime in Paris, relatively speaking, were not separatists. They were collaborators. They didn't want France to join Germany until the Germans got there.

— Vitaliy, you recalled Igor Girkin-Strelkov. Navalny called him a political prisoner. Is Strelkov a political prisoner?

— From the point of view of Russian legislation — he surely is. Russia arrested Strelkov not because he killed civilians in the MH17 plane, not because he killed Ukrainian civilians in the Donbas.

— I'm not talking about Russian legislation. After all, according to Russian law, the Crimea is Russia, like many other regions of Ukraine.

— I mean, the reason why Strelkov was arrested in Russia. Without a doubt, Navalny is absolutely right, because Nikolai Bukharin, and Alexei Rykov, and Karl Radek were political prisoners of Stalin, because they were arrested on political charges. In the USSR, various people were arrested for anti-Soviet agitation. Both liberal-minded people, and outright chauvinists. These people were political prisoners of the regime.

Strelkov was arrested for creating some kind of extremist organization, there were some calls for the overthrow of Putin, I don’t know what they attributed to it. These are political articles, he is a political prisoner, but this does not make him any better or worse.

Strelkov should be arrested by the Hague Tribunal and serve his life sentence. In The Hague, he will not be a political prisoner. Just as Eichmann was not a political prisoner in Israel, but Ernst Thalmann was a political prisoner in Germany. Although he was a communist and a man, to put it mildly, not of the best political convictions.

It's simple, it seems to me. There are people we don't like, but if some authoritarian regime imprisons such a scoundrel (just like the representatives of this regime themselves) on political charges, and Strelkov is imprisoned on political charges, then he is a political prisoner. What's there to argue? It's just terminology.

You see, in our country the title of a political prisoner is treated as a reward, and political prisoners are different. There are, relatively speaking, like Nelson Mandela, Levko Lukyanenko, and there are political prisoners, like Ernst Thalmann. Joseph Stalin was also a political prisoner of the Russian regime, he was not imprisoned for some robbery after all, Vladimir Lenin was a political prisoner.

All of them were political prisoners, but they did not stop being criminals for a single day. Moreover, when they were political prisoners, they were criminals. Stalin killed, robbed, expropriated banks, but the empire had a political account with him. It’s the same with Strelkov.

— Returning to the “Wagnerites”. Can their presence on the territory of Belarus somehow accelerate the fall of the Lukashenka regime?

— No. The Lukashenka regime does not participate in this story in any way. I think that Lukashenka's regime is very convenient for Putin. Behind the scenery of this regime, you can carry out such great combinations.

I think that now Lukashenka has proved his usefulness for Putin more than ever before. He played the role they needed in the play — the negotiator. Everyone believed it. He really enjoyed this role.

You know, like some actor of a provincial amateur theater in a conditional Mazyr, who was allowed to perform on the stage of the Minsk Academic Theatre.

He told how he conducted these negotiations, how Putin called him, how he called Putin. Many took it at face value. I, too, almost perceived it that way, naturally, realizing that half of what was said was a lie, but I listened attentively to everything.

God, Putin was “afraid to talk to Prigozhin,” he spoke to Lukashenka. Prigozhin did not want to be with Putin, he wanted to be with Lukashenka. It's just a great role to put all these bandits at the site of the provocation against the West. Therefore, there is no question of any fall of the Lukashenka regime.

The Lukashenka regime will exist exactly as long as the Putin regime exists. Because this is the occupation regime, this is the Quisling regime. Could Quisling's regime fall while Germany was strong? No, it was not in danger. So Lukashenka is not threatened by anything.

Unless Putin wants to get rid of him, but why would he want to get rid of such a wonderful actor? “What artist dies,” exclaimed Nero. Lukashenka is, of course, far from Nero, but there is already about the same amount of blood on his hands.

— A lot of news appears on the Internet that are heatedly discussed: whether or not Putin has doppelgangers, whether he is in the bunker or not, Kadyrov is swollen or not swollen, news that is actually absolutely not important.

— In the US Congress, they said that the Pentagon classified information about aliens, so we can think that Putin's doppelgangers are aliens. Came from another galaxy, thus alternating in the number of intelligent planets in the galaxy that stand in for Putin while he takes a bath in Sochi.

So there is a lot of different information, but it does not help us in any way to come to real results. The state of Kadyrov's health does not matter. It doesn't matter whether the Chekist vertical is effective or not. If this Chekist vertical is ineffective, then even if there are 45 Putins, everything will be fine for them, and if this vertical is in good condition, then one Putin is enough. That's all.

— What is of key importance now?

— Two things are of key importance. The first is the development of events at the front, that is, the ability of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to liberate the occupied territories. And the second is the willingness of the West to provide Ukraine with security guarantees that would not allow Russia, firstly, to use nuclear weapons in this war, and secondly, to resume this war in the event of a transition to a phase of a frozen conflict, even on the state borders of Ukraine. Nothing else matters, everything else is tertiary.

— Is the scenario of a closed sky over Ukraine real?

— No, not real. In order to close the sky, you need a sufficient number of air defense systems. This is a huge country, Russia has ballistic missiles, which it regularly produces. Therefore, there will be no closed skies until the real end of the war, either until guarantees are provided, or until a political agreement, in which I simply do not believe, exists. Therefore, Ukrainians can live under rocket fire for many years. This is our reality, it should be taken for granted.

— You mentioned nuclear weapons. As we know, tactical nuclear weapons are already on the territory of Belarus. How realistic is the scenario of their use, how do you assess the situation?

— I believe that Vladimir Putin has no restraining brakes on the use of nuclear weapons, at least tactical ones. It's just that these nuclear weapons can be used if the Putin regime is in any danger. Now there are no prerequisites for their use, because there is no danger to the regime either. But those people who really believe that someone can influence Putin in terms of using nuclear weapons create the same illusions for themselves that they created when they said that Putin would never decide on a major war with Ukraine.

I really like it when they say that “Xi Jinping will not allow Putin to use nuclear weapons”. Russia did an excellent job of derailing the “grain deal,” which hit China’s interests and Xi Jinping’s future capabilities harder than any US sanctions. Grain prices have already skyrocketed, and even now China has not been able to buy the products it was supposed to buy in order to lower these prices. Do you know how much China was getting from the “grain deal”? 30% production, not 2% like African countries, 30! And Putin spat on Xi Jinping absolutely calmly. Therefore, all these fictions that China is leading Putin and so on are simply from the desire to create a reality that has never been and never will be.

Therefore, the only way to stop Putin and prevent him from using nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine is Ukraine's integration into NATO and security guarantees. Before this integration — an invitation to NATO at the Washington summit in April, and after that — security guarantees, as for Finland and Sweden. If this does not happen, we are entering very dangerous water. I speak right away.

— Now the idea is very popular that Joe Biden is putting pressure on Zelensky to win faster, to end the war before the American elections.

— Neither Zelensky nor Biden can speed things up, because this is a war, and in a war you can’t put pressure on someone. You can, of course, say to Zelensky: “We would very much like you to achieve military successes.” So Zelensky wants this even more than Biden, I think, a hundred times, because he does not have elections, but the country is at war. But this is a war, you can't pressure anyone there, sorry.

— Among the international contingent, the most significant group is the Belarusians, including the Kalinouski regiment. In your opinion, how realistic is the scenario that after the end of the war, the Kalinouski regiment with weapons will return to Belarus and liberate it from the Lukashenka regime?

— It is clear that if the war ends with the collapse of the Putin regime, then even small formations will have great opportunities to overthrow the Lukashenka regime. But we do not know how this war will end, whether Russia will really weaken as a result of this war, what the political results of this war will be.

— In Ukrainian society, there is such a big demand and expectation that Ukraine will completely liberate all its territories, including the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, the entire territory of Ukraine up to the borders of 1991. In your opinion, how realistic is this scenario?

— I perfectly understand that in Ukrainian society there is a demand for victory, as there was always a demand for justice in Ukrainian society. For the simple reason that the restoration of the internationally recognized borders of Ukraine is justice from the point of view of international law. But war is not even an uprising, war is an event in which people die on the front line. And there is always a very important point that should talk about what the price of liberating all territories can be (even in the best case). From the point of view of people's lives, and from the point of view of the economic and social state of the country at the end of the war.

I am a sincere supporter of the restoration of international law, I have always spoken about this. We cannot leave Russia a drop of what it stole from Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, because the restoration of international law is a priority. But the following question arises: how many of the population as a result of such actions, I mean a long conflict, will generally remain here to live in the physical sense of the word.

I belong to a people that is millennia older than Ukrainians, and in our national history there were events when we won and disappeared, simply disappeared quantitatively. This is the payment for freedom, for the fight against the empire: you win, but remain a hero only on the pages of history books, in the Jewish case, even in the Bible, and then in Russia or in other countries you talk about the exploits of your people, about the Maccabees, about the Mossad. We carried this story through the millennia of exile and returned to Israel, in a different quantity, of course, than it used to be, but the state was restored.

Ukrainians can go through the same experience, I won't even call it sad, it's just a historical experience, it can be. Today I read an interview with the head of the Come Back Alive organization Taras Chmut, whom I deeply respect. He said an important thing: Ukrainians must understand that, most likely, everyone will have to serve in the army. I admit it, it is quite possible that if there is a long war, everyone will have to serve in the army. But the most important question is how many people from this same army will return. Because it is much easier for Russia to use its mobilization potential if Vladimir Putin's goal is to destroy the Ukrainian presence in this territory, which Putin considers the territory of “historical” Russia.

If Putin is told that he must pay with five million Russians so that there will never be Ukrainians here (this is the final solution to the Ukrainian issue for him), I think the President of the Russian Federation will gladly agree to such an exchange, and will be supported by most of his compatriots. I remind you again that this is a war for the final solution of the Ukrainian issue, the presence of Ukrainians here does not give Russia the opportunity to become the country that the Russians see in their dreams.

This is not just a war with the Ukrainian state, this is a war that should once and for all put an end to the very idea of Ukrainianness in the lands that Russians consider the lands of “historical” Russia. And that's how it should be treated, that's what it is. Because if in the event of this war we lose the presence of the Ukrainian people on their ethnic lands, then we can clearly state that Russia will achieve the goal that Vladimir Putin set for himself back in 2014.

I believe that the preservation of the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian state is our main goal and our main victory in this war. Here is what needs to be clearly understood. When people ask me what is in the first place for me, what is in the second, and what is in the third, I always say that the preservation of the Ukrainian people is in the first place, because in the era of the final decision, the fate of the Jewish people may await it. The second is the preservation of the Ukrainian state, if there are no people, there will be no state. And the third is the restoration of the territorial integrity of this state.

If we rearrange these priorities in a different order, we risk saying goodbye to both the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian state, but we will preserve the territorial integrity of a certain entity in which a different population will live.

Incidentally, a striking example is the so-called Palestine, a word coined by the Roman emperor Hadrian, the Greek word he replaced the word Judea with. The word Israel, the word Judea, he replaced with the word Palestine. And this Palestine remained an integral province of Rome, as it was before the extermination of the Jews, before the uprising of Bar Kokhba, only other people lived there.

— In this case, how will the Ukrainians come out of this war, and how will the Russians come out?

— I don’t think about the Russians now, the Russians will come out the same as they are. They will seek to rebuild their empire, they will come out aggressive, they will come out embittered. Ukrainians should least of all think about them, because our task is for a civilizational wall to grow between us and the Russians, such as is now between Poland and Russia, a NATO wall, a “wall of retaliation”, if you like, possible retaliation for aggression, nuclear retribution. Or we will be a poor, depressive, socially unsettled outskirts of the civilizational world for many decades to come. However, it is important for us to be a part of this civilizational world.

I already said this in some interview, I repeat once again that now, if we take the terminology from the Game of Thrones, we are such a tribe of wildlings that fights with the dead in the territory behind the wall, behind the wall of the “night watch”. The “night watch” are other people, Poland, the Baltic countries — this is the “night watch”. They sit on the wall and watch, wave their hands to us, decide whether they will buy our grain or not. Thank you very much. And our task is to get beyond the wall. Stop being wild, get behind the wall, become a “night watch”.

So, who the Ukrainians will become after the end of the war, whenever it ends? They will become the “night watch” of the civilized world. And then there will be walkers, we just need to say goodbye to them and not think what will happen to them. Another quote from the Game of Thrones: “What is dead cannot die”. Forget about them, let them deal with themselves. This is the important point I want to make.

— Vitaliy, let’s sum up, you drew different scenarios, but people always want to believe in the best, hope for something better. Whom to rely on in this situation?

— I think the best thing is that we will save Ukraine. This state was not supposed to be on the political map for 18 months already, or it should have turned into a limitrophe of Russia, like Lukashenka's Belarus at best. We have preserved the Ukrainian people and we have every chance, if we approach the future seriously and responsibly, to preserve it in the future as well. This is already an optimistic scenario, all this could no longer exist. Now comes the most serious test — the war of attrition, and the Ukrainian people must emerge victorious from this war. That's all we have to do.

If you like this article, you can support the website Charter97.org

MULTI-CURRENCY ACCOUNT FOR ASSISTANCE:

Bank's name: Bank Millennium S.A.
Address: ul. Stanislawa Zaryna, 2A, 02-593, Warszawa
IBAN: PL 97 1160 2202 0000 0002 1671 1123
SWIFT: BIGBPLPW
Name of the account holder: Fundacja “KARTA ‘97”
Purpose/title of payment: Donation for statuary aims

You can contact us by the e-mail [email protected]