Moscow’s godfather: Putin’s Russia is a mafia state Trump prosecutor may continue investigation in Georgia

There was a time when Vladimir Putin was seen in the West as the guarantor of a new, modern Russia. He also tried to make this image come true. Two weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Russian president, who was once stationed in Dresden as a KGB agent, gave a speech in German in the Bundestag in Berlin.

The Germans and the West in general heard it with good will. In fact, Putin, then in his late forties, tried to maintain good relations in the early years of his term. He acted relatively rationally. Nothing remains. Today, Putin is seen in the West as a ruthless tyrant – and a potentially deadly threat.

With his murderous attack he turned neighboring Ukraine into a blood and bone mill, not least for his own soldiers. Vladimir Putin can afford it. He sits very hard in the saddle. This weekend he will be re-elected president. The only question is whether it is more or less than 80 percent.

Same time as Stalin

Putin has ruled the vast empire for almost a quarter of a century. In August 1999, President Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly appointed the little-known intelligence chief as prime minister. There was a devilish pact behind it: Putin gained power in exchange for sparing Yeltsin and his family from corruption investigations.

When the 71-year-old Putin completes his next six-year term, he will have been in power as long as Joseph Stalin. Comparisons are difficult. Stalin was a despot, a modern Genghis Khan. He had people shot at random or taken to the gulag. Putin’s methods are more subtle. He acts like a godfather of the mafia.

There must be revenge

This has never been more evident than last year, when Yevgeny Prigozhin dared to revolt. The mercenary leader marched his Wagner troop towards Moscow before returning under questionable circumstances some 200 kilometers from the capital. Putin seemed to forgive him, but two months later Prigozhin fell from the sky in a plane.

It was a process straight out of the script of countless classic mafia films, especially the ‘Godfather’ trilogy. “The mafia code known to all moviegoers is: Failure to take revenge makes the Don weak,” wrote Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. And Putin doesn’t want to be accused of weakness.

The capos kiss his hand

In the Kremlin he marginalized the technocrats and replaced them with ‘siloviki’ who remained loyal to him. This was clear before the start of the war in Ukraine, when the Security Council essentially gave him the green light for the invasion. The television session felt like a mafia meeting where the godfather lets his capos kiss his hand.

By doing this he secured their loyalty. No one could claim they knew nothing. In some ways, Putin is worse than Stalin, Russian-American political scientist Nina Khrushcheva said in the Watson interview. You could argue with Stalin, but “in today’s Kremlin, reasonable exchange is no longer possible.”

He wants his share of the loot

The transformation of Russia into a mafia state did not take place during the war in Ukraine. Even as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, Putin had close contacts with organized crime, wrote his biographer Catherine Belton. One of the criminals was a certain Yevgeny Prigozhin, later known as “Putin’s cook”.

After Putin took power, he targeted the oligarchs. They confiscated enormous assets in the ‘wild nineties’. Now the message from the godfather of Moscow was: you can plunder the country as long as you swear unconditional loyalty to me – and hand over part of the loot.

Huge wealth

The propaganda portrays Putin as a humble servant of the people, but he is said to have enormous wealth, including several properties between which he travels on a luxury train. There are identically decorated work spaces everywhere so that no one knows where they are. He is only allowed to appear in the Kremlin on official occasions.

But one person did not play along: the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at the time the richest man in Russia. In February 2003, he had a heated exchange with Vladimir Putin in front of television cameras about rampant corruption. The Don’s revenge soon followed: Khodorkovsky was arrested, expropriated and imprisoned in a penal camp.

Liquidated mafia style

Shortly before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, he was released as a concession to the West. Today, Khodorkovsky is lucky to be alive. Many opponents of the regime were liquidated in mafia style. The latest person to be affected so far was Alexei Navalny, the most charismatic and prominent opposition figure.

He was a colorful figure, but Navalny’s lasting legacy is that he exposed the corruption in Putin’s mafia system. The most spectacular example remains the Protz Palace near Sochi, which is said to have belonged to the godfather. In this case too, revenge was inevitable: Navalny was poisoned and recently died in a Siberian prison camp.

Real opponents were not wanted

Putin no longer has serious opponents and he suppresses anything that even remotely resembles opposition. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled abroad since the war in Ukraine began. And yet Vladimir Putin, like any mafia boss, is paranoid, full of fear that it might be his ‘turn’.

This is evident from the presidential elections. Six years ago he let Xenia Sobchak, the daughter of his main sponsor Anatoly Sobchak, walk as a liberal fig leaf. This time even a ‘system oppositionist’ like Boris Nadezhdin, who appears as a ‘pause clown’ in propaganda programs on television, is undesirable as a candidate.

The flame of freedom

Nadezhdin was excluded due to reportedly too many invalid signatures. But thousands lined up in cities to sign for him, even though they knew what they were risking. And thousands came to Alexei Navalny’s funeral, despite making themselves targets of Putin’s secret services.

Apparently the saying is true that once the flame of freedom is ignited, it can never be completely extinguished. In this case it is little more than a faint glimmer of hope. The Godfather has too strong a stranglehold on the country. And it is doubtful that a “palace uprising” in the Kremlin would produce anything better.

Looking back, one has to admit that the West has been wrong about Putin for too long (his “understanders” still do). Entrepreneur and Khodorkovsky confidante Leonid Nevslin, who lives in Israel, summed it up: “Essentially, the result of Putin’s rule is that Russia has turned into a mafia state.”