How long will Vladimir Putin last? The war in Ukraine is spreading and there is already talk of a possible successor

The best biographer of the Russian president says that Vladimir Putin’s position “is secure” and has not weakened significantly. But it can happen “if the war goes really badly on the ground.”

So far, Putin controls and manages internal rivalries, but it cannot be excluded that in the second half of 2023 he will make “a political pirouette” and give rise to a successor facilitate a settlement in Ukraine.

This is told by Philip Short, a British journalist, for years correspondent for the BBC from Moscow, considered the author of the best biography of the Russian leader.

Short knows the Russian situation inside out and has contacts in key sectors of power. He is in Italy to present the book “Putin, a life, his time” and spoke with the Corriere della Sera as a privileged observer of the main crisis that threatens world balances.

The journalist believes that the assumption that Putin is handing over to a successor is real because if the war goes on it will be difficult for him to face the Russian presidential elections expected in 2024. “The support of the Russians today is not very active anymore,” he says.

A danger to Putin’s leadership would arise if groups vying for dominance within the regime coordinated into an alliance. “This seems unlikely today, unless there is a dramatic deterioration in the military situation.”

Another front that can cause you serious problems comes from the neighboring Central Asian countries, some former members of the Soviet Union until its dissolution in late 1991.

These countries “do not like what is happening in Ukraine, they are afraid that what Ukraine is suffering today could happen to them. For example, there is a strong Russian diaspora in Kazakhstan.”

Short argues that the most important question at this stage of the war, which will mark one year since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, is whether the West, and especially the United States, “will continue to be able to maintain the flow of military supplies” to Ukraine.

“So far, these supplies have made the difference on which Ukraine’s ability to fight depends,” explains Putin’s biographer.

The big problem is that “Western stockpiles of weapons are depleting at a much faster rate than the ability to replenish them,” concludes Short.

The United States is drawing up a plan “to get through the winter” which will inevitably be it will slow down military operations with temperatures as low as twenty degrees below zero.

The fragility of arms reserves explains the alarm raised by Bill La Plante, the Pentagon undersecretary who plans arms purchases and maintains contact with companies in the sector.

the Chinese threat

A few days ago, speaking at George Mason University, LaPlante froze the audience that was listening to him. “What happens if something serious happens on the Indo-Pacific front?”, the main immense geopolitical theater in which the United States faces China for world hegemony, which is the most strategic for US interests.

La Plante stressed that he was referring to a serious accident “now, not in five or ten years”.

The question that the senior defense official asks himself every day is whether there are enough weapons in US arsenals and in the industrial production chain to face the for now hypothetical conflict due to the invasion of Taiwan by Xi Jinping’s China and the conflict in Ukraine drags on in a long war.

Many of the thirty countries in the Western military alliance, NATO, are raising the same thing doubts and fears. It is estimated that as many as twenty are suffering from a shortage of reserves in their arsenals.

Britain and major European Union nations such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltemberg believes, may face the problem with increasing difficulty.

Since the start of the Russian invasion, NATO countries have sent Ukraine $40 billion worth of military aid, half of which came from the United States.

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, explained that now “the priority is the protection of civil and energy infrastructures, given that since October 10, Putin has raised the level of the conflict”.

Rome, correspondent

B. C