The Transfer of Power Has Begun in Russia

Major international gatherings are usually just a political stage where what has already been agreed upon and done is presented. The NATO summit in Vilnius has been planned and prepared in advance as a significant political platform for presenting the draft conclusion of the war in Ukraine and the outline of a future peace and geopolitical concept in the post-war period.

Given that I am writing this at a moment when the summit is officially just beginning, it is not yet publicly known how the conditional invitation to Ukraine to join NATO after the war will be formulated. However, that membership is the very core of the future Russian-Ukrainian peace agreement. The strongest herald of that conceptual conclusion of the war has proven to be the one who is not there, and who will gradually be less present elsewhere – Vladimir Putin. The news seemingly has nothing to do with NATO and its summit. From the Kremlin, spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced that President Putin met with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, the Russian special forces, and that after several hours of conversation, Prigozhin, along with his commanders, announced that they are ‘ready to continue fighting for the homeland’.

Red Carpet for Erdoğan

At first glance, it seems incredible that Putin would find himself in a pleasant conversation in the Kremlin with a person who threatened him with military rebellion and a coup just ten days ago, who shot down several helicopters and planes, killed about ten pilots, and forced him to close the approaches to Moscow and declare a state of emergency, publicly accusing her of treason. However, this is actually a message that the transfer of power has begun in Russia, that the current president Putin is at this moment merely a formality, and that real power is already in the hands of a publicly unidentified intelligence circle around him that will gradually bring forth a new Russian government and ensure a peaceful transfer of power, which is in the interest of both Russia and the West. The removal of Putin from executive power is one of the conditions for any future transitional peace agreement.

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Another important message is the unequivocal geopolitical alignment of Erdoğan’s Turkey with the West. Due to its position, Turkey will play an important role in the next period of building a new geopolitical architecture, in the period between the conditional invitation to Ukraine to join NATO and its realization. Erdoğan has once again shown that he knows how to read political signals and turn them to his advantage at crucial moments. He lifted the blockade on Sweden’s NATO accession before the summit (which he could not prevent anyway since Sweden is already practically integrating), and in return, his Western allies in Vilnius rolled out the red carpet for him, Joe Biden promised him warplanes, they promised him support for EU accession, which no one in the EU wants, and Erdoğan himself no longer wants it either… In short, they made him the main star of the show, which is exceptionally pleasing to the Turkish sultan. And the West is not averse to his political pragmatism either.

The Russian World in Croatia

NATO, with Erdoğan’s help, has shown that it has completely solidified its northern flank on the Vilnius stage. Additionally, Polish President Andrzej Duda has set the demand for complete energy integration of Eastern Europe by extending the Cold War-era so-called NATO oil pipeline, which ends in Germany. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has presented himself as the last European public vassal of Vladimir Putin, or the Russian energy subjugation of Europe, which is likely the beginning of his end.

Croatia also did not welcome the ‘unprepared’ grand show in Vilnius. Two major scandals were timed before the summit. The shorter-term one is the conflict between the president of the state and the prime minister over the appointment of the head of the VSOA, which is why Croatia welcomed NATO’s celebratory summit without the head of the military intelligence agency, which is a message of immaturity and instability, but also of a smoldering conflict between pro-American and pro-Russian players (and) in the Croatian military sector and around it. However, this disagreement may only be an alibi or a request for understanding of a much larger challenge that logically follows after the consolidation of NATO’s eastern flank – which is the suppression of the Russian gas and oil monopoly from the Adriatic-Balkan basin. Croatia will be at the very center of this gas ‘war’ for liberation from Russian energy dependence, in which the main roles are played by the USA and Russia. This ‘war’ has already begun with the gas affair in HEP, and the real networking of Croatian energy and political lobbies in the Russian world is beginning to become publicly visible. In the ‘war’ that will define Croatia’s position in the new geopolitical architecture of Europe, exciting developments are yet to come…