Your rivals have allies: they in turn will harbour revenge, motivated by their own ambitions.  The lust for power revolves interminably.

Like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, Vladimir Putin is simultaneously dictator and coward: a manic murderer in a quest for restoration of former Russian empires which have characterised a swathe of European/Asian history stretching across centuries.

Whether or not the flight on which arch-rival Yevgeny Prigozhin was sabotaged directly on Putin's order, it was on Putin’s watch within his exclusive secret Kremlin autocracy. 

The only surprise for many silent Russians is that it did not occur sooner following Prigozhin’s threatening but aborted march on Moscow together with rebel 'alternative' Wagner military power brokers.

Putin's Kremlin cabal, which nationally controls a media propaganda axis suffocating any and all information, will continue to deny Russian population's intelligible access to information on political events and decisions. 

Yet, suspicion is mounting that Putin's own political security may have been crucially undermined among supporters of the Wagner challenge.

The global balance of power, alarming for Western democracies, may hinge on Putin’s equivocal relationship with China’s fellow dictator Xi Jinping, and exposure of differences may arise at October's International Olympic Committee (IOC) Session in Mumbai: the most severe constitutional moment in IOC’s 130-year history.  

Will Russia and Belarus - excluded from much of world sport since revelation of institutional cheating at Olympic and World Championship events - be barred from next year’s Games in Paris?

Putin and Xi were embraced in a conspiracy proposal immediately prior to Beijing's Winter Games last year: a mutual promise not to intervene in political issues within foreign countries - and exploded within days by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Where will China stand in the vote? The empire-lust of Russia and China are different: Russia’s political and China’s economic, with the latter intending to surpass USA as a global financial superpower.

The philosophical attitude of IOC President Thomas Bach - himself prevented from defending his 1976 Olympic fencing title at Moscow 1980 by West Germany's support of America's boycott - argues that athletes are neutral, seeking integration and friendship, immune from Government war-mongery. 

For Putin, initiator of institutional drug test corruption following a perceived failure at Vancouver 2010 Winter Games, athletes are no more than social/political civil servants.

A substantial element of Europe, plus USA, Canada and Australia, is likely to side with Bach in the Session vote, while Russia’s anti-West BRICS conglomerate - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - are expected to support Russia, alongside many of the eleven African states commercially reliant on Russian aid plus some Arabs, and plutocrats seeking domination.

In the propaganda war ceaselessly waged by Russia, their Olympic leader Stanislav Pozdnyakov has mounted phoney accusation that Sebastian Coe, recently re-elected World Athletics President and committed to Russia’s exclusion from Paris, is a 'Russiaphobe'.  

This on the fact that in 1980, when Britain’s Olympic team ignored the wish of Premier Margaret Thatcher to join America's boycott, and Coe famously won the 1500m track event.

The difference then and now?  While many opponents of Russia are appalled by Putin’s wilful slaughter of women and children, destruction of historic architecture and deportation of Ukrainian children, World Athletics is more motivated by Putin’s sustained authoritarian drug manipulation corruption, not forgetting the still un-arraigned child figure skater in Kamila Valieva.

The risk facing the IOC is that a vote for exclusion could provoke a breakaway by Russia - as in the past - and support for the IOC and Olympic Games to create a rival championship.  

This could catastrophically rupture IOC’s financial sponsorship and television finance, 90 per cent of which is donated back into subsidisation of world sport.  Unthinkable.