No one can predict precisely what is in store for Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, as the weeks and months pass in the aftermath of what the Wall Street Journal has labeled the “lightning insurrection” launched by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner paramilitary group.

Will what the world has witnessed in recent days be acknowledged someday as the spark that eventually helped overturn Russia’s previous successes in Chechnya and Crimea?

No doubt Putin’s troubles inflicted at the hands of Prigozhin has helped bolster optimism in Ukraine that the Russian president’s days in power — and perhaps the brutal war in Ukraine for which he is responsible — might be numbered.

An article titled “The man who would be tsar” in the Newsweek magazine of March 27, 2000, as Putin was about to become Russia’s president, referred to Putin backers’ insistence that there was nothing to fear about him.

“He will, they say, restore law and order to a chaotic, crime-ridden country.”

But the article went on to say that “skeptics worry he will restore order, without law.

“In post-Soviet Russia, that is a very fine line to tread. In the book of interviews (“First Person: Vladimir Putin”) just out in Russia, Putin makes it clear that in his heart, he is comfortable with the use of force. ‘You have to hit first,’ he says at one point, ‘and hit so hard that your opponent will not get to his feet.’

“He has certainly lived up to that philosophy in Chechnya. Where else — and to what end — Putin might apply it in the future is what the world will soon find out.”

Ukraine and its people are at the forefront now of exposing the horrific answer.

Although we believe we have all longed, in the past, has advocated Putin’s ouster from the Russian presidency, that thinking was built on the premise of a peaceful transfer of power such as occurred in 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev was removed as the Soviet Union’s leader.

Today’s leaders around the world are right in being fearful about Prigozhin and the Wagner paramilitary group gaining control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

“Even the slight risk of the loss of command and control of these weapons could present an outsize threat if some weapons fall into the wrong hands, inside or outside of the country,” the Journal rightly pointed out in its June 26 edition.

It is estimated that Russia has nearly 4,500 weapons in its nuclear stockpile, deployed and stored across that country.

Chaos in a country with such a vast nuclear capability is, without doubt, the basis for great anxiety everywhere beyond its borders.

The man who would be tsar — or czar, by way of today’s more recognized spelling — has had his fragility and vulnerability exposed by Prigozhin.

Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, made reference to that, expressing the opinion “it turned out that the czar is not a real czar because he couldn’t control a man from his own system who’s supposed to be under his full control.”

Putin, whose hands are, in effect, covered with the blood of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians as a result of his Ukraine invasion, talked in the “First Person” book about having gotten his baptismal cross blessed “at the Lord’s tomb” when he went to Israel as part of an official delegation.

Too bad he apparently never learned the real meaning of that cross.

— Williamsport Sun-Gazette