I remember reading some piece from the 1920s, some American intellectual trying to figure out what in the world was going on in Russia.Plus ça change…
I just pray, or send my hopes toward, the Russian people, in their dachas or their apartments in those blocks and blocks of skyscrapers tonight, Мододцы! Мир миру!
Well, it looks like we will have to wait until the history books are written to find out what happened on Frantic Friday:
Did Prigozhin suffer from a Biden-level mental breakdown?
Did Putin/Prigozhin mount a cunning operation to ferret out US/NATO/Ukrainian activists in their midst?
Did Perfidious Albion try to buy the services of the Wagner Group?
Did cunning Russian planners implement a scheme to encourage the Ukrainians to continue their self-destructive failing offensive?
Perhaps the most amusing speculation on the InterWebs is that US/UK/EU offered Prigozhin $6.5 Billion to stage a coup; P. did the minimum to collect their money – and is now sharing the foreigners’ money with Russia.
But talking about $Billions, notice that Hunter Biden’s escape from the jaws of (true) justice has totally dropped off the radar as eveyone focuses on Prizoghin’s squirrel. Cui bono?
It seems to be over now.
"The Kremlin representative said earlier that the mercenary leader will not face criminal charges for his short-lived rebellion and will instead be exiled to Belarus after its President Aleksander Lukashenko negotiated the end of the rebellion.
The fighters who marched with Prigozhin will also avoid prosecution due to their “service” on the front lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Those who did not join in the “mutiny” will be able to sign contracts to join the Russian Ministry of Defense, Peskov added.
He told reporters that he “cannot answer” exactly what the Wagner Group leader will do once in Belarus."
Did Prigozhin suffer from a Biden-level mental breakdown…
Enough with the weird conspiracies.
Prigozhin, being a reasonably competent military commander with a planning staff, presumably had a plan. We don’t know what the plan was. It may have involved help from some commanders in the Russian military. The Wagner group took over the Russian HQ in Rostov without a fight, so there was some level of cooperation. The Wagner troops got about halfway to Moscow without a fight. But then, the bridges ahead at the Oka River were blocked by an opposing force. No more easy drive up the freeway to Moscow. Whatever was supposed to prevent that from happening - didn’t.
This is a classic way a fast advance fails - the opposition gets a strong blocking force to a key choke point you can’t bypass. Go watch “A Bridge Too Far”.
Twitter chatter
This was all a distraction from a certain crime family’s problems in the U.S. Prigozin was never going to attack Moscow. He and Putin will be hugging within two weeks. Watch.
Don’t You remember the TURKEY coup during Erdogan July 15th 2016 ? Same thing they took control Erdogan and his government managed to retain power, and the aftermath led to significant purges against those who were perceived as being involved in or supportive of the coup…
It was set up between Putin and Prig. It was a PsyOp. Flushes out the disloyal. Throws Ukraine into disarray. It was all orchestrated
Totally agree. Prigozhin took the CIA’s money and faked his coup! Probably in coordination with Putin. Then bounced… with the cash.
People keep regurgitating the false reports that Wagner took down Russian aircraft. There is zero video corroboration of this, and zero confirmation from anyone on this.
That coordination would have helped them figure out which Russian leaders were ready to abandon Putin - this flushed them out?
This ‘coup’ and its aftermath make no sense. How can Prighozin trust a security guarantee from Putin after launching a coup, destroying Russian aircraft, and disparaging the MoD leadership? How can it be that Wagner just drove from Ukraine to the environs of Moscow with no resistance or lives lost? It only makes sense if Putin and Prighozin remain on great terms, which implies a totally coordinated act. What am I missing?
Some early thoughts: -More questions than answers -Short-term compromise ≠ long-term solution -This was a mutiny not a coup -Too soon to say Putin will fall anytime soon -Not clear this will affect Ukraine’s offensive -The previous Kremlin-Wagner relationship is over
It made Wagner look even stronger. So if enemies were already afraid of them, now they look way more intimidating.
This is exactly what I was thinking!. Some things about this “coup” looked stage. From the attack on the wagner camp to the quality of the Wagnerites in Rostov. Also, quite a few were in sneakers. Just seemed off.
Never saw anything about PMC moving to Belarus. PMC by all accounts has been disbanded but some could join the actual army if they wanted. Only one going to Belarus is Prigozhin.
They could/should move on Kyiv. This would turn Ukraine’s defense posture and counteroffensive strategy on its head.
What should be obvious but I am the only one pointing out:
Prigozhin and PMC Wagner moving to Belarus is not “exile” but playing an important role for the Russian Federation.
And it isn’t “guarding” the Polish border.
It’s keeping Lukashenko in power.
Lukashenko has real problems in that area.
Not just the usual liberal-homo dissidents but a hard right and elements of the military who despise him.
This situation can be compared to pre-Euromaiden Ukraine.
Belarus is of huge strategic importance, plus with the announcement nuclear weapons will be on Belarussian soil, keeping Lukashenko in power is a must for Russia.
Been thinking much the same, could you also argue that once the Wagner unit reforms it could also be used to attack Ukraine with troops and hardware direct from Belarus ?
What should be obvious but I am the only one pointing out: Prigozhin and PMC Wagner moving to Belarus is not “exile” but playing an important role for the Russian Federation. And it isn’t “guarding” the Polish border. It’s keeping Lukashenko in power.
Wagner forces were replaced in Bakhmut at the end of May-early June. I don’t think any Wagner troops are currently on the front lines, or were pulled from there for this event. Not clear this event will have any immediate direct effect on the battlefield.
Trump warns about ousting Putin in Russia, says successor could be ‘far worse’ He is right. The Wagner leadership wants a more aggressive war. You don’t want nukes on the table. Putin is restrained. Our leaders are incompetent. Pray for peace.
It was a psyop to flush out disloyal troops and make them think twice next time for any next attempted coup.
Surely it occurs to you that the version of events fed to you by the MSM is bogus?
This ‘coup’ and its aftermath make no sense. How can Prighozin trust a security guarantee from Putin after launching a coup, destroying Russian aircraft, and disparaging the MoD leadership? How can it be that Wagner just drove from Ukraine to the environs of Moscow with no resistance or lives lost? It only makes sense if Putin and Prighozin remain on great terms, which implies a totally coordinated act. What am I missing?
If I had to guess… This was a planned false flag by to draw out those who would support a coup and/or were partial to subversion and to provide an excuse for Putin to both expand his powers by citing state emergency to help identify and purge all possible sister’s Dissidents Its the only explanation that makes sense given the leniency of the punishment handed out…not just to but also all Wagner contractors that supported the coup The latter being the most suspiciously illogical
It was either a total inside job in which Prighozin read a script OR Russia lured him into a padded trap with a plan to de-escalate by making compromises the top brass knew would work
CIA outplayed. Reminds me of the scene in Braveheart when Longshanks thinks the Irish will front line his troops against the Scots and William Wallace. Zero bid. Now he will be set up nicely in Belarus and can disrupt Ukraine from the North.
Maybe they conspired to draw in Ukraine with perceived weakness? Maybe it was a trap that Ukraine wasn’t lured into?
“Appear weak when you are strong”-Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Trump has played this one many times. Putin is intelligent and cunning. He just made a productive play.
The FBS, the successor the the KGB doesn’t mess around. Every family member of the Wagner army had a target in their back. It doesn’t matter what country you are from family trumps everything.
I saw a comment on Twitter, remarking about all of the people who just 48 hours ago were authorities on construction of deep-sea submersibles and now have transubstantiated into expert Kremlinologists, “The fundamental problem is that they’re trying to make sense of what is happening in Russia. Things that happen in Russia rarely make sense.” This is why Churchill described Russia as “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. To the extent outsiders can figure out what is happening in Russia at all, it is usually only in retrospect, long after events that make the news. From 1917 through 1991 academic and “intelligence agency” Sovietologists and Kremlinologists collected untold billions in salaries reading tea leaves, gazing into crystal balls, and writing learned papers about industrial production and labour productivity, yet essentially none of them predicted the whole corrupt and dysfunctional Potemkin empire was going to collapse into a pile of dust, even a year before it happened. As far as I know, the only person who did predict the Soviet collapse was a French demographer who observed in 1976 that collapsing life expectancy was inconsistent with a triumphant superpower empire.
Indeed, that’s what has been coming to mind ever since the start of this episode. In the 2016 “48 hour” coup d’état attempt in The Turkey, which initially appeared to be a well-organised military coup right out of Luttwak’s playbook, quickly degenerated into a comic opera festival of bungling in which the coupsters failed to immobilise the targeted caudillo and control communication channels, leading to Erdoğan’s doing a live FaceTime interview with CNN while the coup leaders were claiming to have seized control. Erdoğan was not restrained from returning from holiday to the capital, shortly after which the coup sputtered out. This was followed by a broad and deep purge of the military and civil service which, by 2016-07-20, had resulted in the arrest or suspension of 45,000 military officers, police, judges, governors, and civil servants, including 15,000 teachers and every university dean in the country. One suspects these names were on a list in somebody’s drawer long before the curtain went up on the coup.
We’ll have to wait to see what the aftermath of the just concluded Russian comic opera will be. If there’s one thing that’s constant from Czarist Russia to the Soviet Union to Putin’s родина, it’s that they’re really good at purges.
We can only dream!
Did he announce he was going to depose Leonid Brezhnev and install Konstantin Chernenko?
I always thought the military coup in Turkey failed because the military had already been pretty much infiltrated by Islamist hardliners by that time. Since Ataturk, the military could always be counted on to take control whenever religious radicalism got out of hand; then they’d hand power back to the civilian government. They were the guardians of the secular state. (Both times I’ve been in Istanbul, in 1980 and 1984, there was a curfew in effect.) In 2016 we realized the Turkish military had morphed into the exact opposite.
Kinda like what has been done here, by B. Hussein Omega: he transformed our military into a leftist socialist Skinner box for his theories.
We, in the US, now have a military which I do not doubt would turn its guns on parents protesting the sexualization of their children.
Update
Prozoghin’s Frantic Friday seems to be a bit of a Rorschach test – everyone is seeking what he wants to see.
Larry Johnson has little time for BidenWorld, and thus instead of seeing President Putin’s feet of clay, he poses the question: “What if the Prigozhin “Coup” is Maskirovka?”
Johnson suggests that while the Western usual suspects were slapping each other on the back, Russia was taking advantage of Western distraction to move significant forces into position for an attack from a different direction.
Johnson does not mention the other possible consequence – if those members of Wagner who do not join the Russian army follow Prigozhin to Belarus, then aggressive Poland and foolish Ukraine will now have perhaps the premier fighting force in the world on their eastern borders. Ooops!
What really went on during Frantic Friday? Only time will tell.
I drafted a reply this morning with what I thought was my very own original conspiracy theory. I didn’t read the linked article, but by your description it is very similar to what I was thinking.
If you were to relocate a military unit from where the Wagner group was located to a location in Belarus, which route would you take and how close would you come to Moscow? . All roads in France lead to Paris and all roads in Russia lead to Moscow and from the southern area of battle, you must head toward Moscow to get into Belarus.
I don’t know where he stopped, but it would be interesting to know if he went farther north before the major route to Belarus turns East. On the path shown above it is a town called Yelets which is 100 kilometers as the crow flies from the outside ring road around Moscow.
I have not read much about this event so I don’t even know if I know the facts, but several things struck me as odd:
All in all it just made me wonder if it was a ruse to allow a significant fighting force to move to a Belarus where it could be used to threaten Kiev from the north. If you just move this large a force to Belarus, it raises eyebrows. If you move this force under a ruse, you must have very little respect for the US intelligence.
I am just spit balling for fun.
Here’s an analysis of social and news media in Russia.
In the south, Prigozhin & Wagner had mostly positive sentiment in social media:
They got a fair bit of negative publicity from Russian media that depressed his previously positive sentiment:
… while bailing out Shoighu with a lot of positive publicity:
Now, the problem was the Central Federal District (surrounding Moscow, but not Moscow itself). Nobody cared about Wagner & Prihozhin, and the official push went into the negative:
That’s where Wagner got stuck, and had to turn around.
The lesson is that electronic media are an unprecedented form of population control, and we should all be very aware of it.
Yevgeny Prigozhin and Vladimir Putin have both released statements on 2023-06-26.
First, Prigozhin: the Grauniad says his audio statement was 11 minutes long, but this one minute clip with English voice over is all they released.
Here is Vladimir Putin’s statement.
Putin’s video is unavailable.
For some reason, they reposted it with a different URL and made the original private. I have updated the comment with the new URL.
I had dinner with Pippa at my Savile Club in London recently and will be meeting her again in London in the fall.
Her Dad published a piece on Unherd in January a year ago
