Did he announce he was going to depose Leonid Brezhnev and install Konstantin Chernenko?
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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.
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Update
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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.
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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:
- A bargain was agreed too without a battle. It is also hard to believe a person would agree to a verbal commitment of safety. To take this huge of a gamble and then take a very shaky agreement of safety without knowing you have lost is weird.
- It is also odd that Wagner took a headquarters without a fight. For what purpose? To acquire logistical support on a moments notice?
- It is odd that there were no major air to ground combat.
- One explanation for the lack of combat is the military was not going to interfere. However, if this is the explanation, then why agree to anything? Even if a few units don’t go along and start to defend, it doesn’t seem realistic that you would even start marching with a huge force with the expectation there would be no resistance. If there was going to be no resistance, you don’t need to take a huge force.
- It seems to me moving a large force 20 to 25,000 troops a long distance requires a major amount of supply planning. I have no idea how Russia handles military logistics, but I highly doubt that forces have their own infinite supply of fuel and vehicles to transport this large a force a large distance.
- It seems extremely risky to try to move a large force a large distance in a short period of time. You have a huge convoy that is vulnerable to any air unit or even the smallest of ground forces. Please correct me, but I don’t see how you are convoying and shooting down jets at the same time.
- It also seems improbable to fake a coup. That is a bit risky. The news may cause a real coup.
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.
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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:
At the same time, Shoighu was drummed up:
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.
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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.
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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.
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I had dinner with Pippa at my Savile Club in London recently and will be meeting her again in London in the fall.
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Her Dad published a piece on Unherd in January a year ago
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And for a contrasting more recent piece that is oddly devoid of references to his claim to fame (how to coup), here is Luttwak on Prigozhin and Putin as of a few days ago
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Yes. Far too much of that.
This looks more like a standard way a coup fails - support that was expected from some part of the military failed to materialize. Look at a map. It’s all flat terrain to Moscow until the Oka river bridges. So, reasonably enough, the defenders put a blocking force at the bridges. Prigozhin and his tactical planners had to know that was a likely place they’d hit opposition. Whatever was supposed to prevent opposition there didn’t happen.
We don’t know what the plan was. Sneak an advance unit into position to take and hold the bridges? Make a deal with the area commander on the Russian side to not get there in time? Whatever it was, it didn’t work. The possibility of a fast, easy drive to Moscow was gone, and with it, the momentum of the coup.
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