Let me guess, Prigozhin is now a lumberjack in Belarus.
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That whole thing really made no sense at all. WTF?
It’s two gangsters scuffling. No one wants to really kill the other guy, that’s bad for business.
Do all the former fighter-prisoners who choose not to transfer to MOD just get to wander back into Russian society?
My operating assumption is that Prigozhin hoped that more of the Russian military and intelligence would rally to his banner and that he took an off ramp when that didn’t happen. But just guessing, who knows.
Going for a coup was clearly already option B, what he originally wanted was Putin to chuck Shoigu and co under the bus, scapegoat them for failures in Ukraine and allow Prigozhin greater influence over the war effort. It doesn’t seem to me like that was very realistic, but I know very little about the region.
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This makes a lot of sense.
I’m thinking of all the sopranos episodes where they just beat up each other’s civilians with no intent of actually going to war.
Or when mobsters dangle some guy out a window but don’t actually drop him. That’s almost exactly how Putin operates.
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This kind of makes sense, but the off ramp is kind of terrible for him. Why couldn’t he just flee into exile without attempting a coup? Having achieved more than he could have reasonably hoped, why just give up?
It sort of makes sense if he had some patron or wavering ally in the regime, and they’re the ones who got bought off and called off the coup. But who knows, it’s all crazy.
Maybe he was actually doing it for his troops, he didn’t want them forced into contracts with Russian MOD where they would continually bear the brunt of the worst fighting for less compensation and to be commanded by generals he saw as incompetent
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My theory is the ~£40m Putin arrested in the back of the Gazelles (‘the wagner wages’) was handed back to Mr P in return for his emmigration to Belarus and forfeiture of wagner troops
Episode just dropped from top expert on Russian organized crime and kremlinology.
Cliffs?
Listening, but the guy is an excellent podcaster with a PhD, so worth hearing.
I wouldn’t say he offers firm conclusions so much as a more nuanced and informed assessment of the situation, general and specific.
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Kofman’s take, which ends with
My conclusion is that Prigozhin ultimately lost. Wagner will also lose out. But Putin lost as well, and the regime was wounded. What the long term repercussions are remains to be seen. 19/
I mean yeah, I don’t think anyone can disagree.
https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1672999622032195584?s=20
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Given all of the above, isn’t it a certainty that Prigozhin is going to stumble out of a window at some point? And wouldn’t he know that? Or is Putin really that weak that Prigozhin can lead an armed insurrection and ride off into the sunset?