Everyone agrees there will be a reckoning for both Prigozhin and Putin. Nobody knows when or how that happens.
How long does Prigozhin have?
- Days
- Weeks
- Months
- Years
- He’ll die of old age
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Keed could.
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I don’t have any idea what happened, none of the narratives make much sense to me. I just assume huge amounts of the story are not publicly known and might never be.
Sry, had to.
I mean I don’t have an opinion so yeah I disagree with Kofman that it’s clearly bad for Putin. I don’t understand what happened so how could I have an opinion? Maybe he understands things better and is right, I don’t know.
Does feel like the CIA is bullshitting about knowing about the mutiny. “Oh yea uhh we knew that two weeks ago” sounds like something you’d say when you get called out on something and you blank.
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Wagner was going at it with Ministry of Defense for months. CIA probably saw them mass some trucks and maybe got some wire taps and said, “hmm, something is happening.”
As for how things played out, it was so stupid as to be beyond prediction. I’m bummed we didn’t get to see Wagner capet bombed on the freeway by the Russian Air Force. Would have been a net gain for Ukraine and the world in general. The populace would have been quite confused.
Prigozhin was locked up for 10 years for having no impulse control for his criminality. He’s damn lucky if he gets out of this.
Chefs kiss SK. Not sure if it’s bad if a part of your own military storms your shit and knocks a few aircraft out of the sky. Just awesome
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I knew about it THREE weeks ago
Isn’t it the opposite? The weaker a ruler is, the more he wants to kill his opposition/has to rely on killing his opposition?
USA and Russia been doing this forever
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I read an interview with a german expert who also thinks it was a move of desperation by Prigozin.
But he also thinks that the system is very fragile. Nobody really knew how to respond because everyone looked to Putin for orders but all they got was a rambling speech on television. So he thinks when Putin doesnt issue orders the security apparatus isnt capable of acting.
All this leads me to another issue: Does anyone really think that Russia can control its whole territory. In the far east there are a bunch of other nations that probably took notes. I also fear the possibility what act of strength Putin comes up with to deter everyone who thinks he is weak. An instable Russia also means a lot of WMD’s might not be safe.
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Clearly the Russian state and military are dysfunctional, we knew that, I think the takes that this represents an image problem for Putin are a bit overblown. Like a little bit, sure, but what did this prove really? That if you have thousands of heavily armed soldiers who are Russians (and therefore other Russians will be unlikely to shoot them), you don’t have a homeland that can be nuked in response, and you launch a blitzkrieg attack on Russia, you can get Putin to make the massive concession of… agreeing not to execute you (yet). There were essentially no defections in the face of an armed revolt. If I am a political opponent scheming against Putin I am going to look at this and think hmm looks kind of difficult.
I do think that this is symptomatic of the broader problem Putin has that the war is not going well and that everyone loves a nice war when they think it will be easy and everyone wants a scapegoat when it starts going badly. The scapegoat for Prigozhin was Shoigu et al rather than Putin, but at some point the scapegoat might end up being Putin himself. So while I’m not sure this in and of itself makes it any likelier that Putin’s rule collapses, it is illustrative of the kind of thing that can happen when a war is not going well.
Another factor that seems to keep coming up is that most of these Wagner guys are Russian, and the FSB threatened their families.
3 in-group points though, well done.
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Russian military shooting at one another! This is good news!
FOR VLADIMIR PUTIN
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Move of desperation because the military was going to subsume Wagner into the regular Russian army? I guess that makes some sort of sense but why does Prigozen care that much if that’s what happens? He’s not a soldier and isn’t actually commanding Wagner in any operational sense. His rantings and various videos over the past few months would have got him either relieved, court martialed, or summarily executed if they happened in any actual military, the outcome depending on which particular military we’re talking about. In much of Russian history if a Russian commander did that he’d be facing the last option. Yet he’s still alive? And then after a brief failed coup he’s still still alive? What did Prigozen think was going to happen, he was just going to drive six hundred miles to Moscow and become President of Russia? I have a hard time believing he believed that. Like I said, I don’t understand what’s happening and neither the Western narrative or the Russian narrative make much sense to me. And the alternate explanation of a fake coup and some sort of psyop also doesn’t make any sense to me.
I think the best way to think about it is as a business and not an army. The current situation in Ukraine was bad for Wagner as a business. Sure, there ranks had increased, but I’m assuming you have to pay mercenaries a lot more when they are being given the most dangerous missions. It also hurts his post Ukrainian ability if he’s losing seasoned troops.
Getting absorbed by the army would be catastrophic - imagine if the US announced it was nationalizing Blackwater - I’m sure the owners would go ape shit and so anything they could to prevent that.
I still think his goal wasn’t a coup, just to get Putins attention and negotiate a better deal for Wagner, but when Putin didn’t negotiate he just took whatever deal he could, as the alternative was far worse.
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So more like the bonus expeditionary force march on Washington? I don’t know, maybe. But if Blackwater tried that shit in the middle of a major war with Mexico there’d be blood in the streets.
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And like, lets say that Congress did nationalize Blackwater. Obviously Blackwater Guy isn’t happy but what’s he going to do? It’d be insane for the Blackwater guy to try to do a coup, right? And of course he knows that and if that’s what happened, well, he’s not going to do a coup because that’s fucking insane and he’d just end up getting shot. And then why is Wagner getting nationalized in the first place? It seems like a lot of the rational behind that is because of all of Prigozen’s public antics!
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