SDMB, thank you for aggregating news better than anyone else.
I haven’t heard much about the Russian Air Force. Their loyalty to Putin could be a deciding factor.
The Wagner group would be very exposed traveling within Russia
No one knows which military units will stay loyal to Putin. What will the Russian commanders in Ukraine do?
Right. I assume it means all supply is now coming through Crimea, then having to go east along the land corridor to reach the Donbas. And that’s just one aspect of the trouble Russian forces are now facing.
This actually seems very well orchestrated and I’d imagine he lined up some support beforehand.
It will likely fizzle or he’ll go down, but the audacity and that it’s actually happening is so surreal.
The fact that Prigozhin didn’t die already after his recent burst of online activity is indirect evidence of support to him in the FSB etc. Unless this is all a charade meant to help Putin.
Trenches being dug and machine guns being installed at the outskirts of Moscow.
Ukraine still winning on the propaganda front:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/14homfg/reaction_from_the_frontline_to_the_news_from/
Damn, they’re good.
Then again, their current President and First Lady used to do political satire and comedy for a living…
Since I can’t see the video without logging in, I’m going to do the unthinkable and ask someone to explain the joke to me.
Ukrainian soldier watching the news on a laptop, surrounded by military looking equipment overflowing with popcorn, shaking his head while knocking back the snack.
Thanks!
The Wagner rebellion is not popular in Russia, unsurprisingly. “In war, you need to shove your political ambitions up your ass and support the front with all your might.”
The Guardian reports that outgoing flights from Moscow have been sold out.
Also, Putin’s private plane has been tracked heading for St.Petersburg, out of Moscow.
This is looking like a legit blitzkrieg to Moscow. More than halfway there. Probably before Moscow can prepare defenses.
Per NYT,
Wagner’s armored columns moving toward Moscow appear to have reached the Lipetsk region in central Russia. The vehicles are traveling on federal highways and seem to be avoiding city centers, many of which have been fortified by local military garrisons. A video posted on social media on Saturday and verified by the New York Times shows a column of military vehicles believed to be loyal to Wagner near the Lipetsk town of Elets, about 250 miles south of Moscow.
Some thoughts (those that occur to me way to early in the morning).
*The Ukrainians must be watching this with undisguised glee (and looking for opportunities to improve their positions), but they need to remember this Maxim: The enemy of my enemy is my enemies enemy. No more. No less.
*If Prigozhin is half as smart as he claims to be, he’s already been in touch for weeks now with Russian military folks in the field to lay the groundwork for this. If he’s going off half-cocked, then his odds are bad. But remember that Napoleon landed back in France with (at most) several hundred troops and had chased the Bourbons out of the country in only 2 weeks.
*In a ‘OMG that can’t happen’ scenario, could Putin and his Chiefs, in a bid to keep their power at all costs, consider using nuclear weapons on their own country to suppress the rebellion? Very unlikely, but desperate rulers have done desperate things before…
Meanwhile I’ll see if I have any popcorn in the pantry…
Press on.
‘And our actions to defend the fatherland against such a threat will be tough.’
When I hear ‘Fatherland’, I think of Nazi Germany. (This is one reason ‘Homeland Security’ grates on my ears. Homeland sounds too close to Fatherland.) When I’ve thought of Russia and the Soviet Union, I’ve always thought of Rodina (Motherland) and ‘Mother Russia’.
I think that’s a complete mis-characterization of what that article really says. They quote a lot of people who have vested interests in Putin winning, but no regular citizens. Then there’s this part:
“The fact that Wagner was able to easily capture the million-strong Rostov-on-Don, the 10th largest city in Russia, in which the headquarters of the Southern Military District is located, shows that Prigozhin’s plan has serious support among the regular army. Wagner was allowed into Rostov without resistance,” Sonin wrote on Facebook.
A bunch of Putin supporters supporting Putin isn’t a surprise. But a bunch of actual soldiers deciding they’d rather just let Wagner stroll into their city with almost no resistance? That’s significant. If this move really “wasn’t popular” in Russia, the army could have put a lot more effort into resistance, but they didn’t.
More detail: the Ukrainian soldier is ‘Magyar’, who is the leader of a prominent drone unit and who regularly releases ‘Birds of Magyar’ videos of drones striking Russian forces. He’s a minor celebrity. He’s sitting on the pickup truck tailgate, as he usually is in his videos, surrounded by hardcases for DJI Mavic drones. Except instead of drones the cases are filled to overflowing with popcorn.
The extra details make it really quite hilarious to anyone who follows the war on Twitter.
Wagner’s tactic to start the coup on a friday night has reportedly worked well in that masses of the Russian FSB personell was / is drunk and more or less out of commission.
Bunch of rear echelon guys with no heavy equipment, along with a few local police paramilitary types mobilized at the last second, armed with nothing more than assault rifles, allow a military column headed by main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to just drive past them? That’s just basic survival instinct. You don’t disable a T-80 with an AK-74.
This all happened overnight on a Friday night. Imagine you’re a soldier stationed in Rostov-on-Don, probably primarily tasked with logistics. It’s Friday night, you saw that khuylo Prigozhin posted some rabble-rousing shit on social media, but he’s been doing that a lot recently, so you share a couple bottles of vodka with your mates. Then at 3AM the alarms go off any you’re told to come block the highway because a convoy is on its way.
It’s probably unrealistic to expect the army to have been able to mount serious resistance in Rostov given the amount of warning time they had. That’s really more on the intelligence services who didn’t see this coming.
We’ll see if Rosgvardia can put up more of a fight for Moscow. Normally defending the capital would be the task of 1st Guards Tank Army, but they’re deployed in NE Ukraine, not to mention they’ve been decimated and reconstituted a couple times in the last year.
In other news, Kadyrov’s Akhmat battalion has columns advancing on Rostov-on-Don from multiple directions. He’s come out as loyal to Putin, and has a history of disliking Prigozhin. Of course, with Akhmat you never know if you’ll get any actually fighting as opposed to a bunch of TikTok videos of guys with beards trying to look intimidating.