Continuing the discussion from Russia invades Ukraine {2022-02-24} (Part 2):
Yevgeny Prigozhin just released a 30-minute video with more attacks on the Russian Department of Defense and (indirectly) Putin. Link here.
What logical reason is there for him to be doing this? It’s gone beyond complaining with the goal of getting his men more supplies. He’s now actively burning bridges. To what end?
Personally, I think he wants to be the next Putin. He knows the war is lost, and Putin is going down with it. Once Putin goes, Russia is going to need a new Putin, and he knows just the man for the job. Having the troops feel some loyalty to him by trying to, or at least seeming to try to get them out of the meat grinder could be important.
Prigozhin has to know he’s a dead man if Putin gets his hands on him. He must feel protected, and has a plan for what to do afterwards. It’s hard to see what, because his brutality has made it impossible for the west to welcome him, but he seems to have burned his bridges in Russia. Strange indeed.
Maybe he’s just really, really mad and doesn’t care. Maybe he thinks Putin is going to keep him and his men fighting until they are all dead, and he wants to hurt the bastard as much as he can from where he is.
Possibly, but note that he uses “the good Tsar, bad advisors” motif.
Heh, I hadn’t thought of this angle to his current approach. Gonna need that army on his side to take control, anyway.
What does “taking control” look like? There’s no way he gets control in a military coup. His only hope would be to get enough people in power to support him, and he’s not going to do that by insulting them all as well.
Once Putin is out of the picture, a new leader will need to demonstrate strength and having an elite military force behind him helps. The Russian military will fall behind whoever they think will take care of them in the long run.
Ehh, I can’t say I have a well thought out plan he could follow. I think he could take control with a military coup, but it’s far from a certain thing.
I’m not so sure. The guy with the guns has a lot of sway about who is in control. Maybe he just takes control “temporarily” until they can figure out what’s going on.
Keep in mind, I’m not saying it would work. But a lot of speeches seem aimed at the troops more than anything else. Maybe he’s worried about being fragged? But I think he’s gunning (ha!) for the top spot. Or maybe at least an important position. Commander of the Army? But I just get this sense from him that he thinks there’s going to be regime change and he wants to be on the right side, with some guys with guns, when the axes start to fall.
I get that impression too, along with a big dose of “wannabe local warlord”. He strikes me as the sort that if there’s regime change, he might attempt to carve out his own little fiefdom somewhere.
The reason he is allowed to say what he does is because Putin lets him, provided all of the blame is on the boyars, and none of the blame is on the benevolent tsar. Presumably Putin wants some criticism of other military and government leaders given the difficulties.
Wagner spent a lot of time in Bakhmut, jostling with his enemy.
When we imagine that, we imagine people hiding in trenches, shooting at each other and no other interaction but enmity.
If you think back to things like the Christmas Truce, from WWI, or examples like Talleyrand meeting with the Black Prince, to negotiate before the Battle of Poitiers, it’s not a given that there’s zero fraternization between the two sides. For all we know, Prigozhin and the enemy commander were meeting up in some cave to play poker a few times a week, for the last six months.
Prigozhin might just be going mad on his own, from being shelled incessantly for a year. He might also have been cleverly influenced by his opposite, changed his stance on life after some reflection, or sold out to the group that he thinks will be the winner.
It’s too early to tell.
I would speculate that his immediate endgame is to keep himself and his men alive. As for his motivation for going off on military leaders, it may be linked to his claim that “2000” of his forces were killed by friendly fire.
Something about survival just seems to incline people to lash out at those they believe are responsible for trying to kill them.
His unit has had more “success” on battlefields than regular Russian forces, so perhaps he has calculated Putin will allow him some freedom to criticize, as long as such criticism doesn’t reach the top.
Whoops, I just started a breaking news thread in MPSIMS, unaware this thread had been started. I’ll lock mine and repost the gift link here. Sorry!
Gift link:
From the article:
Russia sent armored vehicles into the streets of Moscow and a city near Ukraine. Russia’s main security agency urged Wagner mercenaries to detain their leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, after he accused Russian forces of attacking them.
This is a fast-moving situation. I started this post 4 hours ago, but didn’t submit.
Wagner was (still is?) Putin’s personal puppy. Putin was (is?) happy (enough) to have the factions taking media potshots at one another. If the factions decide to actually start shooting at one another in quantity, now that’s when we see Putin has lost control of the tiger he’s aboard.
It is clear to me that a unified MoD could swat Wagner readily enough in an actual coup / counter-coup battle. So Prigozhin is either bluffing, has a lot of allies in the Kremlin, or a lot of allies highly placed at MoD. Any/all of which ensure he (he hopes) that a unified MoD response (or worse yet unified multi-agency response) is not forthcoming.
3 hours later …
Now it appears that Prigozhin has comprehensively exceeded his welcome. Whatever value Wagner has to Putin, Prigozhin himself is now part of the problem, not the solution. Or else Putin has lost control of the various Kremlin factions and the FSB is moving independently against Prigozhin in apparent concert with MoD.
If Prigozhin is alive in 48 hours I’ll be surprised.
Are Russian Army troops equipped with sledgehammers?
Pretty wild. Hopefully, this will disrupt Russia enough to end the war.
I stand corrected.
How much of a blow to Putin’s war effort would it be if Prigozhin and his troops are taken out of the picture without too much fuss?