Here’s another possibility that i am pulling out of . . . let’s say “the air.”
We know that Prighozhin’s men in the field were being starved for ammunition. We know also, that they had been in conditions only to be described as “meat grinder.” We also know that when he raised cain about it, he received answering rocket fire. I’m guessing at that point he got concerned about how they planned to pay him.
Prigozhin sees how the available munitions are being meted out (MoD first) and begins to worry about his payment. He hears grumbling in the ranks and worries he’ll lose his troops leaving all the equipment in Ukraine. What to do?
He is a known hot-head. That means a lot more in Russia than it does to most of us. Maybe one step shy of “berserker.”
So he says to his troops, these generals think they can leave us here to be cannon fodder? Let’s go discuss the question with them in person. I’m sure my buddy Vlad will want to hear this.
His goals? Show how badly the war will go with him gone. Give the entire bureacracy a taste of fear before they decide whether to pay him. Get his troops out of the meat grinder and his equipment onto Russian soil before he loses control. Get the Generals who shorted him fired (many think Putin agrees there.) Regain the loyalty of his troops.
If, as i suspect, what Lukashenko did was promise to pay him? Then i think most of these goals were met. I’ll be interested to see where his equipment ends up. I’m betting Putin bought it and it goes back to the front under MoD control.
One more thing, he is out of Ukraine, and noone is using the word “retreat.”
It is Neo-Latin and quite straight forward, and after they did it twice in Prague (1419 and 1618) both times with far reaching consequences they had to find a word for it, and it stuck. Of course the term made little sense before buildings became high enough, but that concern is irrelevant in Russia today. Here is a list of Russia’s tallest buildings.
Are you kidding? We should invent the word every time there’s an unusual form of death, for example death by implosion of submersible (see how all the threads get pulled together there?).
Meanwhile, it’s always a little crazy to me that anyone will talk to reporters in a situation like this. Or maybe they’re smart enough to lie about their names and age…
one — hugely embarrasing thing — I have not seen discussed much:
how is it possible that a couple of 100s / low 1000s stage a thunderrun for moscow and completely succeed, basically being only limited by the top speed of their vehicles…
isn’t that “off-the-scale” embarrasing for any country /army outside of africa?
They were still fairly far out from Moscow, and it’s reasonably certain that Russia didn’t have a bunch of forces securing middle-interior positions. I suspect things would’ve gotten much nastier closer to Moscow.
They went about 1100 miles, stopping only to take control of the military HQ and primary supply depot for the Ukraine war. They turned around about 100 miles short of Moscow.
Either Prigozhin had a deal with Putin already, or Russia has no fighter jets left. They did send a couple of helicopters to fire on them, but Prigozhin says he shot those down.
Or it was always a negotiation tactic/gamble with no intent to ever enter the city and actual Moscow urban warfare. End game for Prigozhin exactly what he got. Humiliating the generals, demonstrating his strength, better exit terms for his men than they were looking at, and getting his pay and likely secure villa.
In that spin this was not coming after the king and missing. It was winning the hand with a poor deal of cards.
Yes good chance of Putin’s people poisoning him at some point and denying it, but his popularity on Putin’s nationalist right (as hard as it is for me to fathom that there is a nationalist right of Putin) would make that murder a riskier thing than killing more liberal opposition figures. Putin labeling him traitor simply did not fly.
One has to think that various power elements are imagining their place as Putin tumbles, while not being stupid or brave enough to shove the knife themselves. But they will be ready when the knife is shoved.
Without meaning to be reflexively contrary, it is worth noting we don’t know this, we just know Prigozhin has claimed this. It may well be true, it might be partially true or it might not be very true at all.
Also his troops, or most of them, were already verifiably out of the meat grinder. They withdrew earlier from the Bakhmut front lines to retool and were largely replaced with degraded VDV formations. That’s why they were free to launch their campaign - if they had been on the front lines, their former portion of the front would have promptly collapsed to Ukrainian pressure. Prigozhin has obviously been preparing for this gambit for a while, it ran too smoothly to have been off the cuff move. There have also been very unsubstantiated rumors that a few regular units (including the 45th Spetznaz airborne brigade) refused to leave their barracks to engage him, which if true has to be extremely worrying to Putin.
Still early days on all of this and it might be a very long time before all the smoke clears.
I think in today’s Russia, you can manage to die by falling out a window even in a basement.
“Fairly far out”, in this case, means “less than two hours”.
It sure looks that way to me. Putin might not have had time to move any ground units into position to oppose him (remember, there’s only one tank left in Moscow), but he did have time to scramble jets. And he didn’t.
I think at this point, the possibility that is the least nonsensical is that Putin tried to stop Prigozhin… and failed. And then once he realized that he failed, then he made him a deal that was really good (for Prigozhin, at least). If this is the case, then it definitely means that Russia has no air force worth speaking of, and might even mean that they have no nukes (and yes, I do think that it’s entirely plausible that Putin would have ordered a nuclear strike on his own country, to put down a mutiny).
But that’s just what’s least nonsensical. At this point, who even knows?
Is exile to Belarus, a Russian proxy, really all that good a deal? Seems like a convenient place to be stashed pending extrajudicial killing. Unless there’s a follow-on part of the deal that hasn’t been revealed yet.
Well, driving at 60 mph. That’s assuming no resistance at all. We also don’t know how strung out this convoy was or even if Prigozhin was lying again . Might have been 25,000 troops 120 miles south of Moscow, might have been three guys in a jeep scouting way 200 miles ahead of the main column.
There is an Atlantic article with this view. But I think it preliminary. The article notes he and some troops covered many hundreds of kilometres in a short time. That he must have had supplies en route and in the towns which are major transportation hubs. In short, that this was very well planned, some time ago.
Sure, some planning was involved. And this may be better than the army seems to be capable of based on the rollout. But what cannot be planned is the reaction. I don’t see Putin going anywhere anytime soon. And given that, it seems a very risky move for the reasons above. Above all else, Putin will not like having his justifications for the war publicly questioned and even cutting any deal with a man being called a criminal yesterday is a serious loss of face. It is true these justifications are stupid and deserve questioning. But that does not make it safe or wise to say so. It is hard to know if Putin’s position is as weak as it seems. But it is easy to know these things won’t be forgotten.
It may be that an extrajudicial killing of a popular figure to his nationalist right is a riskier thing to do than one of opposing figures on the pro democracy side.
Prigozhin has also worked off the books with Putin and his team a long time. It may be that Putin could be afraid of the harm he Prigozhin could do with connections and information he has if there is an attempt that fails …
We don’t know what we don’t know but we know we don’t know it!
The response [of the public in Rostov generally welcoming or being indifferent to the Wagner troops despite Putin on TV warning this is like the 1917 civil war] is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool.
Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose.
The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.
But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.
Because they are afraid, or because they don’t know of any alternative, or because they think it’s what they are supposed to say, they tell pollsters that they support Putin. And yet, nobody tried to stop the Wagner group in Rostov-on-Don, and hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow. The security services melted away, made no move and no comment. The military dug some trenches around Moscow and sent some helicopters; somebody appears to have sent bulldozers to dig up the highways, but that was all we could see. Who will respond if a more serious challenge to Putin ever emerges?
. Might have been 25,000 troops 120 miles south of Moscow, might have been three guys in a jeep scouting way 200 miles ahead of the main column.