Prigozhin Launches A Coup Effort (And It’s Over)

One thing that always made me suspicious of Prigozhin is that he made promotional videos near the front lines after Wagner’s advances and didn’t seem the slightest bit afraid that Ukraine would strike him.

Z

It seems that fame and success have gone to Prigozhin’s head.

I suspect that Putin did not do anything about him so as to avoid making a martyr.

as usual in this war, I feel I have an abundance of alternative narratives available and a shortage of reliable facts. I am left wondering what are they (for any “they”) not telling me, not taking due account of?

and I wait for events to unfold, clarifying events or at least eliminating some line of speculation

Prigozhin mentally unstable? Russia politically unstable? Both could be true, I suppose

I am told Russia had gone into a heightened state of alert a couple days before Prigozhin moved, supposedly suspecting Ukrainian subversion or sabotage.

Putin’s usual calculated restraint is being tried and tested for sure, but so is the political coherence of the Russian state, something Putin specifically cited in his crisis speech. I do not know enough about the deep dynamics of Russian politics to understand the place of such a coup attempt in the midst of this war. How do Russians understand Putin’s insistence on confronting the Collective West? What is the full range of their ambivalence? I just do not know.

This Prigozhin character is a mercenary, no? So, who offered him more cash? Do we even need to ask?

Seen some theories that this was a honey trap for traitors.

Supposedly, a few Russian billionaires have fled.

https://flipboard.com/topic/azerbaijan/billionaire-oligarchs-jets-flee-moscow-as-putin-s-regime-plunges-into-crisis/a-MfoyT9W3S1OBLpDub0Vg9Q%3Aa%3A3199486-004a6f4f0b%2Fforbes.com

Z

Not sure that any Russian aircraft were shot down by Wagner.

Some twitter sources that I believe are usually fairly well-balanced about the war are claiming it is true and then others that I feel the same way about are saying there is no proof of it.

One thing I’ll say is that from what I’ve read there hasn’t been many, if any, Wagner casualties during the insurrection and I would expect that if Russian military aircraft were being fired at that that there would be some retaliation, at the very least.

Z

Mercenaries only fight for money and the adrenaline rush, and never for the state. They will vanished if not paid. It was the DC cops that liberated the US Capitol not the National Guard that just stood by. If anything, the Prigozhin incident shows the similarities between NATO and the Russian Federation. Neither institution are interested in peace or serving their people; only profits for their corporate/oligarch partners. Women were added to US combat units to increase the pool of cannon fodder by 50% but still Americans are so obese, addicted, and ill from upper class exploitation that 80% are unfit to serve in the military.

“Mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skillful, you are ruined.…you will lose the war.”

The Western Empire is trying to take down Vladimir Putin to gain access to Russia energy and natural resources. But if China can create a BRICS alternative economic system, in a New York minute, the US dollar and the neoliberal Wall Street aristocracy will collapse. Western civilization, too, if democracy, run for the good of the people, is not restored.

I dunno, the distance from southern Belarus to Kyiv seems a lot shorter than from Bakhmut to Kyiv… about 400 km shorter.

And where are all of Ukraine’s forces right now?

Hmm…

Well, it looks like Prigozhin blinked.
My next question is: how long will it be, before he decides to try flying, like a bird, out of a 10th floor window.

Prigozhin has long seemed to have some kind of privileged protection from Putin and exile instead of prison for this mutiny continues the pattern.

Putin’s siloviki state is not so far evolved from the gangster state of the Yeltsin chaos that we can not wonder, too, about the fate of the accused, Shoigu and Gerasimov. Shoigu’s plan to absorb the Wagner troops in Russian territory into the contract ranks of the regular Russian Army was, in some narratives, a trigger for Prigozhin‘s mutiny. Incidentally, does Shoigu have his own PMC? I don’t know but I have seen off-hand reference to such a side-venture.

American propagandists are often so eager to label Putin the Great Dictator that they overlook the nature and state of Russian politics with its many loci of power and wealth. Russia is still burdened with corruption and inefficiency and a high level of petty violence in cities. I think the SMO revealed many weaknesses in the Russian military establishment, some of which were highlighted by the need to assemble a hodgepodge of irregular military units including Wagner. In this mini-drama, that other prima donna, the Chechen chief Kadyrov made himself conspicuous with bloody threats. A great many political and military chieftains were called upon to make public declarations of loyalty to Putin and the Russian state. One thing to notice is how many such men of significant local power there are in the whole apparatus competing to be recognized as having loyalty worth re-affirming. Videos of common citizens haranguing Wagner soldiers in the streets of Rostov-on-Don are also on point.

The Russian Federation President is clothed in immense constitutional authority, but authority is not by itself political power. Putin exercises political authority by herding Russian cats among the oligarchs, in the vast state enterprises, in the local and regional governments — the RF has 80-odd constituent republics, krais , oblasts etc. as well as the institutions and departments of the Federal state — not to mention the Orthodox Church and its locally important Islamic equivalents. To my taste, Putin seems more than willing to tolerate a high level of corruption to get cooperation — co-opting Kadyrov to “win” in Chechnya is a prominent example of how willing he is to make a deal with the devil (and apparently how eager and loyal the devil can become.) Putin is not my brand of idealist. But, coldly calculating and cautious, he may not be wrong about how far and hard he can push and get results.

Bill H. made an important point: Putin is trying to revive a strong sense of Russian patriotism and nationalism. The war with the Collective West is associated with a conservative social politics that rejects western decadence. The extreme Russophobia cultivated in Poland and the Baltic states and echoed ridiculously in Western Europe and the U.S. helps to confirm the thesis. Putin’s rhetoric now is a lot more plausible than were his tone deaf attempts in the first decade of the 21st century to fashion an ideology of Russian nationalism in response to the alienation of Russian-speakers in newly independent neighbors.

The Ukraine War has become the occasion to build back a core Russian military-industrial complex and a regular military to match. Ian is certain right that reliance on mercenaries is seldom wise, but Putin may not have had much choice at the beginning of the SMO. There was not much else to work with. We may be watching the process of correcting that mistake. That is a narrative worth considering.

@NR,

Is it possible to name the usual sycophants here in these threads who are claiming that Putin is a god-king who can do no wrong?

If it is too discomforting to name the usual-sycophant commenters here, is it possible to at least run copy-pasted sections of commentary from this thread which would illustrate the concept of “claiming that Putin is a god-king who can do no wrong?”

@Soredemos: Prigozhin wanted Shoigu out and some reports are indicating that he has been removed, though this has not been confirmed to my knowledge. So we’ll have to wait and see on that.

@dc: “God-king” was admittedly hyperbole on my part, but at least a few people here are claiming this was some kind of eleven-dimensional chess move by Putin, which is ridiculous on its face. Wagner shot down Russian helicopters and Russian National Guard members died fighting Wagner. Russia blew up fuel depots inside their own territory to slow Wagner’s advance. The Russian National Guard had civilians out of their cars digging pits on the highways to Moscow.

And what does Putin gain from this? Prigozhin marched Wagner into Russia and directly challenged Putin, who had to flee Moscow. The guy who did this is still alive. Putin looks incredibly weak after this. Even if Prigozhin falls out of a window in a couple of months, the only message that will send to the next guy thinking about trying this is “don’t stop” and “don’t take the deal.”

Also, reports are that the Wagner troops who participated in the uprising are going to be pardoned and all charges against them will be dropped. What will it do to morale in the Russian armed forces when they see that mercenaries can kill them and Putin will let them walk away scot-free afterward?

There is no scenario in which these last 24 hours were beneficial for Putin.

Mark Level,

Thanks for the kind words.

Yeah, considering how it all shook out it almost certainly was a psyop, a honey trap for traitors, as well as a deception to tactically move dense amounts of troops and equipment. It doesn’t make much sense any other way. And the supreme irony of it all is that Prizoghin, rather than a traitorous heel, is actually a patriotic hero by taking a lifetime expectancy hit for his country by double-crossing Ukraine and the West.

Z

NR,

You been punk’d by Vlad and Yevgeny!

There is no hard proof, from what I’ve seen, that Wagner actually shot down Russian military aircraft. Of course, if they were credibly going to pull this off they would have to toss in some tales of real-live military conflict such as that.

What was accomplished by this psyop was that they moved around large amounts of troops and equipment under the guise of protecting Moscow that were probably always destined towards the war front and they shook out some traitors, possibly some at a high level, maybe even some involved in their nuclear weapons program because there may have been orders from Putin to ready the arsenal or some action taken by traitors to do something to ensure that Putin couldn’t deploy them during the coup (this is highly speculative, of course).

In the who-can-we-truly-trust department, they shook out who in Wagner group is bat shit crazy enough to follow Prizoghin into a coup and apparently those numbers were in the thousands. How do you get rid of these armed idiots? Ask them to lay down their guns so that they can be arrested? Fire them and set them loose armed in your society, many of them who are ex-cons? No, you send them to the Belarus-Poland border, keep long-range weapons out of their hands, and keep your eyes on them by rear-guarding them. The rest, the ones you can trust more, get broken up and absorbed into the Russian Army.

Does any of this make any sense any other way? King Kong Prizoghin stomping mad towards Moscow in a fit, leading a column of armed rebels down the main highway towards Moscow, twittering about turkey-shooting down Russian military aircraft on his way in, and calling his shot like Babe Ruth by publicly announcing his plans to take over the throne of the Russian government with all 10,000 or so of his men? Thinking he would live for more than a month as Russian leader? Putin has been in power for a very long time, do you think that Prizoghin would simply be crowned and everyone would follow him? Especially being Jewish with the history that has happened there with all the Jewish oligarchs that raped the country of its assets during the Yeltsin years? Does Surovkin under siege nervously fingering a machine gun on his knee as he shakily asks Prizoghin to turn his convoy around make any sense? Wouldn’t he be flat-out pissed-off! And then Prizoghin agreeing to a deal and the whole thing dissipating so rapidly and easily? As you say: something smells here.

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One of the aspects of this war that is rarely talked about because it can’t be accurately assessed is how many moles there are in this conflict. There are plenty of them in Ukraine and at a very high level I’d imagine. Russia has cultivated them for decades now and there are many Ukrainians who favor Russia over Ukraine. The proof of it is Russia’s success blowing up Ukrainian arm depots. Some folks have complained that the Russians have not hit the decision making centers in Kiev. Well, it’s probably because they’d be taking out some of their own valuable intelligence sources.

There are also many moles in Russia cultivated by the West. It wasn’t all that long ago, around twenty years ago, that Larry Summers’s homeboys had the country totally corrupted at the political level such that when Putin came into power he almost immediately made a law that he could dismiss elected governors on his whim to clean the government up, an action which made him and the person who was heavily responsible for getting him into power, Boris Berezovsky, into enemies. Do you think all of those blackmailed and bribed assets that those oligarchs bought on the cheap when Russia was on its knees were entirely lost when Putin took over?

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Again, nothing makes much sense except that it was a psyop. They’ve been laying the foundations for it for a while. According to the Texeira leaks, Prizoghin had cordial relations, under the circumstances, with the Ukrainians that he was fighting in Bakhmut. There’s rumors that he informed them to stop hitting his guys so heavily and that it would be wiser that they go after less fortified Russian positions in Kherson and whatnot prior to their so-called successful counter-offensive a while back, which may have been exactly what Russia wanted to have happen because they wanted to redraw the battle lines and rearrange their defensive positions. That gained Prizoghin some trust with the West and then he set the stage for his rebellion by going on his very public rants about not being supplied enough weapons. Then recently he made the video that he claims showed the results of an attack on his group by the Russian army, but really didn’t show much.

Whether or not one thinks it was a wise psyop, that the cost of a reputational hit to Putin was worth it, is up to judgment, though of course we don’t have all of the information required to accurately assess that because we don’t know what may have all been accomplished by this psyop, what traitors were shaken out. I personally doubt that the West and Ukraine fully believed that the coup was legit as they took no overt action to reinforce it, but one thing that the Russians could certainly count on to support this psyop is that the West’s mouthpieces would promote the coup hysteria because they’re drooling at the prospects of replacing Putin.

I’d imagine though that Russia’s allies would be informed at some level that it was a psyop, afterwards, to assuage any concerns about Russia’s stability. They probably figured it out on their own anyway.

Z

And even if Russian military aircraft were downed, isn’t it possible that this was all part of the psyop and these aircraft could have been unmanned and purposely downed over areas that wouldn’t cause any civilian casualties, of which there were not one mentioned, as far as I am aware.

Z

I forgot to mention in my previous comment that this would not be the first time that a fake coup attempt had been carried out for world consumption. The first time was the fake attempt to overthrow the government in Spain in the early 1980s to make the King of Spain look like a reasonable paragon of democratic values.
And then there is the Turkish attempt of 2016 that still looks very suspicious to say the least. At the very minimum it is likely that Erdogan had prior warning.

Yes I kind of contridicted myself. Is the take away that I just wrote about important or unimportant?? Well it is important to me that the western political establishment has again revealved that the only thing that matters to them is getting what they want. But I guess in the grand scheme of things it is unimportant because it will not result in any changes in the world because there is a lack of people with integrity in the west.

The two comments above are in the reverse order.