well that was a hell of a way to start a weekend

[solarbird]

So… given all this, particularly:

Peskov says Wagner mercenaries who wish to sign a Ministry of Defence contract can, and fighters who took part today’s uprising will not be prosecuted.

and

The head of the Wagner group will leave for Belarus

…was that idea I was floating in the first hour about this being basically a hostile takeover of Wagner basically… correct? Is that where we’ve ended up? And how much of this was pantomime?

Russian politics, damn, amirite?

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Comments

[talkswithwind]

Wagner-dude has been daring the Kremlin to smack him around for literally months now, if not a year. I've been wondering how they'd deal with him when he got to be too noisy.

[gwydion]

The Atlantic thinks there may have been a planned takeover he was trying to prevent which is part of why the timing was as it was. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/06/putin-russian-coup-over-prigozhin-wagner/674522/

There is also some general speculation that Prigozhin thought he had guys in the Kremlin who were going to kill or arrest Putin, but they either lost nerve, weren't as loyal as he thought, or Putin bugged out so fast they couldn't get him so instead of trying to seize government they all pretended to be loyal to save there skins, which would be the logical response.

[canyonwalker]

In the early hours of the day this looked like an attempted state coup. Wagner forces moved rapidly toward Moscow, indicating that careful preparation likely dating back months. Then a politically negotiated deal arrived swiftly, with Prigozhin seeming to take exile to Russian client-state Belarus.

To me the jury's out on what really happened. Prigozhin revealed a month ago that he and Putin are acting in an elaborate Kabuki theater play when his weeks of bellyaching about Russia depriving his forces of necessary materiel in Ukraine suddenly changed to, "Yup, we've fully taken Bakhmut now and will be turning it over to Russia in a day or two." With that I reinterpreted their whole very public political tiff as a ruse to lull Western powers into drawing a false conclusion that was politically appealing— that Russia's incursion was hopelessly bogged down and Ukraine would soon compellingly turn the tide. Today's events could be yet another purposeful misdirection for Western powers.

[canyonwalker]

Let us remember, also, that Prigozhin was the architect of Russia's propaganda interference in the 2016 US election. It would be foolish to take at face value anything this man says or does in public.

[wrog]

3 days later, we still don't know whether Prigozhin made it to Belarus.

[solarbird]

Russian politics, Am I Rite