Many of you have been transfixed by the highly dramatic events occurring in Russia over the last 48 hours, breathlessly following blow by blow accounts by many experts, some self-proclaimed. The simple gist: The PMC Wagner group, a 25 000 to 50 000 strong private army seen as Putin’s pet snake turned upon its master and bit him. We are now in the aftermath of this act and speculating on who will survive and the extent of the damage to the individuals and institutions involved. Well maybe not the institutions, as Russia is dominated by outsized thuggish personalities and the observation of unwritten rules, a criminal code, the poniatiya , a word uttered by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on February 18 2022, days before the invasion of Ukraine.
My disclaimer is that I have absolutely no idea what is happening in Russia, a country about which I have only the most cursory knowledge . Hence the title. I did attempt some catchup reading of the events and key characters, even attempting a listen in of a twitter conversation that had been ongoing for some 36 hours and had about 100 000 listeners during the short while I was logged in. The overall impression I gained is that many of the talking heads have no bloody clue either and their political biases are leading them, rather than real knowledge. Still, the buzz is quite exciting. There was a gangster face-off for many hours, the Wagner advance on Moscow seemed almost unimpeded, the Chechen thugs led by Ramzan Radykov came close to a dust up with the Wagner thugs in Rostov, the fate of Sergei Shoigu and General Gerasimov is undecided, the Belorussian dictator is sitting pretty as the man of the hour who averted a disaster and Putin’s ‘chef’, Yevgeny Prigozhin may not have many dinners left in his life.
Prigozhin dealt Putin many blows but the most severe one may be pulling the curtain on the motives for the war in Ukraine. The military action is not going as well as Russia anticipated (and now that the Wagner group is in disarray, it may go even worse) but the propaganda to the Russian masses was that it was being conducted for the noblest aims : to stop the genocide of Russian speakers and save the mother culture. From Lawrence Freedman’s (an emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College London) substack:
In his Friday morning video Prigozhin took down this whole contrivance. He explained that there was no extraordinary threat to the Donbas prior to the invasion, that artillery exchanges were no more than usual, and that the whole business was a put-up affair by Shoigu and other corrupt officers, backed by oligarchs making money out of the military build-up. So damning was the charge that the FSB, the security agency, opened a criminal investigation against Prigozhin. Later Prigozhin was on air again, showing images of the aftermath of an attack by Russian missiles and helicopters on a Wagner camp. He moved even further onto the rhetorical offensive. ‘The evil carried by the country’s military leadership must be stopped.’
Let’s remind all Wagner supporters that Prigozhin told the truth a few days ago about why Russia invaded Ukraine.
1. The Russians were plundering the Donbas between 2014-2022
2. There was no increased Ukrainian military activity before February 24, 2022 pic.twitter.com/SR0aC9eUl0
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) June 25, 2023
This may not seem substantial to outsiders but to ordinary Russians, the ones in Moscow sent scrambling home under anti-terrorist measures the last few days, it may be the kind of truth that chips away at confidence in Tsar Putin and his boyars.
