Get ready for the flood of kompromat
As Vladimir Putin sits thinking in his bomb-proof office, he may come to regret the fact that the entire world is sure that he ordered the death of the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Kremlin is a Camorra, a mafia style parliament, running a gangster operation to fill Putin’s pockets and those of his oligarchs and elites. But as the Japanese found in Burma in 1944, if you prosecute a war with terror you will likely come unstuck against a well led, motivated and moral organisation like General ‘Bill’ Slim’s ‘Forgotten Army’.
Putin may in fact have signed his own death warrant. His fingerprints may not have been on the firing button when Prigozhin’s jet was brought down, and may not have been on the Polonium or Novichok which killed some of his other opponents, but his DNA is all over the orders. He now has two very powerful groups to worry about – quite apart from the International Criminal Court, which no doubt has so much evidence that if he ever gets to the Hague he will never leave.
Firstly, Putin must worry about his oligarchs who have now been holed up in their dachas in Moscow for over 18 months, unable to use their superyachts or villas in the Mediterranean. As their leader is further vilified around the globe over this latest murder, the oligarchs may come to see that their only chance to break out of Russia, now so diminished economically and socially, is to dispose of Putin.
Secondly, the Wagner Group might have lost their ‘cowboy’ leader and his deputy, but they remain a large force of thugs and murderers. Prigozhin was no military commander, but the Wagner Group is the most successful military outfit that Russia has managed to put into the field, no matter that they are paid mercenaries, many of them recruited out of Russian jails. To control such a rabble, you need some very hard ‘lieutenants’ running the show and these men will now be considering the future in Belarus and Africa. How ironic it would be if somebody showered them with riches to go and create mayhem within Russia. My experience of mercenaries is that they are not too picky about whose money they take.
archive link: https://archive.is/mMry3
Part Two
Note how he cannot distinguish between “paid mercenaries” and those recruited out of Russian jails. To him, they are the same. Nor can he acknowledge the other specialists that Wagner employed all along; to him, it’s all “such a rabble.” But in reality, there are (1) soldiers for hire, ex-military who do it for a living, AND (2) people Wagner liberated from jail to pad his army on the ground, as well as (3) highly-skilled specialists helping to run it all at the top. While it is certainly possible that a small number of those Prigozhin sprang from jail are also ex-military, it is certainly not the whole, or even a majority, and none who will mourn Prigozhin enough to throw themselves at Putin in some demented individual kamikaze move. The author even uses the redundant phrase “paid mercenary,” as though he doesn’t understand that the very definition of a mercenary is a soldier who is paid to be one.
But then he takes his ignorance further and adds, “How ironic it would be if somebody showered them with riches to go and create mayhem within Russia.” Paying Wagner forces “to go and create mayhem within Russia” is not just ironic, it would be a miracle, since the agreement between Putin and Prigozhin in June involved the vast majority of Wagner forces leaving Ukraine. There may be some stragglers, but there is no single Wagner force anymore. Some went to Belarus, many others went to Africa, and over the last two months between the march and Prigozhin’s death, more still have been absorbed into the Russian army. This author’s statement assumes that there is still a single unified Wagner force left in Eastern Europe, that will also turn on Putin if only an angel investor can be found to fund the operation.
But in reality, it cannot. There is no unified Wagner force in Eastern Europe anymore, no matter how much cash is offered, and within Russia there are no Prigozhins left amongst the oligarchs. There are plenty of non-Russians who would “shower them with riches” (the author’s words) but there simply is no more “them” to shower, lol.
One of the things brought up in the BBC article I linked was how Prigozhin was footing a large portion of Wagner’s bill, and how Putin’s challenge now is not finding someone to lead Wagner, but to lead AND fund it as Prigozhin was doing. Yes, Wagner was an arm of the Russian state, but it was not being paid for out of Russian coffers. Only the equipment, and especially the ammo. (Don’t forget the ammo, because it’s a big part of why Prigozhin marched.)
Putin and Prigozhin started off as friends. Prigozhin was an oligarch because Putin made him one. Prigozhin was on Putin’s side, and worked with Putin to create Wagner out of his own oligarch share of stolen Russian spoils. They were friends and partners in crime – literally! – for thirty years, to the point that after Putin killed him, Putin eulogized him. Putin does not usually eulogize his enemies, lol. But this author seem to be completely unaware of why Prighozin – friend of Putin and co-creator/funder of Wagner – marched on Moscow in June, as though none of that previous friendship, camaraderie, and cooperation at every level ever existed between them.
It’s because Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s actual defense minister, Prigozhin’s counterpart as head of the actual Russian army, was getting Wagner forces killed by refusing to release any of the ammunition to Wagner that Prigozhin had been promised and his troops desperately needed. The way Prigozhin saw it, the level of sheer incompetence Shoigu was enforcing in his own army, and forcing on Wagner through withholding ammo and needed equipment, was the equivalent of simply handing back Crimea and Donbass to Ukraine while continuing to pour the blood of his men over it anyway, and Prigozhin said as much publicly. Prigozhin fought for better supplies and better strategy/planning for months, but instead of helping or even trying to win on the battlefield, Putin used Prigozhin’s battlefront problems to play him politically against Shoigu instead of taking his own war seriously.
For a commander who actually cares about both country and his own men, this was untenable. Hence Prigozhin’s march.
If you look at Prigozhin’s march on Moscow as an elaborate act of suicide, as I do, you might be able to see it as a layered strategy. By marching on Moscow but stopping short of it, Prigozhin gets to escape being the executioner of his own men, gets his troops out of Ukraine by default because now they cannot be trusted as a group by any side, gets out of having to beg for supplies and being pitted politically against a bloody and murderously stupid fool like Shoigu with his men as the stakes, and evades the ultimate fate of having to lead even more forces into a war already lost, all while drawing the world’s direct attention to the great lie underneath all of it: the myth of the all-powerful, benevolent dictator for life. It was masterful, and it got Wagner troops out of Ukraine, even if it cost Prigozhin his own life.
So now, because of June’s march, Putin is revealed as too weak to even stop his own forces at the border. Putin is left with a damn near useless Shoigu as defense minister, and without Prigozhin, Wagner, or even an available and willing Russian oligarch to fund such a force. What they built together as a team is now largely dismantled in Eastern Europe, and won’t be easily put together again, even if it is somehow possible. And Prigozhin is well out of it, no longer trapped or being played as a cat’s paw for Putin’s political entertainment while his men die for lack of ammo in a war that was never going to be won because its commander-in-chief is a deluded megalomaniac.
Did you know that Prigozhin spent time in jail for robbery himself? He was not one who was willing to be trapped. And in the end, he not only freed himself but shot Putin in the foot on his way out. Yes, he knew he was going to die. But he made damn sure it wasn’t for nothing.
To me, that’s the story behind the march and Wagner’s ending that this author could have been writing about, had he known anything but superficial appearance and his own fevered imaginations of a happy ending. Everything Russian is many layered, lol. I know you think this article is grand and this British author is all that plus a shot of vodka, but to me it just reads like a comic book, and not a very good one.
Hypotheticals are not bad when they are well informed. I would be interested in hearing it.
Sorry for the lengthy writing, I was writing it in bits because I kept getting interrupted, lol. Hope it makes sense, and thanks for reading.