Originally published at: Prighozin aborts "coup", turns troops away from Moscow | Boing Boing
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i still don’t get what he got out of all this. why go to all the trouble of double crossing putin and marching on moscow, only to then turn around and say never mind
i’d have to wonder: does the agreement come with a side helping of extra cash?
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sounds like he has meeting in belarus with a tall bulding and some random open window.
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“Yevgeny, you’re looking tired, so we clubbed together and bought you a trip to view the Titanic.”
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I figure he thought he was going to win, that everything would fall over at the first push, but realized he had a real fight on his hands. This is the deal he gets for quitting before serious bloodshed.
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That sounds oddly familiar…
Like something that started last year?
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It’s like the farting noise that a balloon makes as it deflates.
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… somebody remind me where “almost” counts
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The only thing that makes sense is that he was hoping that his show of strength would get Putin to make him the national military saviour. Shoigu would be displaced, the oligarchs and elites would be brought into line, and Putin would remain as the figurehead Tsar.
Putin, though, had no interest in stopping his game of playing the three factions off against each-other to maintain power. Neither did the military faction and the siloviki faction (which includes the media apparatus and the justice system along with the spies and secret police). Prigozhin’s fellow warlord Kadyrov also opposed him. As they all arrayed against him (albeit in a typically Russian_ad hoc_ panic in reaction to the “inconceivable”), he realised that it wasn’t going to work and pinked out.
I doubt it. Maybe he gets to keep the Wagner operations abroad, but why throw more money at a guy they’re eventually going to knock off?
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I’m more curious to know what Lukashenko is getting out of this. I mean, he has to be getting something, but what?
Putin already gave him nuclear weapons before all of this.
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The world champion fence sitter made a big deposit with Putin in the favour bank. He’ll do him another one when he allows the bounty hunt on the orc chieftain to go unimpeded by Belarus’ security thugs. He’ll collect on those favours in the future when he needs to. It’s not much more complicated than that for these gangster regimes.
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Sure, Putin is going to owe him, but the size and public nature of this gesture sure would seem to call for some kind of more immediate quid pro quo.
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Maybe they gave Him a whole country to play.
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Prigozhin’s going to need to be very careful about who he lets pour him tea for the rest of his life.
When it became clear that YP’s “I Can’t Believe It’s Not a Coup™” had fizzled, one of my little inner voices said “If he’d gone through with it, a lot of people would have died. Is that what you want?” to which the other little inner voice promptly responded “I’d rather it was those people who died than others.”
Yes, open warfare between Wagner and the Russian regular army would have been brutal, but I wouldn’t shed many tears for Wagner or its fighters. If they got ground up, it might be a positive good for the world. And if Prigozhin had managed to lock up the Rostov-on-Don railhead for a few weeks, it could have altered or accelerated the whole course of the Ukraine war, potentially saving many Ukrainian lives.
Of course internecine fighting in Russia would also cost the lives of many Russian civilians, who don’t deserve to have their world ripped apart by squabbling tyrants any more than the Ukrainians. So whatever happened, it would have been horrible.
As to what happened, my guess is that Prigozhin started to receive signals that he had seriously outstayed his welcome and that there was a high window in his future. Rather than wait around for his appointment with gravity, he decided to use his remaining assets – the forces under his command – to take hostages – Rostov-on-Don and, by implication, the entire Ukraine war – and negotiate a favorable ‘out’ for himself. He never planned to take it any further than he did, intending all along to let it drop as soon as he got a favorable settlement.
And if he left the senior Wagner commanders – who will bear the brunt of Putin’s anger – twisting in the wind, so be it. Although any who dodge the purge might be interested in doing some tea-pouring themselves.
The other possibility is that Prigozhin thought that units of the regular army might rise up and join him, and had to back down when they didn’t. Perhaps he’d even negotiated support from factions in Russia who failed to come through when push came to shove. But I don’t think Prigozhin would be naive enough to let someone tell him “Yeah, you should totally start a coup, I’ll be right behind you the minute you get things rolling.”
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Here’s a possible explanation for what’s being going on.
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Sounds like his future involves living in a Belarus bungalow with no windows or shower and where tea is never served.
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A splitzkrieg.
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Military/Political theatre~ Prighozin was not about ending up like the “Decemberists”!
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