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Russia says Wagner Group’s leader will move to Belarus after his rebellious march challenged Putin
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- Title
- Russian mercenary chief who called for rebellion confirms he and his troops reached city in Russia
- Published
- Jun 24 2023
- Word count
- 114 words
Putin is definitely weakened. Prigozhin is less certain, since we don't know how dire his immediate circumstances were or how this Belarus angle will play out. If he got word that the FSB was going to arrest him next week, then this march was certainly preferable.
The thing that made no sense is how Wagner got as far as they did without getting blown to bits by the air force. But if this is what was going on then it's also possible Prigozhin got a phone call saying that the air force was finally going to bomb the fuck out of everyone before they'd let him advance on Moscow.
I think its safe to assume Prigozhin is a goner. No way Putin lets this guy get away with a half finish coup.
This is dude is going to be dead in a week or this was plan from the start.
If this was the plan from the start (which isn't outside the realm of possibility given how quickly everything was resolved), and Prigozhin uses this opportunity to open a new front in the war using relocated Wagner and native Belorussian troops, that could be very bad news for Ukraine... which was my major worry as soon as I heard Lukashenko was involved in the "negotiations".
That very well could be it, wouldn't surprise me if the entire thing was a smoke and mirrors operation.
I've only lightly been keeping up with this stuff, but it all being planned from the start doesn't quite seem right. What's accomplished by a coup charade that can't be done some other way that doesn't damage Putin's reputation in Russia?
The only possibility I can think of is trying to get potential insurgents to reveal themselves, but it seems like they would've wanted to keep the show going a bit longer in that case to make sure they're all out in the open, and doesn't quite feel right either for a number of reasons. Quite probably I just don't know enough about the situation to make a good guess.
With the oil depot being blown up and stuff I think it's unlikely that it was planned. The Wagner group has several times complained about not getting supplies as promised, running out of ammo etc. It also makes Putin and the Wagner group look weak. It'll be interesting to see what happens forward for sure.
Edit: I'm also seeing quite a bit of material damages for Russia, and also 13 dead reported as of now, making it more unlikely that it was planned I think.
I agree, I think everything that was suggested Russia could easily do without staging this show.
The whole thing actually made putin look very weak (externally: how easily they were able to just march for 800km and internally: how putin immediately run, how Lukashenko did negotiate with Wagner and the charges were lifted the same day and he was allowed to just go to Belarus, despite being accused of treason and shooting those helicopters, plane and blowing up a fuel depot) and likely created opening for more coup attempts in the future.
This coup attempt maybe ended the best way it could for Russia, but it still was a bad thing for them.
I agree with this part. There has been no subsequent bloodshed that would’ve made this impossible. Even though if one were to accept the beginning of this whole charade as genuine, the suspicious lack of bloodshed, hostile action other than supposedly taking over a city that’s been a Wagner operations center for a long time and not really doing anything past that.
Then suddenly supposedly “unforgivable betrayal” suddenly is all good with Prigozin basically being the next in line to take over Belarus?
I feel like the tail is wagging the dog.
I reassert my prior judgement that this was all smoke and mirrors to position Prigozin as taking over Belarus as Lukashenko is in ill-health. This puts an occupying army known for brutality inside Belarus which has been enduring increasingly bold civil resistance.
This development basically:
So why the charade? Why have the FSB raiding Wagner group homes? Why not just say "Yeah pull back and relocate to belarus" and then announce later than you're handing it to Prigozin?
All of this could have been accomplished without a "fake" coup attempt.
Except isn’t that the prevailing theme of Russia’s “special operations” and other actions? Unnecessary, bombastic, confusing, unprofessional, dangerous.
No? The war is stupid but there's still logic behind it, especially from the "i am a dictator who wants more power and to be remembered" perspective.
"we'll fake a coup" which makes Putin of all people look weak, to accomplish goals that could've been accomplished by just ordering people to do them, is out there on explanations.
"Lol russia" is over relied upon.
Does it really make Putin look weak? He has full control over the media there. Articles that we have seen so far from the AP has included effectively patriotic quotes from Muscovites.
How do you know your assertion is reasonable? You say he looks weak but you’re on the outside (ie not the intended audience) for this. So of course your perspective isn’t going to be a function of that closed media system.
Russian internet chatter was definitely not full of patriotic fervor during all this. Most of the milbloggers (which are influential enough as a group that Putin has catered to that community before) were appalled at every stage of this farce. People on the ground filming videos were running from gunfire, scared for their lives, clogging train stations trying to get out of Rostov - people will remember that long after the media cycle is over.
I think you make a good point in that how most of us looking at this aren’t the target audience.
Per what we know of the deal, Wagner is being folded into MoD, not following Prigozhin.
How do we know this deal isn’t part of another shadow play? The appearance of disarming Prigozin should shore up domestic support for Putin by defanging the betrayer. However, appearances and reality seldom do agree in Russia.
I think in this case it doesn’t matter what they say, we’ll be able to see what happens. You can’t hide moving that many troops and equipment.
Yes. However that will take time. And the slower one moves, the easier it is to obfuscate where troops and equipment really are going.
As I said, I feel like the tail is wagging the dog. That makes me question the optics of the situation.
Thank you 👍
Thank you for sharing. It is indeed a little bizarre to see those videos.
I almost thought originally that this was a fake coup to get out of Ukraine, a la what The Onion joked about in U.S Government Stages Fake Coup To Wipe Out National Debt (except for real because this is Russia) lol
This does feel off to me considering the whole "Putin calling him a betraying traitor" part, and it makes everyone involved look worse for it, so like... very weird to me if it was faked considering their current situation, and if it's not faked, why is Prigozhin still alive? Odd all around imo
Here’s an article that describes some of the anti-elite sentiment in Russia and how Prigozhin was able to tap into that and why it’s not going away. It’s in Russian, so I’ll link to an English summary on Twitter, but google translate seemingly does a pretty good job with the article if you’re interested.
This is also an interesting hypothesis from the author:
This sort of makes sense, given what we know about how deliberately the ‘coup’ avoided confrontation.
The thing that no one seems to be saying is that none of the terms of this "deal" make any sense.
Prigozhin rug-pulled the most competent part of the Russian military machine, spun it around, and ordered it to march on Moscow. People used the word "coup" openly. Save for actually declaring himself Tsar, there's not much more he could have done to throw down a gauntlet in front of Putin.
Then Belarus negotiates a "deal" and the deal appears to be that Prigozhin moves to Belarus, the pre-coup status quo gets restored, and the criminal case against Prigozhin for coup related activities goes away.
So, in exchange for backing down from what looked like a pretty successful coup-in-progress, Prigozhin gets to move to a different country and not be charged with doing coup-stuff?
Who the hell takes that deal? On either side? It's insane. Putin appears to have just green-lit a no-consequences policy for trying to overthrow his government by military force. Prigozhin seems to have just told his followers that he was prepared to have them fight and die so he could move out of the country.
There has got to be something else going on behind the scenes here.
I think if they continued approaching Moscow the Russian Air Force would have had no choice but to bomb the shit out of them. What held them back was probably some doubts about how much of the military would have been willing to turn on their own, but strategically they probably also didn’t want to lose a significant part of their military capability and trigger a shooting war on home soil that there’s no turning back from. Functionally the mutineers were holding themselves hostage. If the military went hard on them it would seriously hobble their ability to continue their own war. They need them in the same way a company needs it’s striking workers.
yeah this has been my conclusion as well, because they were exposed traveling in column through the highways, the Kremlin knew where they were at all times. They could have been easily vaporized with rockets/artillery/jets, this was seemingly more akin to a protest than an actual civil war. Yet Prigozhin still had an advantage to negotiate, because it is unlikely the Kremlin would have wanted to obliterate a huge number of their soldiers, their infrastructure and all the civilians caught in the cross fire.... which might have ignited a real and longer revolution/insurgency.
So it was a stand-off and someone caved behind closed doors, so they achieved this "deal", which is not much of a deal, just a veiled way from one side to lose, which side lost? not quite clear yet, we will see now if Prigozhin gets assassinated (or his forces get arrested or sent to die in the front) or if Putin's power or his MOD's power diminishes. I think this is far from over.
My impression is that Prigo banked on much more support from the military, and/or banked on hitting the jackpot (Shoigu) in Rostov. His drive on moscow didn't go as planned, either because he had to do it in the first place to hit the MoD, or because by the time he got to Moscow, he couldn't expect the kind of support he had hoped for. So hence him accepting the terms. The blackmail doesn't help either.
He was basically left with the prospect of having to actually fight a very risky operation to pull off his coup, at the risk of pulling Russia into a massive civil war.
From what I've gathered, Prigo and Wagner group were fighting on a losing front with not enough help from MoD (ammunition shortage, no tactical backup) and were given bad deals that the private company's workers would be forced signing deal directly to the military. Prigo and half of Wagner did not like those terms, were pushing back on it and raising a stink while still being backed into a corner and threatened to the point where russians launched a rocket nearby them causing Wagner casualties. This forced Prigo's hand to fight for his and his men's lives by staging a March in protest to barter a better deal. Putin and the FSB tried to double down, call him a traitor and pin treason charges on him, causing Prigo to double down and turn it into a coup because no one was offering them a deal that wasn't basically a death sentence.
Putin and the russian government thought they could strong arm him and started to realize the longer this continues the worse it will be for them. Putin organized the Belarus deal caving to Prigo's demands. Putin lost, Prigo's men got their bartered deal and Prigo will continue to be used in the war until he is no longer viable and likely will be assassinated or sacrificed for making Putin lose face. This was basically a union uprising caused by terrible and corrupt russian leadership.
The deal was that the FSB knew where the leaders' living family members were, and that if they wanted those people to remain their living family members they'd turn around.
May people refrain from adding yet more comments about windows or polonium poisoning.
Looking like a Reddit comment section in here.
I don't mean my comment to be aggressively or overly gatekeep-y. It's well-known and well-established that Russia commonly executes political assassinations. Bringing up the fact repeatedly add no new information about the situation but instead gives people less reason to read these threads thoroughly.
A good conversation requires a balance between speaking and listening.
The Noise label seems to be taking care of them reasonably well at least.
I've been labelling them as
joke. Stretching the definition of joke, naturally.Top-level comments that are solely "jokes" like that, especially on serious topics, deserve the Noise label, IMO. Deeper in the comment threads I can be a bit more forgiving and use the Joke label, but not top-level. I left reddit to get away from shit like that having taken over every comment section, and I don't want to see it taking root here.
Sorry about that, some bad acquired habits to deprogram myself of on my part.
Not who you replied to. But no worries. Even all us Tildes old-timers had to go through a prolonged reddit detox phase once we arrived here too, so we totally understand. ;)
p.s. And sorry if I came across as being overly harsh in my own comment about the situation.
Right? Nothing annoyed me more about Reddit than recycling the same stupid jokes and acting like they're the first person to come up with it. That, and pun threads. Fuck pun threads.