70
votes
Wagner head says group standing down after claims of deal
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- Title
- Putin accuses Wagner chief of stoking 'armed rebellion:' Live updates
- Authors
- By <a href="/profiles/helen-regan">Helen Regan</a> and <a href="/profiles/andrew-raine">Andrew Raine</a>, CNN
- Published
- Jun 24 2023
- Word count
- 4120 words
This is going to be the most awkward week ever in russian political circles.
Window repairmen are about to make a fortune.
Edit-
To put a little more thought into this, the only line I can see is if Putin comes out and says "yep my defense ministry, without my knowledge, attacked the brave wagner soldiers, and in light of this i've forgiven him and will be handling the traitors who started this"
Its almost certainly bullshit, but its bullshit people will be happy enough to believe. Still, I can't imagine wagner doesn't somehow get wiped out from this.
I wonder what Prigozhin was able to wring out of Putin. He must've gotten what he wanted to stop the "coup."
Otherwise, what was the point of this exercise? And why even take it this far, with actual troops moving towards Moscow? And quite quick at that.
In addition, I have to wonder about Russia's internal security. A few weeks ago, there was that whole thing where the Russian regiment of the Ukraine military "invaded" Russia. There seemed to be little to border security or even security in those regions that were temporarily occupied. Granted, it seemed mainly like coutnryside, but this area is close to Ukraine. You'd think there'd be more of a military presence given that the two countries are at war.
Now here's this situation where adversarial forces were able to move troops pretty quickly, with again seemingly little to no resistance. And this time towards Moscow! I get that it takes times to move people and assets around, especially in an out-of-the-blue situation, but it still seems strange that two similar situations have happened twice in a relatively quick succession. Are there that many Russian troops tied up in Ukraine (or dead) that the internal security is basically nil?
Or maybe that'd actually be "normal" in other/most countries if similar situations arose? I don't know anything about military or defensive strategy.
Nothing that he should trust. It likely is whatever it took to stop the advance, but Prigozhin will likely be dead within a month of some weird neurological condition. (It's happened before.)
I wonder if he's pulling out to Belarus because Lukashenko would give anything to have a military force he can rely on and still get out from under Putin's thumb.
What a weird news day. Wake up to find rebellion incoming, and going to sleep to find they've "peacefully" turned around.
As someone without any knowledge whatsoever - would this event have been too short to have had any meaningful impact on the Ukraine war?
It's hard to know right now. There were some advancements made by Ukrainians, but Prigozhin explicitly staged everything to have as little effect on war efforts as possible. It makes sense, in retrospect, if he actually wanted to bargain something instead of capturing power for himself.
Only thing I could imagine is that the captured parts of Ukraine would become Wagnerland or something. But yeah, super weird.
He has to know that even if Putin promised him he'd be the next tsar in three months, that it would be lies and Putin would never forgive this. The only thing that any deal would be worth anything at all is if he originally had absolutely nothing to trade with.
If I was a mercenary leader commanding an massively overstretched force that had the sole purpose of intimidating my (former) boss while giving as much appearance as possible of being an effective fighting force, who'd just received a call from a terrified but desperate-to-remain-relevant lackey of the former boss, I'd probably say I'd reached a deal, rather than saying I need to stop for a bit for my logistics chain to have a hope in hell's chance of catching up before I get overrun.
You might be onto something. Some anonymous sources also theorize that there might be multiple sides, which makes more sense.
For more information see this HN link
Yeah and also the other way around doesn't make sense. Prigozhin must know that Putin wouldn't let him live even if there's a deal at first.
There's something very odd about all of this. We're missing some piece of the puzzle.
<Tinfoil hat> The whole thing is staged by Putin, Prigoshin and possibly parts of the MoD to achieve some goals around (1) integrating Wagner into the regular military and (2) rotating a few undesirable commanders. It's not hard for Putin to use these events to fire a few senior MoD officials. Not sure what Prigoshin gets out of it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up bringing him closer to power in a year or so.
Very much though: </tinfoil hat>
i know it’s tongue-in-cheek, but well, Prigozhin downed like 10 army helicopters so that seems like an extremely stupid thing to do
When you’re doing poorly in a war, “stabbed in the back” theories begin to appear. Wagner seems especially vulnerable to it, given Russian weakness in supply capabilities and perceptions of its leadership. I can just hear Prigozhin on the phone: “My guys are gonna kill me if we can’t make some kind of gesture that Russia supports them, please help me out…”
Once he’s dead we’ll see who will be the next ceo of Orcs for hire; whoever it is will hopefully be good evidence for/against my pet theory
So, can someone explain how this is even conceivable for Prigozhin? How can he well and truly trust that he won't be assassinated? This is mind-boggling to me. In one second he's gunning for a coup and the next they're buddy-buddy again?
From my armchair opinion, Wagner isn't cohesive enough to rally behind a martyr. If Prigozhin dies, Wagner will probably assimilate... right? Unless he has some (figuratively) nuclear information, keeping him alive sounds like an unacceptable risk.
Part of me believes he's just lying to create confusion and still on his way to Moscow. But then again, weirder things have happened
BBC commentary guesses that perhaps he thought he would have, in 24 hours, a super huge home front support from a massive number of Russians. That, originally he thought he could drive in and be welcomed with opened arms. When that didn't happen, his only chance is to negotiate. It's 0.000000001% of survival vs zero if he keeps up the non-supported coup.
Incidentally it might have been close to 0 anyway if he didn't start a coup; his group has already lost something like 50% of his men, NATO is arming Ukrainians stronger every day, and Putin frankly isn't interested in his survival anyhow. He was either going to die following bad leadership, or he could have tried to shoot the moon.
He's headed to Belarus, where Lukashenko is trying to maintain power while simultaneously preventing Putin from taking over. Prigozhin has just demonstrated he's not perfectly loyal to Putin, which means that perhaps Lukashenko could recruit him and have extra troops without tipping the balance of power too far toward Russia.
More importantly perhaps, is that putting troops on the Belarusian border is a very safe action despite still being useful to the war - Ukraine needs to match the troops on the Belarusian border in case Belarus/Russia invade through it, and so any Ukrainian troops on the Belarusian border are troops not in eastern Ukraine.
In other words, putting troops on the Belarusian border is the absolute best thing to do with troops you don't trust in the slightest. It also means there's no particular excuse to undersupply Wagner with shells (since they won't need any shells, as the entire point is that they won't actually fight), and there's no valid reason for the Russian army to shoot at Wagner.
So all in all, this is probably the safest possible outcome for both Putin and Prigozhin, at least to my limited knowledge of Russian politics.
As usual with Russian politics, it’s incredibly difficult to tell the difference between their usual shadow puppet play and reality. It’s like a slightly more transparent North Korea.
Well that went nowhere. What was that all about? 0 to 100 and back to 0 real quick.
I don't think it's at zero yet. Prigozhen was being charged with treason even before this advance. Putin called him a traitor on national television. Prigozhen has been whipping his men into a fury for months and beating his own wardums to the international community. This isn't something either man can walk back with just a single last-minute negotiation from a buffoon like Lukashenko.
No clue what's next but I don't think this is over.
Unless we're living in bizzaro land which we very well could be, all things considered.
Edit: 6 hours later, I stand corrected. We live in bizzaro land. I shouldn't try to understand the logic of oligarchs.
How bizarre. I can't even begin to speculate about the details of this deal.
Prigozhin had better start fasting and stay away from all windows from now on.
That's the part I find so bizarre. He must know this. What deal could they have possibly offered him that made him believe he could get out of this alive?
I'm glad to know that I came in here to get some more context and everyone else is just super confused. As with everything that ever happens in Russia, I'm forced to guess that this whole thing might have been staged.
I don't know about staged, but I'm convinced there's a lot of things we don't know about that was key in all of this.
I was thinking it might've been that, but given how bad it makes Putin and Russia look, if it was staged, I don't know that Putin was in on it. I keep going back to Prigozhin's statements before all this where he was almost saying that the war in Ukraine was a mistake and he seemed to be very careful to not go after Putin specifically, but to his Military heads. I almost think the whole thing was staged as a way of telling Putin, "Look how vulnerable you are, this isn't going the way you think it is."
OR this was him just flipping off everybody on his way out the door, "F* you, F* you, F* you, You're cool, F* you, F* you," because it seemed like even before this he was in danger of getting shit-canned. OR it was a way to flush out traitors, since anyone joining the revolt openly is pretty much screwed by now. I'm just entirely perplexed by this whole thing and I hope we learn the full truth of what really happened behind-the-scenes some day. The guy was on the verge of making history and seizing power (or making a really bloody mess in a major world capital), and then just walked away at the last minute. The whole thing is nuts no matter what the truth is.
Yeah, i was thinking this could be like what Erdogan did a few years ago to flush out "traitors". Also, Putin could be trying to bait the west into getting involved to give him an excuse to escalate.
Shame they backed down already. I was really hoping that this would give Ukraine some breathing room and an opportunity to take back their territory.
I've been confused by things before, but this definitely tops the list
(It looks like) Putin already renegs on deal:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-yevgeny-prigozhin-just-get-disappeared-by-duplicitous-putin
ETA: Added that parenthetical because this is all so chaotic, who knows what's really happening.
ETA2: Someone on the Fediverse said that maybe this is maskirovka by Putin.