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Tomn posted:Sorry, but what part of any of this is about securing Putin's African interests? Hell, the only reason Prigozhin could pull this off was because he was busy organizing forces in Ukraine, and explicitly not Africa. Is your argument that the MoD absorbing mercenaries directly into its command structure also means taking over Wagner's African operations? If that's the case, that seems like it's happening anyways? Details about what the deal was are sketchy but apparently Wagner mercs are getting amnesty and contracts to work with the MoD directly while Prigozhin fucks off to Belarus. How does any of that defend Putin's interests in the way you describe? Putin's shadow army should maintain a low profile for a while, given the political cleanup that has to take place. Retiring the name "Wagner" seems like a good start.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:00
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Wagner was in Ukraine because Putin had excess African money to throw around.
BungMonkey fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 04:09
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/24/us-intelligence-prigozhin-putin/ "A key trigger for Prigozhin, officials said, was a June 10 Russian Defense Ministry order that all volunteer detachments would have to sign contracts with the government." Edit: I'll tack this on to keep it concise. From well-noted historian Stephen Kotkin in an earlier interview: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/prigozhin-rebellion-putin-fate-russia-future-stephen-kotkin posted:Has what’s happened in the past 24 hours changed your view of Putin? RockWhisperer fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 04:11
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The good thing for Wagner rank-and-file is that they probably won't have to help support the Ukrainian disaster any more
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Jun 25, 2023 04:30
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acidx posted:I saw it reported hours ago that nobody was killed as a result of those helicopters being shot down, but haven't seen anything else about it. Who knows if it was true then or is now. Either way, Russia is no stranger to quietly burying their dead soldiers in unmarked graves if a situation calls for it. Most of those helicopter models do not have any way of ejecting for the crew.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:33
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BungMonkey posted:Prigozhin's funding and authority is provided by Putin for a politically independent shadow army to develop Putin's African kleptocratic ventures and act as a backup plan/escape route to Africa in case Russian politics turn sour. i'm inclined to agree. also interesting to note that the whole war in Ukraine was never even originally meant to include wagner, who were specifically excluded from it for the first few weeks until it was clear that it wouldn't be an instant success. the mod-wagner feud has been simmering for as long as wagner has been relevant to Russian interests, too. very curious what actually happens at the mod and how much of a military force prigozhin keeps in europe vs returning to africa Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 04:34
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acidx posted:I saw it reported hours ago that nobody was killed as a result of those helicopters being shot down, but haven't seen anything else about it. Who knows if it was true then or is now. Either way, Russia is no stranger to quietly burying their dead soldiers in unmarked graves if a situation calls for it. I'm not saying helicopters are unreliable in general but I'd rather be in a plane crash than a helicopter crash. The plane crash you can take steps and mitigate. You gotta roll a natural 20 on a twenty-sided die to survive a helicopter crash. If someone from the russian government is saying nobody died, this is damage control to sweep all this under the rug and try to memory hole it.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:36
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Nelson Mandingo posted:I'm not saying helicopters are unreliable in general but I'd rather be in a plane crash than a helicopter crash. The plane crash you can take steps and mitigate. You gotta roll a natural 20 on a twenty-sided die to survive a helicopter crash. Unpowered planes with intact control surfaces require a runway. Unpowered helicopters with intact control surfaces can land almost anywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation But yes, they're probably dead.
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Jun 25, 2023 04:51
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Alkydere posted:He got what he wanted today but it eroded a lot of Putin's power over him, and everyone else really. I feel that basically Putin letting the MoD play stupid games has vastly eroded his power and this is basically the point where we point back in the future and go "Yeah that's when it visibly started to come apart". The whole Russian puppet show has been falling apart since Kiev didn't fall in 3 days, but there's rot, visible rot and when things finally visibly implode. Didn't Putin just fail to manage his subordinates? It sounds like a classical error where your dogs start to eat one another for power but it went too far this time.
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Jun 25, 2023 05:31
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Also, for all of the talk of 11D chess, didn't Putin get on TV last night to call them all traitorous rebels and urge the rank and file mercs to disobey Prig and stay in Ukraine?
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Jun 25, 2023 05:36
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The Glumslinger posted:Also, for all of the talk of 11D chess, didn't Putin get on TV last night to call them all traitorous rebels and urge the rank and file mercs to disobey Prig and stay in Ukraine? Yep. Which is why any talk you see of "unified Russia" or "It's not so bad for Putin" is silly. You don't flip flop from "These men are traitors" to amnesty and concessions without suffering a cost. quote:But yes, they're probably dead. This is a great article, thank you for that.
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Jun 25, 2023 06:00
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quote:Here’s the bottom line: even if it is now snuffed out, an alternative was allowed to arise. All this unfolded in real time, on video, over months and months. Putin did not intervene earlier and allowed things to get to this point. Stunning. Either he has descended into utter incompetence or he has less operational control than his media machine has been letting on. Or both. I expected him to be better at Authoritarianism 101. Ok I am really trying not to act like i'm some sort of geopolitics super intellect but I get just a little bit worried when even the Best Brains making these articles have to ask a bunch of questions rhetorically around something that I think should be way more obvious, namely that dictators go kooky and lose their loving minds and that this has obviously happened here in russia the writers at foreign affairs should not be getting blindsided by this whole part where this whole war thing is going on to begin with because putin had already gone absolutely poptarts like were they expecting that the same guy who made the battle of kyiv go off exactly like it did was really going to be able to handle when poo poo got worse than he had already made the country without Ukraine's help
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Jun 25, 2023 06:17
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Hard to accept the obvious reality that this guy is unhinged when your career depends on publishing papers and articles theorycrafting fancy wheels within wheels for any Great Power you're analyzing.
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Jun 25, 2023 06:24
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I think in the aftermath people are already starting to downplay how much real danger Moscow was in. Prigozhin out and out stated they seized Rostov to get the airfield under control, and then on a hundreds-of-kilometers road march to Moscow the air attacks on them are weak enough to be driven off by some Strelas. We all saw the guys in Moscow deploying with machine pistols and the Wagner guys with T-90s. I think it's possible that if they kept going Wagner tanks would have shown up in the southern suburbs of Moscow late yesterday evening and Putin's national image would have collapsed.
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Jun 25, 2023 06:26
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Someday we'll have a Call of Duty level based on this and people will think its unrealistic that you can march on the capital and the only opposition you face is 8 helicopters.
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Jun 25, 2023 07:26
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Is it possible a few pissed off division commanders presented Prigozhin with the options of leading an insurrection or seeing how many extra holes he could live with? Then once he could he cut a deal immediately, sending the pissed off divisions to Africa where he wanted to be and accepting his place off the board in Belarus?
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Jun 25, 2023 07:54
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It's technically possible Prigozhin took a ton of LSD and went to the bad place and when he finally came to he was 20 minutes outside of Moscow.
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Jun 25, 2023 07:56
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If this ordeal taught me anything, it's that we don't know poo poo about what is really going on or what could happen in any given situation and we should probably stop pretending like it could possibly be deduced by a bunch of random people on the Internet. Putin could go on live TV wearing drag and announce that he's decided to retire and is leaving the Russian presidency to Hillary Clinton. It would make about as much sense as anything that just happened.
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Jun 25, 2023 08:05
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In retrospect you would really want to have a bunch of loyal veteran rapidly-redeployable VDV guys sitting around for this exact eventuality.
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Jun 25, 2023 08:12
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mutata posted:It's technically possible Prigozhin took a ton of LSD and went to the bad place and when he finally came to he was 20 minutes outside of Moscow. this is why authoritarian states hate lsd Arglebargle III posted:In retrospect you would really want to have a bunch of loyal veteran rapidly redeployable VDV guys sitting around for this exact eventuality. they do, or at least did, all but one of those adjectives anyways. vdv units reportedly have not been a big fan of mod leadership over the last 16 months KillHour posted:If this ordeal taught me anything, it's that we don't know poo poo about what is really going on or what could happen in any given situation and we should probably stop pretending like it could possibly be deduced by a bunch of random people on the Internet. i mean no one knows fuckall but also this exact situation was being speculated about and discussed a month ago so it's not like this was utterly unforeseeable. I wrote on here that it had no chance of working unless there was an major breakdown within the russian military wrt opposing such a push. that said, anyone claiming certainty or full knowledge of really anything more than 5 minutes from now is an idiot, yeah the showdown between wagner and mod was brewing for explicitly about two months (and realistically reflects a rivalry/hostility that has existed since wagner's early days in syria) and particularly came to a head about a month ago. mod was trying to render wagner non-viable so obviously wagner was going to have to try something. like most things that happen anywhere ever, if you're paying attention to the situation it's rarely completely out of the blue. stuff being completely out of the blue usually just means you weren't really paying attention more than some innate 'the world is unknowable' e: also https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1672781952221433856?s=20 Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 08:13
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https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1672687478841528320?t=61sc9Zut4nfaUBzbskIfRg&s=19
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Jun 25, 2023 08:44
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Herstory Begins Now posted:I wrote on here that it had no chance of working unless there was an major breakdown within the russian military wrt opposing such a push. Which they could have entirely had lol That's the most amazing part is the the breakdown is so pervasive that all sorts of totally wacky outcomes can plausibly come about (like all this poo poo)
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Jun 25, 2023 08:47
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It does make sense that Prigozhin's hand was forced to do something, the MoD order seems like it would steal his entire mercenary company and then send him a order to charge across a minefield by himself or be executed for insubordination. Combined with Wagner getting shot at and rocketed, not a great prospect for even the low rank Wagner soldiers to get folded into that and the likely russian military bullying of Wagner troops with the shifted power dynamic. End result though is everyone involved looks weak and stupid and we're watching a empire fall at the very first country to stand up to their military in a self-inflicted ball punch, like a kid standing up to a bully at school and the bully losing all of their aura of fear and power.
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Jun 25, 2023 09:14
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Did they actually get rocketed? I know that Prigozhin claims that, but I also remember seeing some credible-enough people doubt that it wasn't staged.
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Jun 25, 2023 09:22
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How big is Wagner exactly? Is Putin literally going to let a bunch of mercenaries who were about to invade the capital simply go home and act as if it never happened? I guess in American politics people get pardoned too but that's a weird way to do it!
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Jun 25, 2023 09:32
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The Wagner guys are going to be spread through the whole army. And infect it. Pigman I’d going to come back for round 2. If Putin doesn’t get him first.
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Jun 25, 2023 09:39
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:How big is Wagner exactly? Prigozhin said he had 25 thousand people. Estimates say it was around 10 thousand before the war, then augmented with 40 thousand new prison recruits, then it got ground down in Bakhmut.
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Jun 25, 2023 09:40
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been rumors for 12 hours that there's going to be a change in russian military leadership coming soon. including now from people in the gerasimov/shoigu camp now. still rumors as far as I'm concerned, but interesting to see that starting to come from within Russia, though there's also been some foreign efforts to spread such rumors as well
Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 10:19
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WarpedLichen posted:Someday we'll have a Call of Duty level based on this and people will think its unrealistic that you can march on the capital and the only opposition you face is 8 helicopters. "Believe it or not, this wasn't because of memory limitations." - Some game dev Herstory Begins Now posted:i mean no one knows fuckall but also this exact situation was being speculated about and discussed a month ago so it's not like this was utterly unforeseeable. I wrote on here that it had no chance of working unless there was an major breakdown within the russian military wrt opposing such a push. that said, anyone claiming certainty or full knowledge of really anything more than 5 minutes from now is an idiot, yeah Ehhhh I think it was pretty reasonable to assess that the situation was coming to a head, but beyond that I think everyone is baffled by how the breaking point actually played out. Making various moves for influence and Putin's ear, absolutely. A person or persons taking retirement, getting cashiered, fleeing the country, finding themselves in command of three Krushchev-era tractors in Buttfuck, Siberia - sure. Assassinations, no trouble believing that. But Prigo announcing he's heading to Moscow with tens of thousands of men to sort poo poo out, and then gathering a big head of steam that sees his forces basically unopposed except for single-digit choppers until Moscow is barely over the horizon, with Putin apparently having fled the city, AND THEN he goes "Well my work here is done" and calls the whole thing off agreeing to... exile and not really much else that's worth the paper it's not printed on? That is the poo poo that all has everyone baffled. Maybe the first stage of a hothead going "I'll paint HIS wagon" and some of his guys are rowdy enough to go along with it, but no subsequent part is even slightly realistic. Yet it all happened.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:19
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BungMonkey posted:Shoigu and Gerasimov escalated to a vassal war by rocketing Wagner and attempting to take over its holdings. Prigozhin did the job he was put in place to do by defending the political independence of Putin's shadow army and Putin's African assets. It would be neither politically, rationally, nor emotionally correct (within sociopath psychology) to punish Prigozhin's loyalty. They didn't do a rocket strike on Wagner, that was just misinformation by Prigozhin. Can't find it now but one of the more reliable Twitter accounts was talking about it. This doesn't invalidate your argument completely; but my gut feeling is that you're mistaken - isn't Putin supposed to be in charge? As in, surely he should have known about and proactively prevented any vassal war before it happened? Either way though, Putin is not nearly as in charge as everyone thought
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Jun 25, 2023 10:27
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WarpedLichen posted:Someday we'll have a Call of Duty level based on this and people will think its unrealistic that you can march on the capital and the only opposition you face is 8 helicopters. Looking forward to future Moscow Bus charity streams.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:28
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i mean the idea of what ended up happening had been floating around publicly in discussions for a month, multiple major intelligence agencies were aware of it for weeks, putin was apparently notified of the plans in advance (and seemingly took no significant efforts to stop it in advance). the real unknowns that got people scrambling were the 'what if he goes all the way to moscow?' questions one explanation that I think makes some sense:  (he's a strategic studies guy at st andrews) jaete posted:They didn't do a rocket strike on Wagner, that was just misinformation by Prigozhin. Can't find it now but one of the more reliable Twitter accounts was talking about it. the rocket strike, real or not, is immaterial compared to the reality that shoigu was in the final stages of legally shutting down wagner Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 10:29
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I can see that, Prigozhin wanted to push back but in doing so nearly toppled the whole country. Russia is like one of those saloons in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, a flat front with 2 pieces of plywood in the back so it doesn't fall over.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:35
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So that read is Prigozhin expected his convoy to hit some resistance there would be a tense stand off and then there would be a theatrical brotherly coming together where a deal is reached to save Russia. But instead there was no physical opposition so he had to back down to avoid a collapse into anarchy that would help no one? Which meant there were no theatrics and everyone involved just ends up looking incompetent.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:40
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lagidnam posted:I can see that, Prigozhin wanted to push back but in doing so nearly toppled the whole country. Russia is like one of those saloons in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, a flat front with 2 pieces of plywood in the back so it doesn't fall over. You mean like a Potemkin village?
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Jun 25, 2023 10:41
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a pipe smoking dog posted:So that read is Prigozhin expected his convoy to hit some resistance there would be a tense stand off and then there would be a theatrical brotherly coming together where a deal is reached to save Russia. It's one of the more plausible explanations I've heard at least.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:49
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a pipe smoking dog posted:So that read is Prigozhin expected his convoy to hit some resistance there would be a tense stand off and then there would be a theatrical brotherly coming together where a deal is reached to save Russia. idk about 'theatrical brotherly coming together' so much as prigozhin gets his demand that wagner is not in-fact legally terminated and shoigu is neutered of his ability to go after prigozhin/wagner
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Jun 25, 2023 10:51
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The entire situation resembles a mobster film, one of those scenes where the lieutenants convene to negotiate a deal, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, someone, most likely Joe Pesci, erupts with a burst of unpredictable violence and intimidation to prove a point. Then it subsides as abruptly as it began, and everyone continues as if nothing had occurred.
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Jun 25, 2023 10:56
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has shoigu been seen or made any statement at all since this started? I've been looking but have seen nothing.
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Jun 25, 2023 11:05
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No lol
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Jun 25, 2023 11:13
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