making a strong against the war, or even making lists of russian casualties from that war. here is prigozhin, putin s got, winning this private military contractor company, talking to social media, like every day, showing corpses of russian fighters, screaming expletives against russian leadership, calling them criminals and worse, calling for them to be killed, saying the russian elite is corrupt and the war is a lie. why are they letting prigozhin do that? well, friday, apparently, he hit the end of this road. he announced, in effect, a mutiny. wagner fighters versus russia. wagner fighters took over a military outpost in russia, that is key to supplying russian forces in ukraine. they took it over without firing a shot. they were greeted warmly by the russian citizens of that town, in which that military garrison is located. and then wagner troops started to advance towards moscow,
the problem is that one of his enterprises, the wagner group, who went to his head, because he s had some successes, so he thought in ukraine, he felt betrayed by the regular army. and he started speaking out like crazy on telegram and other memes, and people started hearing about this in russia, and i thought this was fantastic. here s this popular new guy who s winning some battles and ukraine, and he courses, just like putin used to before he got all fancy. and this went to prigozhin s head. and he thought that he could make a move on the defense secretary and the general staff and by implication of putin himself, and possibly to become a successor. do i think that he thought that he could enter red square and take over the kremlin like in some that movie, or like in august 1991? probably not. but he certainly thought that he was capable of raising his oat profile and power, and he
saying out loud that that s where they were going. columns of wagner troops going hundreds of miles in a straight shot right at moscow. they got to within 150 miles of moscow. the whole world was bracing for a military coup in red square. putin himself reportedly fled, he left moscow as wagner fighters were closing in. and then, prigozhin and his wagner fighters turned around. because apparently, lukashenko, the doofus dictator of belarus, was the one who made the call. he made a call to prigozhin to offer a very strange off ramp to this very strange crisis. the end result is that prigozhin has gone to belarus to lukashenko s country to live out his days, i don t know. nobody seems to know exactly what s going to happen to him there, or to his wagner group fighters. are they all going to belarus with him? putin gave a speech to the
it is not like the wagner group is fighting as an independent force there. prigozhin s wagner mercenaries are basically a private augmentation, adjunct to the russian military. they rely on russian military infrastructure. they can t operate a whole war there on their own. the russian military has to be there, too. but that dynamic has created some friction. since the ukraine war started and russia s invasion of ukraine has gone so poorly from day one, prigozhin has taken on this sort of unsettling new role in russian politics both for putin and for everybody else. he has essentially taken credit for all the russian military victories there have been in ukraine and has gone after the russian military for all the russian failures. and at a time when regular russian citizens are being arrested and prosecuted just for describing russia s war in ukraine as a war, when regular russian citizens are being
to have a customer named vladimir putin who became his patron and to have vladimir putin as your patron it turns out is a very lucky thing. you become extremely wealthy. you become extremely powerful. you enter what is called putin world, this personalist regime that all depends on the great dictator. the problem is one of his enterprises, the wagner group, went to his head because he had some successes or so he thought in ukraine and he felt betrayed by the regular army and started speaking out like crazy on telegram and other means and people started hearing about this in russia and they thought this was fantastic. here is this popular new guy who is winning some battles in ukraine and he curses just like putin used to before he got all fancy. and this went to prigozhin s head and he thought he could make a move on the defense secretary and the general staff and by implication putin himself and possibly to become a successor.