billbindc

I would flat out ignore virtually every anonymous quote you are hearing on this topic. Everything that is being leaked is driven by agendas that cannot be assessed and isolated from any real context. We quite literally don't know who is saying what, why, when or how. It could be Milley talking in the Oval or some Colonel sitting at the Rosslyn Starbucks. We will find out several years from now.

While surely irritating, this sort of squabbling and second guessing is both entirely normal in a large cooperative military effort and likely has little effect on the outcome. There are a lot of interests, a lot of money and a lot of people involved. It is only to be expected that some take their gripes to the media. And the actual people in power weigh in:

It's worth noting that Russian absolutist colonialism was a thing lots of Russians were themselves in denial about 15 years ago. Chechnya was 'Caucasian' and folded neatly into a War on Terror storyline that allowed Russia to imagine that it was engaged in a civilizational fight alongside rather than against the West. Ukraine looked like a problem that could be finessed rather than bludgeoned into submission at an exorbitant cost. Russian nationalism hadn't yet fully curdled into resentful fascism because Russians themselves imagined that they might provide a positive attraction for neighboring Slavs. When the flattery failed, the suitor in Moscow turned to rape.

Certainly a discretionary war but one that the average Russian isn't hurt by in an extremely direct way while it scratches a long standing ressentiment itch. The Russian national project is motivated by that feeling and Russians themselves sense that this is something of a last hurrah. Their economy is essentially resource extraction, their population is sliding inexorably down and their sense of themselves as a great power is slipping away. Folks raised on the folk ideology of the USSR will let other people's kids die for a long time if they think they have a chance of reversing those trends. So...not existential in terms of material national survival but more than a little bit existential in cultural terms. Why else would Solovyov and his ilk yatter on about using nukes or extending "Western Russia" to the docks of Nice? The fantasy has enormous political power in Russia. That is why Putin is doing it in the first place.

Speaking of appeals to authority... "This is the thinking of a shallow wargame developer who never put themselves in harms way."

Burkina and Niger between them have something like 25k in their armed forces. In ECOWAS alone, Nigeria has over 230,000 and will be backed by French networks, special forces, Western ISR, etc if it chooses to intervene. That's a hybrid war Wagner might just be stupid enough to fight.

War is communication too…

Some confirmation of things some of us have been saying here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/25/putin-prigozhin-rebellion-kremlin-disarray/

Some further notes: Girkin...for all of his grotesque extremism...is actually astute on the war, points out unfailingly that Prigozhin is no tactician or strategist and is profligate with the lives of his men. He nibbles at Putin...but he takes bites out of Prigozhin and the smarter sort of Russian fascist thinks he's right. He predicted in May that Prigozhin could launch a coup attempt and then after it happened he said Prigozhin should (reasonably enough) face treason charges. Girkin is no serious threat to Putin and Putin knows it. Furthermore, he's obviously a useful stick to beat up the driver of an attempted coup. But what's happened? Girkin is in jail and Prigozhin is not. That says everything about who won and who lost the chevauchée.

It will be amusing to find out which "former employee of Wagner" requested Girkin's detention. Who wants to bet that turns out to be Prigozhin? (Note: it would be extremely naive to believe it was actually Dmitriy Petrovskiy who set this in motion.)

I think that Grozev and Weiss aren't going to speculate on what they can't nail down. I'd personally say that a formal alliance isn't the sort of thing these folks do but the outlines look pretty clear (Rosneft, Dyumin, Zolotov). Not acting to defend Putin, for the big players, amounts to the same thing as actively attacking him in the end. As I see it, the damage to Putin's regime is illustrated far more by what we don't see than what we do. To use the famous trope:

Highly useful. : https://theins.ru/en/politics/263596

A pretty typical outing from Kofman in that he provides some interesting data but his analysis is essentially a list of platitudes.

Well worth reading:

For the record, I fully support the use of the term byzantine in the sense used above. I violently react to any such use in relation to the later Roman Empire. Just setting some boundaries.

The point of a chevauchee is, inter alia, to cause damage with political effect. I would submit that what constituted damage (and accrued power) in the 1300’s is not quite the same thing as in 2023. Prigozhin very certainly and severely damaged Putin’s power because abundance and communication makes damaging hard assets more difficult while damaging soft assets becomes easier to accomplish. So, don’t take my analogy literally. It’s meant to be adjusted to current conditions.

The very great benefit of this space is (or can be!) that if you let it, it allows you to interrogate your own thinking on the subject of Ukraine and Russia. I had not considered that framework at all until I read Steve's post.

I should have said "coup d'etat". My bad. I would also say that I don't think there's a 'new power' or that one is in control. The folks who, by action or inaction, allowed Putin to be humiliated and see his aura demolished aren't completely unified over anything other than seeing Putin's power diluted. Many certainly don't want Prigozhin anywhere near power, they disagree over whether to stay in the Ukraine war, how to fight it if they do, they have their own economic interests, etc. Think of it as an awakening to the fact that if they choose as a group to not allow it, they don't necessarily have to abide by Putin's arbitration of their disputes or deposition of their positions. It's not some clique pulling the strings and skillfully managing the state from behind a curtain. It's a post struggle, temporary equilibrium with Putin trying (not so successfully) to reassert himself while the central contradictions that created that struggle remain essentially unfixed. Momentously and prosaically...a world of possibilities has been revealed. The next round of bad bounces, lucky breaks, trains to Finland Station will now ensue.

I wouldn't get too far into refining the definitions down. No two power struggles are the same nor...whatever that clown Edward Luttwak claims...are any two coups alike. And sometimes one begins as one thing and ends up being another. In this particular case, it actually represents the kind of thing one would have seen in the medieval era with powerful nobles directly threatening the king, going out of favor, coming back in but ultimately not being severely punished for fairly violent chevauchée's aimed at the central power. And that makes sense. Putin's Russia is in some senses a feudal state even down to the allocation of resources to powerful figures who are then expected provide armed forces in return. Wagner is the most obvious of those but Gazprom, Roscosmos and others exist and are growing. As the Russian state further regresses, that trend will accelerate. I agree that the Prigozhin faction...which we still don't clearly perceive...did not want to actually overthrow Putin in order to avoid taking the blame for Ukraine, to minimize personal risk and to avoid the potential for really revolutionary chaos. But I don't think there's a progressive change happening. The revolt happened and a deal was struck but nobody is really in enough control to make incremental changes. It was a spasm and this is the aftermath where everyone is figuring out what it means, what the new rules are and what winning the next round will take. And you can be *very* sure that both sides are thinking about both a post Putin *and* a post Prigozhin future. Neither one of them promises stability.

Years of war to wear barrels to ineffectiveness would seem to be a better metric.

I think blackmail in this context would have weak traction and I think the answers are both simpler and more complex than that. Putin still controls most messaging in Russia and can deal with mundane corruption claims. What Prigozhin has simply is the support of enough of the power structure in Russia that Putin is forced to deal with him. But it's complicated because that backing is often tacit or simply about holding back support for Putin if push comes to shove. What Putin learned, probably to his great surprise, is that a large portion of his regime is indifferent or hostile to him and needs only coalesce around a sufficiently effective locus of force to overthrow him. So at this point, everyone is trying to find out where the balance is...and if it can be tipped over.

It is well worth listening to entire clip of his resignation. Popov gives off strong 1917 Czarist army vibes:

No, not likely. My position has been that this wasn’t really a coup. It was a renegotiation of the silovik terms of service. Before the blow up Prigozhin was going to be out, the war was going to lurch along and Putin was going to retain the ability to decide who wins, who loses and who to pin the blame for the war on. Prigozhin has his own personal reasons which drove him but his krisha and other factions have different motivations. Those folks want to have a say in where things are going, to end Putin’s monopoly on outcomes and to make sure that if the war is lost the onus remains entirely on him (and Shoigu/Gerasimov/etc). In terms of the war, we can already see that it is hurting it…with the MoD leadership even more distrusted, the commanders in theater ever more unhappy, Wagner out of the fight, etc, etc. I think we are still pretty far away from negotiations. Neither side has what it wants, what looks stable and/or what it thinks it might get with a longer war. And whoever makes the first move in effect says that they are in the weaker position. So this will go on…in what I’ve taken to calling “Brusilov’s Defensive”…and we’ll see how long it takes for someone else to assemble the men and arms to renegotiate the terms of service irrevocably.

BLUF: Prigozhin won.

On repeat: Igor Sushko is a fabricator.