billbindc

Yep. A significant concession to Prigozhin and whoever backed him while Wagner now plans to spend the next month or more relaxing at their bases before a potential August move to Belarus. Folks, if you are going to 'lose' a coup this is how you want to do it.

Watch this space. As I've argued elsewhere, it's quite likely that Prigozhin was representative of a large faction and that rather than that faction wanting to have a full bore coup, they wanted to renegotiate the terms of Putin's power. Without extraordinary krisha, there is no universe in which Prigozhin in not dead, Wagner is not dispersed/disarmed and MoD/Rosgvardia are not being purged. And yet.

My read on it was that it's the kind of thing that a fairly well trained and and highly motivated force could do effectively (i.e. Ukraine's army) but I can't see how it wouldn't break down in a force of mixed capabilities with uneven training, bad motivation and endemic distrust between formation commands. I would be very surprised to find out that this was being adopted on any scale and even more surprised to find out it was actually accomplished.

Primarily it means that Erdogan doesn’t think Russian objections are going to matter much. Put another way, Erdogan expects Russia to lose and be in no position to punish him for either move. It also means that he thinks Ukraine is likelier a more important partner in the medium term than Russia will be.

The debate on this reminded me of De Gaulle's bemused reaction when Churchill felt compelled to approach him over Allied concerns about French civilian casualties in the pre-DDay bombing campaign. It was very "what the **** are you talking about?". Churchill...already in agreement...was relieved and not at all surprised.

Prigozhin showed up with an attorney and a writ and then was immediately handed over gold, money and guns. It is quite clear that Putin has very strict limits at least for now on what he can do to or about Prigozhin. The biggest move so far is to try and use Russian media to tarnish his public persona. Not exactly the Yezhovshchina.

Nuclear Diner is Cheryl Rofer. Quite a resume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Rofer

Yep. Cluster munitions make the US Congress very uneasy and that’s the other major reason (and more important than range) why they aren’t out there yet.

He’s the German propaganda officer in Saving Private Ryan yelling into the loudspeaker “The Statue of Liberty is kaput!”.

Guys, I have some bad news. It seems that the entire Ukrainian army is kaput.

Concur. The options here are that a faction in the power vertical takes power to forestall a spontaneous explosion or the spontaneous explosion happens on its own.

Nasty. And really gets at the nature of the war for a lot of Russian mobiks. Out of position, out of their depth and essentially abandoned to their fate. I can't see how an army can lurch along for long if any significant portion of it is in that state.

Nope. That was what the studies done for Stimson were saying before the fact by people who didn't know the atomic weapons program existed.

Not on the far left myself...one of those damned moderates...but I pay attention to that space and this is correct. There are quite bitter debates about the war in Ukraine. Normal folks only tend to hear about the tankies like Greenwald but there are plenty on the right correct side of this conflict. Terrell Starr is a good example. h

Sushko is a fabricator. Avoid.

The term of art is that democracies enjoy rule of law whereas Russia has what they call "rule by law". Meaning that everyone is violating the law and can be slapped down at will by the selective enforcement it. If Putin is unable to do that to Prigozhin, we'll learn much.

Come on now, lads. Imagine trying to do Lend Lease with a nuclear armed opponent.

How do we defeat a Great Power that has nuclear weapons? We don't. Instead, we help put it in a position in which it perforce defeats itself.

I've always been an area studies guy myself so it's never revved my engines much either. But this sort of thing *is* influential in how conflicts get explained to the public at large so we need to pay some attention. One need only look at how Mearsheimer is *still* being approvingly quoted by the Musk supplicants on Twitter to see that real world political implications come from what are often just very dry intellectual exercises in policy justification. Seen in that light, Phillips is attempting to lower the resistance to arming Ukraine and raise resistance to deferring to Russian interests. Call it another front in the war if you will.

I'm more sympathetic to Phillip's idea that these things need revision once in a while (if only to induce media to be less slavishly devoted to crude narratives) but the idea that the US was a superpower from 1917 to 1941 is....oof.

There are some pretty smart Russia experts out there who think that this will ultimately allow Putin to purge the baddies and strengthen his government. They other point that they make is that with Prigozhin and Wagner out of the picture (maybe!) there is no alternative. I would argue that’s wrong…starting with the fact that nobody (including Prigozhin) imagined he could be the next Russian leader. The BLUF is that the essential conflict at the heart of the Russian system (a badly fought war, a dithering leader, lack of channels to peacefully redress same) hasn’t gone away and is unlikely to be resolved peacefully.

The Biden administration has decided to put a little more sand in the works:

My jokey take to folks is "If you live in the grey zone long enough, the grey zone lives in you" but I do think that's basically what happened here. Putin trained the security services of the state to be both crafty, servile and financially corrupt. He trained them to conduct policy through cooption, indirection and to always insulate the core actors from the cutting edge of any hostile policy. What happened with Wagner and Prigozhin is the apotheosis of that program. All that really happened in a sense is that Putin broke the rules himself by exiting the methods of grey war to make conventional war on Ukraine and turned out to be quite bad at it. This created a conflict at the core of the organs of state power (both formal and informal) between his authority and the violence based legitimacy that authority must be seen to be preeminent in.