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The 2023 Russian Coup.

I'm not sure what I believe, I can see a couple of different aspects that have both positive and negative outcomes for different players - and I think that they are not mutually exclusive.

I do believe that this was a genuine power grab by Prigozhin. Not necessarily aimed at Putin and the Big Chair, but certainly at the Defence Ministry, and Shogu and Gerasimov, with perhaps the aim of Prigozhin forcing himself onto the top table, whether Vlad liked it or not.

I do not believe that this was some kind of set-up job between Putin and Prigozhin with the aim of giving Putin an excuse to bin off Shogu and Gerasimov - firstly because I don't think he needs one, but most importantly because I do not believe that Putin solidly trusts anyone with their own powerbase, and I certainly don't believe that Putin - who, let's remember, is so ultra cautious about COVID that he meets everyone at 50 paces, and so ultra cautious about assassination that he takes a 'rent-a-crowd' of FSB officers to act as members of the public on his public engagements - would consider allowing someone with their own military to roll to within 200km of Moscow with the Russian military effectively switched off for the day.

My assumption is that Prigozhin, when he started this, had, or thought he had, an agreement with the Russian major military units near Moscow to let him past, but that that changed as he got within two hours drive of the Kremlin.

I'll be stunned if Prigozhin lives long enough to discover he's no longer of the Putin's Christmas card list.

I think Putin will be appalled/horrified by the lack of resistance by the Russian military. I think there'll be a purge, and I doubt Shogu or Gerasimov will keep their posts.

I think he'll very much think he's got away with it - and to a degree he has - and I think he'll take note of who, when the going got tough, got going. Lots of flights in private jets to Dubai and Turkey, including a Deputy Prime minister. I doubt he'll believe it was a last minute holiday booked by the wife...

I think Putin is strengthened by the departure of Prigozhin - he's cuffed off a rival, Wagner is going to thoroughly integrated into the Ru mil, and no other PMC comes close to Wagner's size or capability.

I think he's weakened by the lack of Russian military response - others will see that the Russian military obviously don't give that much of a crap about him. I think it will be a significant psychological shock to the wider Russian elites that Prigozhin was able to simply say 'to Moscow!', and pretty much everyone in Wagner followed him without batting an eyelid.

I think he's also weakened by a) having to do some kind of deal with a bloke with tanks at the gate, and b) by Lukashenko playing the role of peacemaker/facilitator, interceding on his behalf - Lukashenko is supposed to be the Little Dog, not the big one.

If a Guards Tank Division had destroyed Wagner on the road to Voronezh, with Wagner's men either dead, or in chains, with Prigozhin swinging from the nearest lampost, then Putin would look immeasurably stronger. But that's not what happened.

Whatever else, I am convinced that whatever it looks like now, on Sunday evening, is not what it will look like in two weeks, or three months.
 
petee said:
i have an opinion.

prigozhin (sp) has been wauling for ages that he's not getting the support from moscow that he needs/wants/expects.
he has nothing to lose so goes and gets moscow's attention, and how.
he gets safe passage to belarus, for the moment, the non-rebels become regulars, the rebels are in the clear, for the moment, though i don;t know what they're going to do without him.
in other words, prigozhin gets what he wants: out of the entire business, since he can't fight as he think he should be able to; and his soldiers get taken care of or at least not executed, for the moment.

win for prigozhin, for the moment.

i don't think putin looks too weak, maybe part of not arming wagner thoroughly was to show who's the boss, and now putin has prigozhin cashiered, for the moment, and some of his soldiers into putin's ranks.
Click to expand...
I understand that the plan was to move Wagner personnel into the Russian army and that was a large part of the reason why they had an away day to Moscow.

The outcome is that those personnel are still going to be transferred. Prigozhin is empty handed (as in his company has been commandeered) and in exile.

So I'm not sure how that is a win for anyone but Putin. He gets new troops probably at a fraction of the cost he was paying before and without the troublesome middle manager.
 
kebabking said:
I'm not sure what I believe, I can see a couple of different aspects that have both positive and negative outcomes for different players - and I think that they are not mutually exclusive.

I do believe that this was a genuine power grab by Prigozhin. Not necessarily aimed at Putin and the Big Chair, but certainly at the Defence Ministry, and Shogu and Gerasimov, with perhaps the aim of Prigozhin forcing himself onto the top table, whether Vlad liked it or not.

I do not believe that this was some kind of set-up job between Putin and Prigozhin with the aim of giving Putin an excuse to bin off Shogu and Gerasimov - firstly because I don't think he needs one, but most importantly because I do not believe that Putin solidly trusts anyone with their own powerbase, and I certainly don't believe that Putin - who, let's remember, is so ultra cautious about COVID that he meets everyone at 50 paces, and so ultra cautious about assassination that he takes a 'rent-a-crowd' of FSB officers to act as members of the public on his public engagements - would consider allowing someone with their own military to roll to within 200km of Moscow with the Russian military effectively switched off for the day.

My assumption is that Prigozhin, when he started this, had, or thought he had, an agreement with the Russian major military units near Moscow to let him past, but that that changed as he got within two hours drive of the Kremlin.

I'll be stunned if Prigozhin lives long enough to discover he's no longer of the Putin's Christmas card list.

I think Putin will be appalled/horrified by the lack of resistance by the Russian military. I think there'll be a purge, and I doubt Shogu or Gerasimov will keep their posts.

I think he'll very much think he's got away with it - and to a degree he has - and I think he'll take note of who, when the going got tough, got going. Lots of flights in private jets to Dubai and Turkey, including a Deputy Prime minister. I doubt he'll believe it was a last minute holiday booked by the wife...

I think Putin is strengthened by the departure of Prigozhin - he's cuffed off a rival, Wagner is going to thoroughly integrated into the Ru mil, and no other PMC comes close to Wagner's size or capability.

I think he's weakened by the lack of Russian military response - others will see that the Russian military obviously don't give that much of a crap about him. I think it will be a significant psychological shock to the wider Russian elites that Prigozhin was able to simply say 'to Moscow!', and pretty much everyone in Wagner followed him without batting an eyelid.

I think he's also weakened by a) having to do some kind of deal with a bloke with tanks at the gate, and b) by Lukashenko playing the role of peacemaker/facilitator, interceding on his behalf - Lukashenko is supposed to be the Little Dog, not the big one.

If a Guards Tank Division had destroyed Wagner on the road to Voronezh, with Wagner's men either dead, or in chains, with Prigozhin swinging from the nearest lampost, then Putin would look immeasurably stronger. But that's not what happened.

Whatever else, I am convinced that whatever it looks like now, on Sunday evening, is not what it will look like in two weeks, or three months.
Click to expand...
Wonder what you think about Prigozhin's own decision making? If this wasn't some kind of set up, taking things as far as they did he put himself in a position that would almost inevitably lead to his death (short of the Russian military joining in and ousting Putin). He was past the point of no return, so why didn't he carry on? I mean, he was in the end given an escape route but, again, short of it being a put up job, couldn't have expected that. And as you say, there's every chance he'll be shot/poisoned/arrested at some point in the near future. He's now lost his private army and is on borrowed time.
 
kebabking said:
I think he's also weakened by a) having to do some kind of deal with a bloke with tanks at the gate, and b) by Lukashenko playing the role of peacemaker/facilitator, interceding on his behalf - Lukashenko is supposed to be the Little Dog, not the big one.

If a Guards Tank Division had destroyed Wagner on the road to Voronezh, with Wagner's men either dead, or in chains, with Prigozhin swinging from the nearest lampost, then Putin would look immeasurably stronger. But that's not what happened.

Whatever else, I am convinced that whatever it looks like now, on Sunday evening, is not what it will look like in two weeks, or three months.
Click to expand...

Agreed with most of what you say, especially that last sentence, but exile doesn't look like a deal to me, plus Lukashenko will be forgotten tomorrow. Peacemaker/facilitator? Posh words for carrier pigeon.

If Putin had killed Wagner troops speeding up the M4 (ffs), troops he needs, he'd have looked like he was directly killing fellow Russians. So not necessarily a good look.
 
Incredible that multiple Russian aircraft and Russian pilots/aircrew were taken down by Wagner yesterday, seemingly with no repercussions.

10 people on this plane alone:



There was already friction and resentment between the regular forces and PMCs, and this is going to fester for some while.
 
Anyone know how many Wagner soldiers and equipment are going to Belarus with their boss?

Lots of conspiracy theorist on twitter are saying that Wagner is now 100k from Kiev.
 
Wilf said:
Wonder what you think about Prigozhin's own decision making? If this wasn't some kind of set up, taking things as far as they did he put himself in a position that would almost inevitably lead to his death (short of the Russian military joining in and ousting Putin). He was past the point of no return, so why didn't he carry on? I mean, he was in the end given an escape route but, again, short of it being a put up job, couldn't have expected that. And as you say, there's every chance he'll be shot/poisoned/arrested at some point in the near future. He's now lost his private army and is on borrowed time.
Click to expand...

I think the important thing is to not start off with the assumption that decisions and plans, whether by Prigozhin or others, are going to be brilliantly thought through, with all the ducks in a row.

Prigozhin isn't Professor of Cunning at St Claude's College, Cambridge - he's brutal, he's not stupid, but he's not some master strategist.

I think there are probably several things happening at the same time to push this in his head - firstly that Putin has green lit Shogu and Gerasimov's proposal to bring Wagner much more under military control, which is both the end of Prigozhins power/influence/income, and it's something of a personal betrayal by Putin of someone who's done his bidding, and more effectively than many others (Shogu and Gerasimov particularly), and with whom he's had a long standing relationship.

I think - without wanting to sound misty-eyed, Prigozhin is a bad bastard, if he was at Nuremberg he'd have got the rope, and earned it a hundred times over - Prigozhin has spent far more time at the front, with his soldiers, than any Russian general of equivalent rank. There's footage of him fighting (that looks real, rather than staged), and there's footage, and quite a bit of it, of Prigozhin dealing with Wagner dead, helping to carry bodies and the like. The connection to his soldiers/whatever is, imv, proven by the fact that they simply followed him to Moscow - there's an emotional connection there thats is not simply about money.

I think he's a very angry, scared/humiliated, betrayed, and quite possibly traumatised man who's never been a strategic thinker, but one who has seized opportunities as they have presented themselves - and uptil now his instincts have served him well.

I think Putin's decision to back Shogu over him has acted as a final straw, and he's lashed out. What's particularly interesting to me is that he's managed to get 500 miles, and within a couple of hours of Moscow before that lashing out met something that didn't go his way.

Could be wrong of course....
 
Tanya1982 said:
Is that really when their troubles started?
Click to expand...
By no means, but I had in mind Russians still alive today, and events easily within living memory.

And to understand today's Russia, it's necessary to remember that it was the Perestoika and Glasnost years that led directly to it. Some posters don't like me referring to it for some reason, but I was a frequent visitor to Russia 1988-93, and so witnessed the way that the recently emerged, tentative hopes of the majority were quickly dashed. They were perhaps naive hopes, emerging as they did in a population which had been politically muzzled and nullified for seven decades, but they were marshalled and then decimated by thieves, gangsters, charlatans and foreign asset-strippers, and the beleagured population inevitably adopted cynicism and, in the many who believed they'd been sold a lie by the west and the western-friendly generation of politicians and, ahem, entrepreneurs who triumphed in August '91, a poisonous nationalism. A disturbing number of those Russians I got to know, my age and younger (I was mid-late 20s), have been dead for quite some time, either at their own hands, through drink and drugs or else mostly curable illnesses. They are statistics in the drastic decline in life-expectancy set in motion by western-encouraged economic 'shock therapy.' From the elections that immediately followed the Yeltsin coup of October 1993, it was obvious that a Putin-like figure was going to step out of the shadows.

But nobody needs me to tell them any of this-it's all in Adam Curtis's excellent recent BBC series.
 
Last edited:
I think he's a very angry, scared/humiliated, betrayed, and quite possibly traumatised man who's never been a strategic thinker, but one who has seized opportunities as they have presented themselves - and uptil now his instincts have served him well.

I think Putin's decision to back Shogu over him has acted as a final straw, and he's lashed out. What's particularly interesting to me is that he's managed to get 500 miles, and within a couple of hours of Moscow before that lashing out met something that didn't go his way.
Click to expand...

Yes. Plus maybe a touch of megalomania-beyond-your-station-mate - he had a good mouth on him.

I am tending to think he was simply threatened with annihilation and a get out clause.
 
kebabking said:
I'm not sure what I believe, I can see a couple of different aspects that have both positive and negative outcomes for different players - and I think that they are not mutually exclusive.

I do believe that this was a genuine power grab by Prigozhin. Not necessarily aimed at Putin and the Big Chair, but certainly at the Defence Ministry, and Shogu and Gerasimov, with perhaps the aim of Prigozhin forcing himself onto the top table, whether Vlad liked it or not.

I do not believe that this was some kind of set-up job between Putin and Prigozhin with the aim of giving Putin an excuse to bin off Shogu and Gerasimov - firstly because I don't think he needs one, but most importantly because I do not believe that Putin solidly trusts anyone with their own powerbase, and I certainly don't believe that Putin - who, let's remember, is so ultra cautious about COVID that he meets everyone at 50 paces, and so ultra cautious about assassination that he takes a 'rent-a-crowd' of FSB officers to act as members of the public on his public engagements - would consider allowing someone with their own military to roll to within 200km of Moscow with the Russian military effectively switched off for the day.

My assumption is that Prigozhin, when he started this, had, or thought he had, an agreement with the Russian major military units near Moscow to let him past, but that that changed as he got within two hours drive of the Kremlin.

I'll be stunned if Prigozhin lives long enough to discover he's no longer of the Putin's Christmas card list.

I think Putin will be appalled/horrified by the lack of resistance by the Russian military. I think there'll be a purge, and I doubt Shogu or Gerasimov will keep their posts.

I think he'll very much think he's got away with it - and to a degree he has - and I think he'll take note of who, when the going got tough, got going. Lots of flights in private jets to Dubai and Turkey, including a Deputy Prime minister. I doubt he'll believe it was a last minute holiday booked by the wife...

I think Putin is strengthened by the departure of Prigozhin - he's cuffed off a rival, Wagner is going to thoroughly integrated into the Ru mil, and no other PMC comes close to Wagner's size or capability.

I think he's weakened by the lack of Russian military response - others will see that the Russian military obviously don't give that much of a crap about him. I think it will be a significant psychological shock to the wider Russian elites that Prigozhin was able to simply say 'to Moscow!', and pretty much everyone in Wagner followed him without batting an eyelid.

I think he's also weakened by a) having to do some kind of deal with a bloke with tanks at the gate, and b) by Lukashenko playing the role of peacemaker/facilitator, interceding on his behalf - Lukashenko is supposed to be the Little Dog, not the big one.

If a Guards Tank Division had destroyed Wagner on the road to Voronezh, with Wagner's men either dead, or in chains, with Prigozhin swinging from the nearest lampost, then Putin would look immeasurably stronger. But that's not what happened.

Whatever else, I am convinced that whatever it looks like now, on Sunday evening, is not what it will look like in two weeks, or three months.
Click to expand...
I meant to ask you to send me the list of Twitter Tankies that you were spending yesterday afternoon looking at.
 
kebabking said:
I think the important thing is to not start off with the assumption that decisions and plans, whether by Prigozhin or others, are going to be brilliantly thought through, with all the ducks in a row.

Prigozhin isn't Professor of Cunning at St Claude's College, Cambridge - he's brutal, he's not stupid, but he's not some master strategist.

I think there are probably several things happening at the same time to push this in his head - firstly that Putin has green lit Shogu and Gerasimov's proposal to bring Wagner much more under military control, which is both the end of Prigozhins power/influence/income, and it's something of a personal betrayal by Putin of someone who's done his bidding, and more effectively than many others (Shogu and Gerasimov particularly), and with whom he's had a long standing relationship.

I think - without wanting to sound misty-eyed, Prigozhin is a bad bastard, if he was at Nuremberg he'd have got the rope, and earned it a hundred times over - Prigozhin has spent far more time at the front, with his soldiers, than any Russian general of equivalent rank. There's footage of him fighting (that looks real, rather than staged), and there's footage, and quite a bit of it, of Prigozhin dealing with Wagner dead, helping to carry bodies and the like. The connection to his soldiers/whatever is, imv, proven by the fact that they simply followed him to Moscow - there's an emotional connection there thats is not simply about money.

I think he's a very angry, scared/humiliated, betrayed, and quite possibly traumatised man who's never been a strategic thinker, but one who has seized opportunities as they have presented themselves - and uptil now his instincts have served him well.

I think Putin's decision to back Shogu over him has acted as a final straw, and he's lashed out. What's particularly interesting to me is that he's managed to get 500 miles, and within a couple of hours of Moscow before that lashing out met something that didn't go his way.

Could be wrong of course....
Click to expand...

He's also got no military experience has he which must impact how he sees and does things (for good and bad), but I expect makes him a bit more of a wild card than he might be had he been schooled through the ranks of the Russian military maybe kebabking? Although he did gather a bunch of (ex?) Russian military senior officers to do the actual commanding and decision making - until now anyway?
 
It's also worth remembering that Putin himself was, for practical purposes, in the pro-western camp during and immediately after Perestroika, and also, more arguably, during the early years of his presidency.
 
kebabking said:
I think the important thing is to not start off with the assumption that decisions and plans, whether by Prigozhin or others, are going to be brilliantly thought through, with all the ducks in a row.

Prigozhin isn't Professor of Cunning at St Claude's College, Cambridge - he's brutal, he's not stupid, but he's not some master strategist.

I think there are probably several things happening at the same time to push this in his head - firstly that Putin has green lit Shogu and Gerasimov's proposal to bring Wagner much more under military control, which is both the end of Prigozhins power/influence/income, and it's something of a personal betrayal by Putin of someone who's done his bidding, and more effectively than many others (Shogu and Gerasimov particularly), and with whom he's had a long standing relationship.

I think - without wanting to sound misty-eyed, Prigozhin is a bad bastard, if he was at Nuremberg he'd have got the rope, and earned it a hundred times over - Prigozhin has spent far more time at the front, with his soldiers, than any Russian general of equivalent rank. There's footage of him fighting (that looks real, rather than staged), and there's footage, and quite a bit of it, of Prigozhin dealing with Wagner dead, helping to carry bodies and the like. The connection to his soldiers/whatever is, imv, proven by the fact that they simply followed him to Moscow - there's an emotional connection there thats is not simply about money.

I think he's a very angry, scared/humiliated, betrayed, and quite possibly traumatised man who's never been a strategic thinker, but one who has seized opportunities as they have presented themselves - and uptil now his instincts have served him well.

I think Putin's decision to back Shogu over him has acted as a final straw, and he's lashed out. What's particularly interesting to me is that he's managed to get 500 miles, and within a couple of hours of Moscow before that lashing out met something that didn't go his way.

Could be wrong of course....
Click to expand...
Cheers.
 
Does anyone have any idea if Shogu and Gerasimov have their own powerbase within the Russian military? Can they be easily got rid of?
 
weltweit said:
Anyone know how many Wagner soldiers and equipment are going to Belarus with their boss?

Lots of conspiracy theorist on twitter are saying that Wagner is now 100k from Kiev.
Click to expand...
Common sense says either none, or else maybe personal staff and bodyguards. Think it's a bit like asking how many patients Harold Shipman was allowed to keep.

Officially, what has been said is that Wagner fighters who did not participate are going back to Ukraine. The rest we have no idea, and we also don't know how many they are.

If you're dealing with people who think Putin masterminded the whole thing, there may be not much point.
 
i mean there's no hard evidence he left Moscow but also if he did then of course he'd have kept it a fucking secret and not admitted it, and will never admit. truth of that might not come out ever. but what's the point even? doesn't even really matter whether he did or not.
 
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