At such a remove from the actions in a vast country with no free news services, it’s hard to definitively say what’s going on with the Russian coup. So here are a variety of “state of play” snippets from various sources (Suchomimus’s discord, MSM, YouTube, Twitter, other social media, etc.). Some of these are rumors that may later turn out to be false, so treat with as many grains of salt as you deem necessary.
The Wagnerites broke through the barriers on the way to Moscow. https://t.co/ys98bor3yG pic.twitter.com/pazOSU5xXK
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) June 24, 2023
Here's another video from Voronezh đ„ pic.twitter.com/yPNlnGwY4E
— MAKS 23 đđșđŠ (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) June 24, 2023
That’s supposedly Russia hitting a Russian oil depot.
Here are some update videos. From Peter Zeihan on the Ukraine war:
I think Zeihan is too optimistic about the hole Ukraine put in the Chongar bridge, and I think Russians will try to at least run supply trucks around it and hope it doesn’t collapse.
From Suchomimus:
Wagner reportedly has 25,000-50,000 men, plus tanks on transporters and anti-aircraft systems. “This isn’t a ragtag army.”
Russia was “also building defensive positions near Serpukhov, 100 kilometers away from Moscow. So far the troops based around Moscow look like they do remain loyal to Putin.”
Developing…
Update: Is the coup already over?
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced a deal late on Saturday that Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin would depart for Belarus in return for being spared prosecution, after an abortive rebellion in which his troops made a dash for Moscow.
The announcement, carried by the Tass news agency, came shortly after embittered warlord Prigozhin announced his men were turning back from Moscow to avoid a devastating civil conflict. In a voice recording posted to his Telegram channel, Prigozhin said his troops would turn back after advancing within 200 kilometers of the capital.
It was the culmination of an extraordinary day, in which Putin had accused the Wagner group of âtreasonâ and said that their uprising risked tipping Russia into civil war.
Prigozhin, smarting over the Kremlinâs handling of the war in Ukraine, announced early on Saturday that his mercenaries had seized the major southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, a logistics hub for Putinâs war, and threatened to push on to Moscow. Wagner forces also appeared to be well established in the city of Voronezh, 500 kilometers south of the capital.
Well, that’s a disappointment to all of us who thought it would allow Ukraine to liberate itself from a distracted Russia.
Prigozhin’s coup didn’t even last the three days of the 1991 Soviet coup…
Update 2: Oryx has a list of equipment lost during the coup.
Tags: 2023 Russian Coup, Alexander Lukashenko, Chongar strait bridge, Lipetsk, Peter Zeihan, Ramzan Kadyrov, Rostov, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sergei Shoigu, Suchomimus, Ukraine, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Putin, Voronezh, Wagner Group, Yelets, Yevgeny Prigozhin
Supposedly over thanks to Lukashenko’s mediation.
I don’t understand how Putin thinks he can let Prigozhin walk away after this.
I don’t understand how Prigozin thinks Putin can let him walk away after this.
I don’t understand any of this.
Absolute batshit day and my Bayesian probability models are all shot to hell. Nobody had today on their bingo card. Putin did not come out of this looking good. He was hated but now he looks incredibly weak.
For a number of years now, my nightmare scenario has been that power in Russia is seized by… Kadyrov. Think about that scenario…
OK, firstly, has there been any video showing W convoys turning around and going back south? Agreeing to a deal and then just continuing northbound to Moscow seems like a very misdirective and coup-like thing to do if Prigozhin indeed has sponsors within the polished woodwork of the MoDâŠ
The brief could have included something like âyou are going to hear weird things during the course of these days, some of which will be from me – just keep driving north until you get the secret code wordâ.
And secondly, why would any Wagner dudes trust any âguaranteesâ that Lukashenko gave Prigozhin? Or any of the formerly-Red-Army folks who went over to the W side publicly? It seems to me their only options are drive north and finish the planned housecleaning, or go home and wait for the GRU or FSB or whatever to kick in the door, yelling âWe have changed the conditions of the dealâŠâ
I’ve got no idea what the hell is going on at this point. I wouldn’t have expected Wagner and Prigozin to give this crap up so easily, unless the whole thing was orchestrated from Moscow from the beginning.
We will see what we will see, I suppose.
Prigozhin would like to see General Gerasimov and Defence Minister Shoigu stood up against the wall. This is the reason he gave for his mutiny.
If Prigozhin can attack these two Putin loyalists without suffering any repercussions, it will demonstrate that loyalty to Putin does not bring protection from oneâs political enemies.
This makes Putin look weak, which is intolerable for an authoritarian figure.
Wagner and the other PMCs will have to be neutered. This will hobble the war effort but the Ukrainian adventure was destined for failure notwithstanding.
Putin can claim Prigozhianâs treachery cost the Russian troops a well-deserved victory and escape blame for the loss while simultaneously protecting Shoigu and Gerasimov.
Then everyone can go back to business as usual: skimming defense funds for private enrichment while the front line troops are starved of supplies.
If sub-Saharan Africa were populated by whites, it would strongly resemble Russia.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced a deal late on Saturday that Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin would depart for Belarus in return for being spared prosecution, after an abortive rebellion in which his troops made a dash for Moscow.
I don’t see that being true, and Belarus remaining a Putin puppet.
Prigozhin going to Belarus and Belarus remaining under Putin control == Prigozhin getting shot.
I’m not saying that Prigozhin won’t get shot. I’m just saying that if he remains in Belarus and not shot, then Putin is losing Belarus. Which makes Putin’s war in Ukraine even more difficult
Looks like Obama/Soros went a ‘color revolution’ too far.
I wouldn’t share a plane ride with them, or Prigozhin, any time soon.
Occupational hazard when playing the game of thrones.
If Prigozin is alive 6 months from now this was kabuki theater by Putin and him to flush out folks who aren’t on board with the war. If he ends up falling from a 6th story window then I got nothing.
Here is one possibility.
I donât know whatâs going on but itâs worth speculating. From the cheap seats:
The Russians have decided to adopt a shaky image to present to the world of a regime and State in turmoil so that the idiots of the West and the poor bastards in Ukraine decide to âstrike while the iron is hot and there is turmoil and confusion in the enemy ranks.â
So what if per rumors Lukashenko really is ill and on his last legs, and in return for not taking Moscow Prigozin gets the Shirtless Tsar to push Shoigu and Gerasimov out of hospital windows over the next few months in tragic accidents, plus he gets to be the next guy in charge of the Belarus satrapy?
Then when Putin falls out of a hospital window himself, the cage match between forces road marching from Belarus and those road marching from Kadyrovland will be the main event.
You do recall, that in the mists of time of last week, Russia gave Belorussia some tactical nukes.
Either this is a lateral reorganization, or Vlad feels he has serious power centers in Minsk.
Or something.
Over at Spinstrangenesscharm (an Israeli) the guess is:
“Either Putin and Prigozhin cooked this up as a way to make an excuse to exit Ukraine while blaming the whole mess on [Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu and others in the oligarchical circle, or Prigozhin and his lieutenants are dead men walking.”
This is one of those sequences where everyone is going to be speculating about what the hell was going on right up until the point where it becomes obvious, and until it does? Good luck figuring it out.
We may never know, not until the archives with all the background become accessible. Maybe not even then.
I’m just totally taken aback by the entire course of events. One, I never thought Prigozin would turn on Putin; two, if he did, I’d have never expected him to go right to the doorstep of Moscow and just quit; three, I’d have never in my wildest ravings have said “Yeah, the Russian Army is just going to stand aside and let all that happen…”
Which sort of implies that this was a head fake by Putin, and that he and everyone else knew it was theater, but… Why the hell did they go to the extent of shooting down aircraft? Who was the audience for all the drama? I don’t think that any of this is going to help convince any Russians to do much of anything; the demonstrated apathy is mind-boggling.
We’re not going to know “…what it all means…” for some time, maybe bordering on forever.
Weird times, these are. This whole thing is something that if you went back in time and described it to your younger self, that person would be sad because it was obvious that they were doomed to a bout of extreme insanity in their later life…
re: ed in texas
Russia move some of their tactical nukes to Belarus. The arming code and control still rest with Russian Army stationed there. This is like saying that US gave Turkey some medium range nuclear tipped missile just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There’s a slight difference between the US placing nukes in Turkey vs. the Russians putting them in Belarus… For one, we know that our Permissive Action Links work. Even if Turkey were to take the nukes at Incirlik (which are still there, BTW…), they’d have to remanufacture them in order to make them work.
Russian nukes? There were reasons they kept those things under lock and key of the KGB, which was that they didn’t trust their PAL systems. Rightfully. And, depending on vintage? There’s no telling what the hell they actually put into Belarus; it’s not like they had access to some super-secret superior arms industry for their nukes that the rest of the Russian military didn’t; the same issues apply across the board. What condition are those Belarus nukes in, what generation are they, and who has control of the damn codes, if there even are any.
Friend of mine participated in the START treaty inspections back in the 1990s. He came back from those in total awe of the sheer half-assedness he found everywhere they looked, and one of the things that blew his mind was the lax security controls on some of the nukes. The Brits weren’t much better… At one point, they had some of their stuff secured with combination bicycle locks, and the Soviets didn’t even bother with that level of security, relying on KGB conscripts to serve as guards…
There’s a real chance that either the nukes transferred to Belarus are essentially inert, or that the “security” on them is a fig leaf.
If you’d spent the nights on duty that I did with my friend who did those inspection tours in the former Soviet Union, you might not ever sleep soundly again. They publicly said that they had determined that there were no “loose nukes”, but the reality…? Nobody, including the Soviets, had any real idea. You went into that situation expecting there to be solid facts, tracking, accounting, all of the rest. There wasn’t. The Soviet nuclear complex was run the exact same way as the rest of their industry was, with idiots in charge demanding the impossible from people lower on the totem pole who’d then lie their asses off and suborn the inspectors just to survive. The inspection teams went out with the records from the central offices in Moscow, and they’d be lucky if they found anything on the ground that matched what Moscow thought. He remembered guys blowing their brains out the minute the START teams showed up, because they knew the jig was up.
We spent literal billions trying to help the Russian Federation gain control over things and put in place good controls. How much of that has stuck? No idea; don’t take a thing you hear about it at face value, because you’re dealing with Russians who instinctually lie and prevaricate about these things to a degree you’d find incomprehensible.
My friend said that the prevalent attitude was that the only way their peculations would ever get discovered was if a nuclear war actually happened, and if that did, then they’d all be dead under a rain of American nukes anyway… So, who cared if the stuff worked or not? They found instance after instance where things had been diverted to build dachas and other nice things for the poor generals that got assigned to run the missile fields in Bumpf*ck Urals… It was insane.
You ever get the chance to talk to a guy who was on those inspection teams, and they’re willing to go up to the line on the things they saw and weren’t supposed to talk about? You’ll have a fascinating conversation, one that will absolutely f*ck with your sleeping well at night for years.
Only saving grace about all that stuff? Nukes require careful maintenance. Anything that “leaked” after the fall of the Soviet Union has likely aged out, and would, at best, fizzle. One would hope, anyway…
Perhaps I had too much faith in at least the professionalism on the part of the Nuclear Navy (see Kursk disaster) or Strategic Rocket Forces (which has warheads that require maintenance, replacement of at least the tritium that has half-life of 12 years). God only knows how many of those warheads are actually works.
I don’t think anyone knows.
The Russian record for consistently making high-technology items that require extensive amounts of manufacturing precision and consistency ain’t what I’d call good; the so-called “Monday-morning Ford” that you were supposed to avoid because the guys were coming back from a weekend off, and were still a little hung-over? That issue permeates the entire Russian/Soviet industrial system, to include the supposedly “better” military side of things. And, with the lower prestige, money, and all the rest that’s been going on since the Wall came down? Most of the really competent people left, to work elsewhere. It’s why the guys at Roscosmos are not what they were, thirty years ago.
Putin basically took the crown jewels of the Soviet system, the military-industrial complex, along with the space industry, and pissed them away. They’re not getting reconstituted any time soon, and may not be recoverable in any real way without extensive reconstruction that’ll be a recapitulation of their rise to international competitiveness in the first damn place. Look at all the major projects they’ve undertaken for the Indians, for God’s sake… How many of those have come off? They nearly sunk their only “operational” carrier while it was in the f*cking drydock, they’ve blown up the technologists who were trying to build those much-vaunted “nuclear torpedoes” on several occasions, and then there was the Kursk…
I would not want to risk a nuclear war with the Russians, but at the same time, I also wouldn’t bet money on their stuff working, either. The whole system over there is a corrupt mess, with zero credibility going up, down, or sideways anywhere at any level. You can’t trust anyone to do what they’re supposed to be doing, when they’re supposed to be doing it, or how they’re supposed to do it. And, that issue is everywhere in the system like some sort of cancer on the body politic. It’s always been an issue with the Russian culture, but it’s gotten incredibly bad under Putin. I don’t think even he knows what ground truth is, out in the hinterlands of the Russian state. He certainly overestimated the capabilities of his military and intelligence organizations, which have demonstrably not been up to standard since well before February 24th, 2022.
“The whole system over there is a corrupt mess …
Wen Ho Lee.
Drug raid in 2005 turning up PAL lab documents.
Rear Adm. Timothy ‘Poker Face’ Giardina.
‘Stiletto Sam’ Brinton.
Pot meet kettle.
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This discussion of the PAL code reminds me of the opening scene of WarGames https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-T_uhQ0iE4 where the operator of the silo didn’t know that they’re doing an exercise, and an unacceptable number of the operators failed to launch.
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