I’m glad I didn’t bother commenting at the time on the strange events that occurred in Russia a couple of weeks ago when one of Putin’s longtime henchmen, Yevgeny Prigozhin, decided to use his Wagner group of Mercenaries to take over the city of Rostov-on-Don (the military base of command for the Ukrainian war) and then head towards Moscow to take out his enemies in the Russian Military.

Not Putin of course. Prigozhin made that very clear from the start and in public via his Russian Telegram account, in a way that nobody could pretend was Western lies (lots of video at the link). In fact he even tried to make it all sound very patriotic; the Russian generals had screwed up the Ukrainian invasion from the start, including lying about the reasons for it, were still screwing up, and had to be replaced for the sake of winning the war, the honour of Mother Russia and to preserve the great leadership of the god head Putin:

“PMC Wagner Commanders’ Council made a decision: the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped. They neglect the lives of soldiers. They forgot the word “justice”, and we will bring it back…After we finished what we started, we will return to the frontline to protect our motherland. Presidential authority, Government, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Rosgvardia, and other departments will continue operating as before. 
…
 “The Ministry of Defense is trying to deceive the public and the president and spin the story that there were insane levels of aggression from the Ukrainian side and that they were going to attack us together with the whole NATO block,”

This didn’t stop Putin from going on National TV, talking about charges against Prigozhin and using words like “Traitor”, which is not a word used lightly in that country, and not when you had Wagner troops shooting down several Russian attack helicopters just a couple of hundred miles down a highway from Moscow.

And then it was suddenly all over, after just 48 hours. Prigozhin called a halt to his troops. The President of Belarus got involved in negotiations and the next thing everybody knew Prigozhin had given up control of Wagner and headed into exile in Belarus, with all charges dropped. Yes, really:

Just in April of this year, opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza, Jr was sentenced by a Russian court to 25 years in prison for merely speaking out against Putin’s war in Ukraine. Kara-Murza’s treason conviction was “the latest move in the Kremlin’s relentless crackdown on anyone who dares to criticize the invasion.”

Well yes, but Kara-Murza didn’t have thousands of armed mercenaries behind him, spread from Russia to Ukraine to Africa. It’s not as if Prigozhin’s very public criticism of the Russian military and its leaders is new. He’s been unloading on them for months, in particular accusing them of not supplying his Wagner troops with sufficient artillery support around Bakhmut and letting his guys die in their thousands after they took over the fighting there. I kept wondering how the hell he was being allowed to do this so publicly but figured it was the usual powerplay of such states, where the leader keeps his minions on their toes by setting them against one another.

In fact some of the crazier Russian supporters pushed that line hard:

There was no civil war. There were zero casualties. It was just Prigozhin being batshit crazy like he always is, and right back to the frontlines after his outburst. What do I think? I think Prigozhin is working with Putin as usual to accomplish any number of goals. What did Putin gain? The disguise of the movement of mass quantities of his troops, the appearance of being weak to bait Ukraine to attack (they did and lost outside Artyomovsk), and he weeded out any traitors who may have tried to join with Prigozhin. What did Putin ultimately lose? Nothing.

As the writer of that article, former US Infantry officer, Strieff, says in response:

This may make sense if you are huffing glue and using PCP suppositories; otherwise, not so much. Prigozhin was not “being batsh** crazy as usual.” He took over two Russian cities, including the headquarters of the Southern Military District that controls the fighting in Ukraine. Units of the Russian Army rallied to his banner. There weren’t “zero casualties.” Wagner shot down at least six Russian aircraft. Traitors weren’t weeded out; they were given amnesty. Trigger-happy security forces killed civilians. No one “worshipped” Prigozhin. Everyone knows who and what he is.

So what the hell was this? A coup d’etat? Rebellion? Putsch? Revolt? Insurrection? Mutiny? You can see the definitions over at Pablo’s post, When a coup is not a coup, where he concludes that it was none of these things. I agree.

This was a testing of the waters by Prigozhin, to see who or what would flock to his banner, and although some did it was not enough and he quickly folded his cards to escape to relative safety. But in this test he revealed cracks in Russian society. The deputy chief of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, said Prigozhin was welcome to take Shoigu and Gerasimov away. Here is video of Prigozhin leaving the headquarters of the Southern Military District in Rostov-on-Don, with a crowd shouting their support for him. There was also video of locals clearly not pleased to see the return of Russian Police.

None of this made Putin or the Russian Army look competent, and it has to be humiliating for Putin, no matter what propaganda he tries to push across his MSM. What strongman makes a deal with a man he called a traitor? Part of his army abandoned him. A lot of people in areas taken over by Wagner were openly supportive.

And now, just two weeks later, here’s an example of Putin’s weakness, courtesy of a very similar figure, Turkey’s President Erdogan, who not only met with Ukrainian President Zelensky, but took two specific anti-Russian actions.

First he announced his unambiguous support for Ukrainian membership in NATO. Considering the stalling actions he made over admitting Sweden and Finland to come out with this is a big deal.

Second, he released to Zelensky five of the senior commanders of the Azovstal iron and steel works siege in Mariupol, which Turkey had promised to interne in Turkey until the end of the war as part of POW-exchange that Turkey negotiated last September. Remember that these are people that Putin declared to be neo-Nazis. Russia was not happy:

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed Ukraine and Turkey “violated” prisoner exchange agreements amid the return of Ukrainian commanding officers who defended the Azovstal steel plant from Turkey.

Turkey has been walking a very thin line in this conflict; they supplied some military weapons to Ukraine – quietly – but have also been diplomatic with Russia and not tried to inflame the situation. Certainly you couldn’t say that Erdogan is pro-West, let alone pro-American. No, you only pull stunts like this against Putin when you’ve sniffed the wind and concluded that he’s been weakened and will be weakened further.

And while Prigozhin’s effort may have failed there are other power centres in Russia that will be looking at these events, drawing their conclusions, and making plans for a post-Putin future. As this article notes:

Putin is often called a Machiavellian. If he has read Machiavelli, he would know that a prince is never safe from armed militia men and their divided loyalties… Mercenaries and auxiliaries, as well as banished men in foreign courts, as Machiavelli wrote, have no fixed loyalty, and are disposed to constantly probing the limits of their power; only fear keeps them in line.

And it’s not as if Prigozhin didn’t have a point about Russian military leadership that Putin must know by now:

The planners were Shoigu, the Russian version of an affirmative action hire with no military knowledge, and Gerasimov, the Russian strategist who once thought information warfare is the future rather than hard power. Any military strategist worth his salt knows that logistics is far more important than tactics. Gerasimov’s boneheaded plan to take Kiev led to Russia losing the cream of her VDV airborne troops in a matter of weeks. 

Here we have two highly credentialed midwit bureaucrats deliberately misleading their countrymen about a war that they thought would be won in three months at maximum with a strategy that did not consider local nationalism and resistance, and who thought postmodernity is all about gray zones, pink-haired people on computers, and utilization of disinformation, unlike those neanderthal hard men with blood in their eyes. If that sounds familiar, you might be having an attack of noticing things that you shouldn’t. 

The rise of incompetent people like that are merely symptoms of the cracks.