I’ve had nothing really to say about the Ukraine situation, cos frankly what is there I can add to that discourse… but it’s taken an interesting turn in the last couple of days. The longer it dragged on, the more I expected one of V. Putin’s generals to get the shits and off him, but I think they’ve all been too worried about accidentally falling out of high windows like certain critics of Vlad have done (here‘s the most recent one I can find).
However, it seems at least of Putin’s mates has finally got pissed off enough with him, that being Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner Group, which is basically Russia’s state-owned mob of mercenaries… I saw someone post online a quote by Machiavelli about mercenaries, which can be read here, and I think old Niccolo was not necessarily wrong, there really is only so much you can buy from them, and Prigozhin seems to have passed this point.
I don’t fully understand what’s been happening, but from what I can see, Russia started leaning more heavily on Wagner men which gave Prigozhin ever greater influence. but also brought increasing tension between him and the “proper” army. This kind of peaked a few weeks ago when P. showed a video of a Russian army commander allegedly claiming to have ordered his men to fire upon the Wagner fighters, and things have spiralled out of control to the point where it’s now a full-scale uprising by Wagner. And possibly some Russian troops with them.
Things are obviously chaos at the moment and I have no idea what to believe from what I see on social media and news sites, cos both sides could be and almost certainly are spreading bullshit everywhere. There’s reports that Putin has already fled the country, and Lukashenko, his fellow dictatorial shit from Belarus, has supposedly also fled that country, but who can say right now. P. was behind a lot of Russia’s interference 2016 and 2018 US elections and runs this thing, so I expect his propaganda machine would be as good as Putin’s. Seeing a couple of people on Mastodon speculating that the whole thing is actually a stunt by the latter, who they’re claiming has ordered P. to stage this as the pretext for a major crackdown… and yeah, I don’t believe that.
But in any case there’s a decided whiff of 1917 in the air again, and we all know how that went… except this time I suspect it could be worse. I said I’d expected one of Putin’s generals to do something like this and I wasn’t the only one at at the time, but I remember someone saying it wouldn’t solve anything cos anyone who might replace him would still be absolutely fucking terrible. And P. clearly would be too, and probably not just for the reasons Machiavelli describes. As others are saying, it’s not even a coup so much as it is a mob war…
Whatever. I suppose Ukraine is enjoying the show, however it ends, cos even if it ends badly for Prigozhin, Putin is still toast sooner rather than later, but whoever loses, I’m not sure the rest of the world wins. I’m just glad Trump’s not president in the US right now. For many reasons, obviously, but not least because we can guess how he would react to what’s going on. P. might have done the online work to help get Trump elected, but I think Vlad is where the Republicans’ real loyalties remain…
