Commentary

How Russia was on the brink of a civil war

June 26, 2023

Peter Zeihan (Commentary Contributor)

A civil war was possibly averted after Belarus stepped in and helped end the Wagner group's mutiny against Russian military forces. — Image credit: Getty Images

All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.

How close was Russia to a civil war? For more than 24 hours, starting on June 23, Yevgeny Prigozhin — leader of the Wagner group — led a mutiny against the Russian military. His mercenary forces seized Russia’s military facilities in Rostov-on-Don, before advancing towards Moscow. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko apparently convinced Prigozhin — once a close friend of Putin’s — to stand down.

Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan gives a recap of the action while it was happening.

Excerpted from Peter’s June 24 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:

An attempted coup is in progress in Russia. The mercenary group Wagner, led by a one-time confidant of Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is attempting to overthrow the Kremlin. The implications for the Ukraine War are … massive.

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All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.

Hey everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Marshalltown, Iowa. This is my old middle school behind me. I was trying to bide my own business and have some personal time and attend a birthday party here in my hometown. But apparently there’s a coup going on in Russia, so no rest for the wicked, short version is over the course of the 23rd 24th and 25th. A guy by the name of pre gosun, who is the leader of the Wagner paramilitary group, who has been an unofficial arm of the Russian military now for several years, has launched an arm in its direction his troops have left their positions in Ukraine. They have moved into Russia proper, they have captured the city of Rostov on Don, which has a population of about 1 million, they’re attempting to flip Russian troops to their sides. And the Russian government, Vladimir Putin himself has declared proposing to be a traitor, and has called upon the military and security services to crush him. Prigozhin has said that the President is misinformed. But it’s okay because we’re going to have a new president soon. Anyway.
As someone who very vividly remembers duck and cover drills and is very aware that the Russians had been aiming nuclear weapons up us my entire life, there’s something just deeply hilarious about this. The trick here is to not blow anything too much out of proportion, because there’s a lot we don’t know. So let’s start with what is certain raw stuff Adnan is the primary a logistical and communications point for the Russian military in the entirety of the Ukrainian war. So first and foremost, the Ukrainians are making a lot of popcorn here, and are getting very serious about their counter offensive. Now until this point, at least until the 23rd, the counter offensive was not going particularly well, in any battle, where the Ukrainians are facing off against the Russians. And the Russians only lose three times as many troops as the Ukrainians do. That’s a battle that the Ukrainians have lost. They’re in a huge material and demographic disadvantage, and they just haven’t been able to achieve breakthrough. There are multiple lines of Defense’s that the Russians have built over recent months. It starts with minefields. And as you get further back, it’s anti-tank barriers and trenches. And for the most part, the Ukrainians haven’t been able to get through the minefields. So I don’t want to call it a failed offensive, I don’t want to call the stall defensive. It’s been it’s definitely not been going as much as well as they’d hoped. But on the 23rd, we saw two things out number one, a change in military strategy. The Ukrainians have gone from targeting commanding troll bunkers to targeted ammo dumps, which is something usually do before a big push. And the trocar bridge in Crimea was hit by a few missiles to make the rail system completely impassable until repairs are done. Now, the Russians do have the technical capacity to do that, but it’s going to be something that takes weeks, which means that there was this window in western Ukraine, where the Russians in the western half of the front from millet to pole West, were not able to function. And that provides an opportunity for Ukrainian forces. Now, I’m going to put all of that together now in a video from something that I was originally planning on posting before the coup started. So here’s the Ukrainian section of that. And then we’ll come back to the Russian section. We’re now well into the third week of the conflict. And the Ukrainians haven’t achieved any sort of breakthrough. There’s two main lines of defense that the Russians are trying to hold. The first is a series of minefields. And the second is a series of more strategic defensive emplacements, like Dragon’s Teeth and trenches. And the Ukrainians haven’t really been able to get past the minefields to get to the real defenses yet, and what that means is they’ve just kind of been bogged down in attritional fighting. And because the Russians have an order of magnitude more industrial plans and reserves and at least a factor of three more population. Any battle in which the Ukrainians are duking out, mano a mano is not one that they’re going to do well, and in fact, any battle where the Ukrainians only killed three times as many Russians, as they lose in their own troops is a battle they’ve lost. So instead of seeing the dramatic breakthroughs that we saw on KEARSON in Kharkov last summer, it’s been a slugfest and it hasn’t gone. Well. That said, a couple things. Number one, we’re still early in the offensive, they’re still probing for weaknesses. They’re still going after command and control. And then second, in the last 96 hours, a few things have changed. First of all, three, four days ago, Ukrainians shifted from using their missiles to target command and control systems to going after ammo dumps. And you would do that when you’re getting to the next phase of the operation. You feel like you’ve broken up the ability to read act and now you’re trying to not just a trip, there are forces that make sure that the forces cannot actually get meaningful supplies. But the real issue happened with the morning of Thursday the 22nd of June, when the Ukrainians put some serious holes in a few supply bridges that are critical for Russian forces. And to understand the significance of that targeting shift, we need to look at a few maps. Here’s our first map of the Ukrainian space, nothing to explain exciting here. The red line is roughly where the front is the Russians occupy the territory to the east and south of that Orion, and the yellow bars are aware of the Ukrainians that put their primary thrusts. Now, the the one on the left there, that’s the Zapper needs to front. The Ukrainians have been expected to go in that direction since the very beginning of this conflict. Because if they can push down to the Sea of Azov, they can basically isolate the entirety of the Southwestern Front End Crimea, because not only would there no longer be a land bridge between Russia proper and Crimea, but the Ukrainians would be able to target the current straight bridge directly. But they’ve had more success going further into the East because there are fewer defensive works. But still, in all these cases, you’re talking about advances in the single digits of kilometers, no sort of strategic breakthrough where mobile Russian forces, excuse me, were mobile Ukrainian forces and get them behind the Russians and isolate them and break them up and for strategic retreats and routes. Okay, here’s a zoom in on Ukraine. The single most important thing here is, of course, the courage bridge, and attack unclaimed attack, we don’t really know who did it. But either the Americans the Ukrainians took out one of the spans of the courage bridge last summer. Now the courage bridge has real lines to it to two lane road connections and one rail connection. The Ukrainians, Americans, whoever it happened to be, were able to take out one of those two lane road connections and start a series of fires on a rail car that was going by on the rail bridge at that time, which warped the bridge and made it impossible to handle cargo. So no more trains in and out of Crimea from this route needs to be the primary route. And only two of the four road lanes were being asked to go on truck. And when they do have convoys coming or going, they have to shut it down to other traffic. So that was a big hit. And it forced the Russians to shift their supply route over to this area to the land connections that go into Crimea. So let’s zoom in there. Now, first thing to understand about this area is a lot of this is not land. This entire zone here is a series of brackish lakes, which obviously you’re not going to be running cargo across. In fact, there’s only really two ways to cross. On the left, you’ve got the proper land connection, which is an all land route that goes through southern Ukraine, it is the furthest connection from the front. It’s not that the infrastructure there doesn’t work, it’s just that it’s not great. However, if you go to the yellow arrow, the one further to the right to the east, you’re looking at the John Hart crossing. Now John har has a rail connection and a road connection. And it’s these connections that the Ukrainians put some holes in, they use a special kind of warhead, of which I’m not going to go into detail because it’s not my focus, but it blue all the way through the concrete blue all the way through the rebar put a giant hole right in the middle of the thing, you’re not taking trucks across that you’re not taking the rail across that until such time as these are repaired, repaired, it is not beyond the capacity of the Russians. But keep in mind that it’s been months since Kirche. Had that hole put at it and the rail connection there has still not been been rebuilt. One of the many, many downsides of the Soviet dissolution is we’ve had a simultaneous education crisis and demographic crisis. Now decades in progress, the technical education system in Russia Kalash back in the 80s. And their demographics. They’ve had a death rate that’s been higher than the birth rate for 30 years now. Which means that the youngest suite of people who have the full skill set to be technical experts, they’re in their 50s. Right now they’ll turn 60 this year on average. They still haven’t replaced the span and courage, they still haven’t replaced the rail system, there’s a question as to whether they can. Now the children are crossing is not nearly sophisticated. Instead, it’d be at a high elevated suspension bridge. It’s a low block bridge. It’s not blocking navigation. This is not a navigable waterway system. They probably can do it, but it’s going to take them a few weeks, which means in the meantime, ennemi cargo going to and from Ukraine has to come from that Western bridge. And this means that the soldiers in Ukraine, the Russian soldiers and occupied recruiting are facing a double bind come back to this map. Notice the city of Miria pool. Basically any Russian troops that are west of that zone, have basically been cut off from supplies that come from Russia proper off in the east, they got everything they needed from Crimea, which is, you know, more difficult to support now. And now with the China bridge offline is going to take about a week for the Russians to reroute everything further was to then cross a larger distant chunk of territory. That would suggest to me that the Ukrainians are as ready as they can possibly be to make a push in that direction. Now coming down from Zephyr desea, it doesn’t really matter where they penetrate as long as they reach the Sea of Azov. It could be east of Mariupol, it could be west of multiple, it could be anywhere in between, anyway, that they can cut that land bridge forever, and then have the range in order to hit the remains of the courage bridge direct.
If we’re going to see an attack, if this counter offensive is going to really manifest as something, these are exactly the circumstances you would expect the Ukrainians to shape and now they’ve done it. And since there is going to be a window before the Russians can redirect supplies further to the west. The troops in the meltable area are now completely cut off vulnerable. They’re not going to get reinforcements. They’re not going to get fuel, they’re not going to get artillery shells and animal. Now would be the time. Now that’s the strategic picture that we’re seeing right now. Okay, now back to Russian side of things with the coup. Rostov on Don is the primary jumping off point for Russian forces into Crimea in the southern front and as long as Rostov on Don is off line, it is impossible for any Russian forces anywhere in the Crimea or unoccupied Ukraine to reinforce to get more troops to get equipment to get fuel. So this is a beyond a golden opportunity for the Ukrainians to give the Russians a serious drubbing. The question is, how long will it last? While there have been many, many reports say in many, many, many things. There is no sign of direct large scale fighting between Wagner forces and Russian forces at the moment. But to the Wagner forces are definitely in command of the logistical train on which the entire Russian army in Ukraine dependence and in that sort of situation. wonderful opportunity for the Ukrainians. Okay, next chunk. We’re gonna go into some of the stuff going on in Russia proper

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