Commentary

Russians fighting Russians is attractive but someone has to win

June 26, 2023

Peter Zeihan (Commentary Contributor)

A deal has been reached after the brief mutiny in Russia by the Wagner Group, sparing its chief's life and those of his soldiers. — Image credit: AP Images

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

It’s been only a few days since the Wagner Group, headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, turned on Russia. However, the march on Moscow ended as suddenly as it began after Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal sending Prigozhin to Belarus and sparing his mercenaries from prosecution.

Straight Arrow News contributor Peter Zeihan breaks down the latest after the biggest threat to Vladimir Putin in his 23-year reign.

Excerpted from Peter’s June 26 “Zeihan on Geopolitics” newsletter:

For those of you who did more normal things this weekend, you missed a coup in Russia!

Or not.

As the saying goes, Russia is a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a tuna salad sandwich that’s gone off.

Apparently the guy who launched the coup, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, was only kidding. Whether his effort was a political stunt or negotiation tactic, it’s all over. It was fun while it lasted.

Here’s my assessment as to where things stand. There are certainly more questions than answers.

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

Everybody, Peter Zion here still an Iowa coming from my parents backyard. Obviously this Russian coup is at little nonstandard. Let’s start with what we know for sure. A little bit of background, the Russian government of Vladimir Putin is a clique of people who are primarily from St. Petersburg, where Putin was vice mayor for work in a lot of the 1990s, after returning from East Germany, where he was a KGB officer, who was in charge of stealing things, Putin’s early mindset was that the Russian system is not really capable of producing things of value for itself. So it needs to steal them. I mean, that was his job. And that came true in St. Petersburg, as well, where he fused with local organized crime in order to govern the city, when he became national leader, he basically just brought his people with him and continue that same general idea. It’s not that he is a massively corrupt person. In fact, by Russian leadership standards, he’s pretty clean. But the people around him who have kind of done all the dirty work and the heavy lifting have always been on the crop side, probably not to the same degree as the folks who looted the state back in the 1990s. But you know, this is still Russia. So even the Patriots are corrupt to a certain degree. Anyway, it’s not so much that means that Russia is a corrupt state, although it is, but instead, it’s a different sort of selection process for the people who are at the top that your job on officially is to extract wealth from the population and the system. As a result, you’re not going for the good managers, you’re going for the good people who know how to intimidate. So organized crime is working hand in hand with the Russian government at the national level. And the tools that you use in managing an organized crime syndicate are the ones that the Putin government has always used to manage the system writ large, which is one of the reasons why Putin has been able to strike a series of deals with the church and leadership because they think very similar leader kind of a warlords come robbers, and that colors the entire system. That means that most of the big strategic thinkers that used to be part of the Soviet system are not for the most part, part of the Russian government. And when it comes to things like military tactics and professionalism, that shows Putin was an inveterate Westerner because, you know, St. Petersburg is the window on the west, but he never really develop the skill sets and it’s necessary to take that beyond ideology. So we have a lot of less competence in Russian institutions compared to where it was during the Soviet period. And Putin despite what his personal preferences may have been never developed a skill set and above all else, the the team of people that is necessary to take it in a different direction. He has had a few people over the years kacian off McHale, Kazi and off if you remember him, former finance minister was one of them, people who know how to run an economy, But bit by bit most of those people have fallen out with the Putin government and are a little longer part of the picture. This is one of the reasons why Provos and was able to become so powerful not because he was a competent leader. He’s not he’s a former caterer. But he had the ideology of the, quote, hard man image in Russia. And you combine that with a general attitude within the top leadership that is non standard for government quality, and he was able to rise to the top. Okay, so that’s that, what’s going on with Poghosyan. Now? Well, a deal supposedly has been struck where he will not try to overthrow the government and hang the defense minister in Red Square. In exchange, everyone in Wagner signed a document saying that they’re now under the control of the defense ministry, and propose and personally goes to Belarus and stays there. So basically, he’s going into exile. It sounds like he was bought off. Honestly, he should consider himself lucky. We, from the video that I have seen of this armed convoy that was supposedly going to Moscow to launch a coup, I never saw more than a couple of dozen vehicles, and it wouldn’t take too much to stop that. You throw in a little bit of air power and propose and broke person certainly wasn’t going to do very well. also proposing was not part of that convoy, suggesting to me that his plan this entire time was simply to look for an exit strategy. Putin had made the decision about a week ago that the Wagner mercenary group had to be folded into the defense ministry. So honestly, Prigozhin had already lost this fight. And the coup if it wasn’t going to be serious, which turns out it wasn’t. It was always about proposing honestly just getting the best retirement package that he could. The defense minister hates him. He would have had a target on his back and this is probably the best he could hope for now, whether or not he lives in X, or routes. That’s another question. But this all raises a series of questions. So first of all, let’s talk about Wagner. We now have the bulk of Wagner who have joined per gosun On an attempted coup, even if Prigozhin never expected to succeed, the soldiers followed him. And at least one unit of the air defense system within the Russian military joined him. And there’s plenty of rumors swirling out that other units joined as well. That means if you are Putin, not only are is the most effective fighting force you have of questionable loyalty. There’s a lot of folks in the rank and file that you don’t know if you can trust anymore. So Putin’s confidence in his command over his own military structure has got to be thin. And even if every single soldier even Wagner signs on to be under Defense Ministry control, they’re not going to be viewed as very reliable. And then when you’re in the middle of a war, that’s a bit of an issue. Which brings to the second question, what about Putin himself, he has now been publicly challenged, and not by like some pro Western liberal elite, or somebody who may have been corrupted in their words, by Western media, by one of the Hardman Poghosyan has many, many, many weaknesses. And for those of you who have been cheering for him, oh my god, are you serious? This is a guy who disciplines folks with a sledgehammer to the head, and thinks that the mass rapes and the mass killings and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine has been far too soft for what the Ukrainians deserve. Putin is a genocidal dictator and Prigogine is like psycho about it. So you know, careful who you wish were root for it, all of us. I mean, the idea of Russians fighting Russians, yes, yes, yes, that’s attractive, but eventually has someone has to win. So anyway, back to Putin. He’s been he’s been threatened personally, and challenged personally, by someone far to his right. And that’s not something that he can just wish away. And even though I don’t think this coup, if that’s what it really was ever had a chance of succeeding. It happened. And at least part of that convoy got within a couple 100 kilometers of plot scale. That does not reflect well on Putin’s grip of the system is command of the details of military operations, and his ability to use law enforcement, the military and the intelligence services to maintain a grip on the country. So even if forgotten, dies tomorrow publicly at the hands of Putin in a deathmatch and Thunderdome. It’s too late. The challenge has been made, and anyone who has any concerns about the war or Russia in general, now feels that they have a little bit of political coverage and maybe speak up a little bit more than they used to. And since the state has been shown to be somewhat hollow, and Putin’s leadership have to be relatively incompetent and thin, that is a big challenge moving forward. The third big question, and we’ll know the answer to this one fairly quickly, is what about Rostov on Don, the city that goes into over that is the primary communications and logistics hub for the entirety of the Russian war. In Ukraine. It has now been offline for two days, I’m sure they’re in the process of getting it back on. But every hour that that is not operating normally is an hour that Russian forces in Ukraine do not have access to the equipment, the ammo and the reinforcements that they need. And remember, we saw two big movements of Russian forces out of Ukraine. Wagner was the first one. The Chechens were the second ones were supposedly chasing Wagner and even some of the other regular troops were starting to get pulled in order to deal with the coup. So a lot of Russian forces and pro Russian forces are out of position, providing some opportunities for the Ukrainians, most notably in the Donbass. And if you remember, the Donbass is the part of Ukraine that the Russians conquered back in 2014. And what that means, among other things, is that the Russians have never built defensive works there because they never thought they would have to defend it. So the Ukrainians were finding some difficulty pushing south into Zyprexa. But they found it actually fairly easy to push east into the Donbass with buckboard. Again, being kind of the hot spot because that is exactly where proposons forces were pulled from. Anyway, a lot going on. A lot of this is not going to clear up in the near term, but I thought it might be useful to have a bit of a primer. Cue the trolls and I will talk to you guys next time.

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