please post any subsequent updates here unless they’re huge happenings. i just woke up and half our news front page is updates which is nice but also A Lot and most of these don’t have to be their own thread
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please post any subsequent updates here unless they’re huge happenings. i just woke up and half our news front page is updates which is nice but also A Lot and most of these don’t have to be their own thread
So reading twitter…
It seems much of the “Ammunition shortage” Prigozhin was loudly complaining about was stock pilling. Similarly much of Wagnar was pulled out of Ukraine to rebuild.
There have been suggestions Prigozhin was planning to launch an attack on Sunday but the Russian MoD attacked a Wagner site forcing him to launch a day early.
One tweet suggested Wagner soliders had been calling family all day (e.g. before a big operation).
Seizing Rostok Von Don was a clever initial play, since its a major logistics hub. This allowed him to arm his troops and provides a base if the coup fails.
It seems the South Military District gave up without a fight, with soliders surrendering.
Prigozhin has sent a shock force to Moscow, its bypassing major cities and trying to get there ASAP. There is a belief senior Kremlin officials will abandon ship.
Various helicopters are attacking the shock force but it seems Wagner are using air defence. Various MI-8, KA-52 and a ll-s2 have been shown destroyed.
The Tik Tok bigrade are trying to attack Rostok, considering they aren’t “true Russians” and were used as barrier troops, this doesn’t seem to be going down well. They are also stripping Donetsk of defenders to do this.
This also means if the coup lasts for more than a few days, the Russian Army’s going to start running out of ammunition in significant portions of the front in Ukraine.
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Beau has three videos out on it already. He’s really good for context on military things.
Thanks for this, that was some pretty good insights.
He’s been almost as fast as social media on this one, and I trust his sources.
Second this. His channel is great for short yet accurate/level-headed views on topics like this. He will always get a shout-out from me.
Beau the human trafficking CIA asset? Nah thanks.
Does he have a military background or something? Why is he more of an expert on this topic?
I’ve not done a deep dive into his background, since he’s clearly been in journalism for a long time with the choice of tangents he goes off on and presumed questions he addresses. I needed only one video to know he was becoming part of my daily news diet. If he does not have a military background in some way, I would be surprised.
I think he said he was a contractor for army but didn’t go into any more details. He was also in prison for smuggling immigrants across border if I recall correctly.
His real name is Justin King, and his background is… checkered at best. His politics on screen are solid but he also has prior convictions for human trafficking. These are things you can look up. So I take everything around him with a grain of salt.
I appreciate the background. I’ve worked with a lot of journalists with checkered pasts and am one myself, so that sort of thing doesn’t bother me so long as he’s good at predicting the things he can based on experience and data and is clear when he can’t. That his politics align somewhat closely with mine makes it easier to watch, but I’m there for the analysis.
So I googled around, and found this conviction: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2008/February/08_crm_145.html
This isn’t usually what we think of as “human trafficking.” It seems that the people he smuggled understood what they were doing, and not being forced or coerced it. If that were the case, additional charges of exploitation would have been filed.
This is what I was referring to, thank you for finding it.
This is what like 99.9% of human trafficking is. They’ve successfully propagandized anyone who conflates sex trafficking with normal undocumented human movement.
An important distinction here is that he was convicted for the visa fraud kind of trafficking and not like sex trafficking or something. There’s a huge difference there but people hear trafficking and just assume it’s the worst kind imaginable.
He is intentionally vague in his videos, but he has worked with the military in some capacity as a civilian before, and he still has a lot of contacts in the military. Mostly though, I personally trust him more than most because I’ve been watching him for years and he usually turns out to be correct. He’s also pretty level headed and willing to admit what he doesn’t know.
Trying to constantly remind myself that none of us are immune to propaganda, and that it would be really easy for this scenario to be misrepresented as a clean-sweep against the Russian military. Wagner’s def gonna cause serious problems but I’d frankly be shocked if this ended with a successful coup or any meaningful change
Even if they win, this dude is a literal war monger fascist. Not better or worse than Putin.
Actually Prigozhin is arguably waaayyyy worse. Putin is a ruthless warlord just like Prigozhin, yes. They have equally virulent ideologies, yep.
But Putin is a politician first and Prigozhin is 100% not. Say what you want of Putin but deep down he still gives a shit about projecting certain images of control, law, etc – he still values the opinion of certain international communities. He is still the leader of a government, not just a battalion or an army.
Prigozhin doesn’t give a shit about any of that, he is a simple and ruthless warlord without any pretense of governance at all, who only understands force and who has no qualms about being open in his toxic ideologies.
I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely Prigozhin actually accomplishes any of his own goals towards Russia because he isn’t a politician and he’s just a thug, but I also think it’s equally unlikely Putin’s Russia recovers from this. Wagner was Putin’s pitbull. They were virtually the entirety of professional real soldiers Russia had under its command. No more pit bull changes things dramatically. We can easily expect a social “downgrade” of Russia’s status as superpower in the eyes of other nations. That leaves some big doors open for China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and of course, the United States.
We may be on the cusp of a second break up of the USSR, further breaking Russia down into disparate nationstates. That possibility offers a lot of problems on its own. It’s no longer a question of “rogue warlord gains control of russian nukes”, now its “russian nukes don’t exist, now those nukes belong to 15 new whatever-istan nations, each without any pre-existing relationships or treaties”. That’s scarier. Doubly so because in that big muck of former Russian states, Wagner could still be around in the middle of it with the biggest dick on the block. He’d predictably go Atilla, march through every one of them and conscript every dude over 16 to fight. And history tells us over and over just how those situations end: global-scale wars. Conqueror types never stop, they just keep conquering until they get stopped.
I think you’re mistaken, it is Putin who is the warmongering conqueror here, not Prigozhin.
If you think Prigozhin isn’t a warmongering conqueror, you don’t know much about him.
They both are. I’m late to this thread now, but the best case scenario for Ukraine would have been Prigozhin not backing down, Wagner getting wiped out, but the Russian military facing heavy losses, which would significantly hinder their ability to wage war.
And then maybe some other less warmongering oligarchs assassinating Putin
Just to add to this, a Prigozhin government would likely be far worse for Ukraine. While Putin had few qualms brutalizing civilians and committing war crimes Prigozhin has none. He’s a ruthless, murderous thug. The best outcome would be that he is defeated by the Russian military but that they have to withdraw troops from Ukraine, allowing the Ukrainians to seize the initiative with their offensive. The worst outcomes don’t bear thinking about.
How do you know all this about him? I’ve never heard of this guy until 5 minutes ago and am very curious.
Edit: 2022 corrupt person of the year… Great.
Have you been following the war in Ukraine at all in the last 16mo? If not, that’s surprising, but understandable.
Anyway, Prigozhin and his Wagner PMC group of mercenaries have been talked about consistently since the beginning. In the last ~6mo or so, he’s been constantly in the eyes of the (Western) media as his rhetoric against the Russian military leadership—not against Putin, though—has steadily been increasing all the way to this sudden outbreak of internecine violence.
Aside from Putin, he’s basically been the #2 face of this war from the Russian side, at least in Western media, over even Russia MoD head Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, who’s the Chief of Staff of the Russian military, who are supposedly in charge of prosecuting this war.
Oh dear god the war has been going for 16 months now?
I stopped following it after the first month.
Thanks for the information that’s very helpful.
I have such mixed feelings. Happy that there is visible weakness in Putin’s power, which could maybe lead to his eventual removal from power which would be amazing. Very frightening though that the ones replacing him might have the same goals as Putin, except this time, actually be competent at their jobs. That’s a horrible outlook for Ukraine. Oh man…
The guy has gone on the record stating that he thinks the war in Ukraine was not justified and was done simply to please the defense ministry. Who knows what he would get into as a leader, but at least with him in charge Ukraine should be less worried.
Likely to see de-escalation of the war in Ukraine if he succeedes. But I don’t have hope for a whole sale withdrawal.
My guess is at a minimum he trys to hold Crimea
Wouldn’t that be the best case for Russia? Take out military leadership, get someone else to be president, defend Crimea, try to get soldiers out of the rest of Ukraine, and get support for peace from the international community?
Essentially just a change in leadership for a, fortunately, abysmal failure.
Right now it looks as if he wants to maintain status quo, walk up there, and have this done with in a few days.
Yup.
With rumors the defense minister has been detained coupled with Wagner blaming the defense minister for the lies justifying the invasion… MAYBE this is some weird way for Putin to save face/stay alive while pulling out of eastern Ukraine?
But that sounds like bullshit, this whole thing is getting weirder by the moment right now. Smells like a lot of misinformation flowing from all sides right now.
Suppose Putin is in an information vacuum, like I’ve seen reported a few few times, then it doesn’t seem as as crazy. Still batshit insane but not as crazy. Cool to think about though.
Swan Lake
If Moscow stations start playing this, it’s a probable sign that the Coup is legitimate and the transition has started. Bonkers to think think that in our lifetime we’d see the collapse of a nuclear power. Even if Putin and his government survive this Coup, I don’t think he’ll have any political capital left to lead. By 8:00pm EDT, we’ll have a pretty good idea who’s left standing.
This is the second collapse of a nuclear power in 30~ years
Except that with the USSR falling the transition of power for Russia was a bit more peaceful than this seems like it could go since in 1991 Russia didn’t have a complete power vacuum due to Boris Yeltsin was accepted as the legitimate leader of the succeeding Russian Federation. It’s looking like the shit going on in Russia now makes the August coup attempt look like a peaceful misunderstanding
At the time that wasn’t a given. Gorbachev was under a lot of pressure from hardline communists within the party to crack down on the uprising and no-one really knew where the loyalties of the military lay. As it turned out Yeltsin won the day and the transition went peacefully but it could very easily have turned out differently.
What are you talking about? Yeltsin literally bombed congress and killed many congress people… the transition to capitalism from the USSR was and is still one the worst humanitarian crisis ever.
This ones different because we don’t have a “smooth” transition of power to another government. This is the total collapse of Putin’s autocratic government which he set up over 20 years of ruling. We had randos on twitter talk about how Wagner forces were talking over nukes. During the soviet collapse, Russia’s military had complete control of it’s nuclear arsenal. We get front row seats to the collapse, an analogy would be the train wreak in East Palestine whereas the World is the town and the train is Russia.
Wait, how could we possibly have a good idea TODAY? Aren’t they in Rustov, almost 1000 km from Moscow?
Putin has already fled Moscow to another province and some top leadership have fled to Turkey. They are moving FAST into Moscow.
Nobody in their way to stop them, Russian’s army is in Ukraine. If they continue like this Moscow will be put under siege by tomorrow.
They’re already moving fast toward Moscow. They’re saying they’re in Voronezh already but fog of war means we don’t know for sure for a while.
They’re taking over Rustov because of a huge military supply there.
Without opposition, that’s a day of travel.
@muddybulldog
Yeah if they just pickup Russian soldiers on the way without any trouble, it’ll be very fast
@exscape
I see reports of them arriving at Lipetsk (430km from Moscow) just now, after conquering Voronezj (500km from Moscow) about 6 hours ago.
They’ve already taken Voronezh as well, some 500km from Moscow and have been reported to be advancing through the Lipetsk province, 350km south of Moscow.
There are reports of gunfire at half-way between Rostov and Moscow already. But yeah, I don’t think they will manage to reach close to Moscow within a day https://nitter.net/igorsushko/status/1672434377425551361#m
Hasn’t it been stated it’s not a coup?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60947877
I don’t know what the difference between that and a march for justice are though.
People attempting coups have historically called them noncoups.
Also, if Prigozhin wins, Putin will probably end up being “killed by traitors”, but Prigozhin will vow to avenge him and bring all traitors to justice.
The other historical trend seems to be finding out who funded or influenced it after the attempt. I’m curious to see how it pans out
Historically, there’s also been a lot of nincomcoups that ended rather abruptly.
“This is not a coup” is roughly akin to “I’m not a Nazi” … you’ve brought up something outside daily norms to such an extent that you’re engaging in framing.
I get that. What I’m wondering if there have been any further developments or changes to that. Even hints to the contrary.
If things did escelate or spiral and there was no word as to directions or aspirations I feel like it could be a massive confusing fumble
Speculation is pointless; all one can do is keep up via nonsensationalized channels.
This is going to be one of those days I miss being in a newsroom.
It doesn’t even really matter what Prigozhin intended at this point. Putin has made it clear he’s treating this as a coup attempt, so Prigozhin has to either pull off a successful coup or die.
It’s down to branding. Prigozhin is framing this as a fight against the military leaders who have deceived Putin and caused him to make mistakes, but he does not blame Putin himself and is leaving room for Putin to change sides.
That