Lazy Caturday Reads

The Merchant’s Wife at Tea, by Boris Kustodiev

Happy Caturday!!

All hell has broken loose in Russia, and I’m not a good judge of what is happening, although it’s certainly interesting to watch events as they happen. It does look as though Putin is getting weaker. Yevgeny Prigozhin, formerly known as “Putin’s Chef,” who is the leader of the Wagner Group, a private mercenary organization, is challenging Putin’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and top general Valery Gerasimov over the way the Ukraine war is going.

It’s important to note that Prigozhin is not a good guy. He was in charge of the Internet Research Agency, which led the disinformation campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election and put Trump in the White House.

I’ve been watching TV and reading knowledgeable people on Twitter off and on since late last night when Dakinikat called and got me to pay attention. I was sort of hibernating yesterday and sure enough, something big happened while I was escaping reality. Anyway, I’ll post some of what Russia experts are saying at the moment. Obviously, this is a fast-moving story. In fact, MSNBC is reporting right now that mercenary forces are marching toward Moscow and Putin has ordered makeshift truck blockades of roads into the city.

One interesting thing I’ve seen on Twitter is the number of former Republicans who are expressing relief that Biden is in the White House now and not Donald Trump.

This is from Russia expert Tom Nichols, who posted a primer at The Atlantic last night: A Crisis Erupts in Russia.

A simmering political feud in Russia has exploded into a crisis. The head of a Russian mercenary army fighting in Ukraine alongside Moscow’s official military forces has declared war against the Russian ministry of defense, claiming that Russia’s war in Ukraine was all the result of a giant plot by defense bureaucrats to mislead Russian President Vladimir Putin into a pointless conflict.

‘A Girl With Kittens’ (1895) by Ivan Gorokhov (1863-1934)

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, also claims that Russian government forces struck his men and inflicted numerous casualties. The Russian Defense Ministry denies any involvement with the strike, but Prigozhin has gone, literally, on the warpath, claiming that he will march into the southern Russian city of Rostov and onward if necessary to topple the corrupt officials leading the Russian Defense Ministry and military high command. He is asking Russian police and military forces to stand aside while he gets “justice” for his troops.

The Russian government, which has long welcomed Prigozhin’s assistance in conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, has apparently had enough of all this, especially now that Prigozhin is dismantling the Kremlin’s rationalizations for the war—and by extension, making Putin look like a fool or a liar or both. The Russian security service has opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for instigating a coup and issued a warrant for his arrest, something they could do only with Putin’s approval.

As for why this is happening, Nichols writes:

Think of this conflict not as a contest between the Russian state and a mercenary group, but as a falling-out among gangsters, a kind of Mafia war.

A government doing a lot of bad things in the world can make great use of a cadre of hardened and nasty mercenaries, and Prigozhin has been making his bones for years as a tough guy leading other tough guys, ultranationalist patriots who care more about Mother Russia than the supposedly lazy and corrupt bureaucrats in Moscow do. The Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, is led by a political survivor named Sergei Shoigu, who has managed to stay in the Kremlin in one capacity or another since 1991. Shoigu never served in the Soviet or Russian military, yet affects the dress and mannerisms of a martinet.

Prigozhin and Shoigu, both personally close to Putin, have good reason to hate each other. Shoigu’s forces have been humiliated in Ukraine, shown up both by the Ukrainians and by Prigozhin’s mercenaries (a point Prigozhin hammers home every chance he gets). Prigozhin claims that Shoigu has withheld ammunition and supplies from Wagner, which is probably true; a defense minister is going to take care of his own forceto displace Shoigu or move up somehow in the Moscow power structure. But Shoigu is no rookie, and a Russian Defense Ministry edict was about to go into force requiring all mercenaries to sign up with the Russian military, which would place them under Shoigu’s control.s first. The two men have a lot of bad blood between them, and Prigozhin might have been hoping to displace Shoigu or move up somehow in the Moscow power structure. But Shoigu is no rookie, and a Russian Defense Ministry edict was about to go into force requiring all mercenaries to sign up with the Russian military, which would place them under Shoigu’s control.

Read more at The Atlantic. If you can’t get past the paywall, try emptying your cache. They allow a couple of free articles.

Also from the Atlantic, by Anne Applebaum: Russia Slides Into Civil War. Is Putin facing his Czar Nicholas II moment?

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

‘Tête-à-tête’ (1868) by Vladimir Makovsky (1846-1920)

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily….

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply….

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

There’s more speculation at the link. Again, try emptying your cache to get by the paywall. I was able to get these two free articles this morning.

Some background from Max Seddon at The Financial Times: ‘He went nuts’: how Putin’s caterer served a dish of high treason.

When they first appeared in 2014 to fight covertly in Ukraine, the masked militiamen of Russia’s Wagner group epitomised how Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin had mastered a new, underhand form of warfare.

‘Girl In Front of a Mirror’ (1848) by Filipp Budkin (1806-1850)

But after Wagner paramilitaries took control of at least one Russian city on Saturday and began a “march of justice” on Moscow, the blowback from nine years of war in Ukraine threatened the very foundations of Putin’s state — with a problem of his own making.

After months of lurid public infighting, the conflict between Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitaries and the Russian defence ministry has boiled over into the first coup attempt in Russia in three decades.

Although Putin appeared shocked by his former caterer Prigozhin’s “treason” during a stern five-minute address to the nation, the chaos indicated how years of covert warfare, poor governance and corruption had created the greatest threat to his rule in 24 years….

The roots of Prigozhin’s revolt date back to 2014 when Prigozhin set up Wagner as a way for Russia to disguise its involvement in a slow-burning war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The group helped keep eastern Ukraine under Russian proxy control and, as its mission expanded, gave Russia plausible deniability for sorties as far away as Syria and Mozambique.

Seddon provides quite a bit more background on the conflict between Prigozhin and Putin. Read that at the link if you’re interested. On what’s happening now, Seddon writes:

The exact circumstances leading to the uprising remain unclear. One person close to the FSB said Russia’s security forces had spent the past several days preparing for some kind of assault, suggesting Prigozhin had learnt of the plan and had decided to go out all guns blazing. “This isn’t out of nowhere and it didn’t come as a surprise,” the person said.

Another former senior Kremlin official said the conflict with the army had driven Prigozhin — a former criminal who is said to revel in publicly executing deserters — to even further extremes.

“He went nuts, flew into a rage and went too far. He added too much salt and pepper,” the former official said. “What else do you expect from a chef?”

An important trigger for Prigozhin’s uprising appears to have been Putin’s decision to back the defence ministry’s attempts to bring Wagner to heel.

Read more insights on Prigozhin’s state of mind at The Financial Times.

‘Morning Tea’ by Vladimir Makovsky (1846-1920)

Yaroslav Trofimov at The Wall Street Journal writes about what’s happening now: Russia’s Putin Orders Military to Crush Wagner Power Grab, Calls It Treason.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Saturday he ordered his military to act against the Wagner paramilitary group that seized the southern Russian city of Rostov, describing its actions as treason that put the country’s survival in peril.

As Wagner columns moved toward Moscow Saturday, they were attacked by Russian aircraft in the Voronezh region, some 300 miles south of the capital. Videos from the area showed the city of Voronezh’s main fuel depot ablaze, a Ka-52 helicopter destroying a vehicle, and another helicopter narrowly escaping a Wagner antiaircraft missile. A Russian plane was also shot down.

The crisis unfolding in Russia represents the most serious challenge to Putin’s 23-year rule—a direct consequence of the strains put on Russian society and armed forces by the war that he unleashed against Ukraine in February last year.

If the Wagner insurrection isn’t put down swiftly, the strife could significantly undermine Russia’s front-line troops in Ukraine just as Kyiv carries out a Western-backed offensive to reclaim occupied lands. The uprising exposes the fault lines that have already emerged in Russian society and challenges Putin’s strategy of waging a long war against Ukraine in the hopes that Western political will to support Kyiv would eventually collapse.

Wagner troops, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, earlier in the day took over the main military headquarters for southern Russia, in Rostov, and other installations there, encountering virtually no resistance from the regular armed forces. After that, Wagner sent columns of troops northward toward Moscow, as the Russian army rushed to cut off highways and defend the capital city. Moving past Voronezh, Wagner’s tanks and troop carriers were seen by Saturday lunchtime crossing the Lipetsk region, where authorities called on residents to remain indoors.

While Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian president remained in the Kremlin, flight-monitoring services showed that at least two special flight-squadron aircraft used by Russia’s top leadership left the capital for St. Petersburg on Saturday. Russian troops started preparing fortifications on approaches to Moscow.

Read more at the WSJ. I didn’t encounter a paywall when I used the link at Memeorandum.

‘Her Favorite’ (1905) by Nikolai Bodarevsky (1850-1921)

The Guardian is posting live updates here.

2 hours ago:

The governor of Russia’s Lipetsk province says the Wagner mercenary group has entered the region, AP reports.

The Lipetsk region is about 360km (225 miles) south of Moscow and much closer to the capital than Rostov-on-Don, where Wagner forces appeared during the night.

3 minutes ago:

The Moscow region has suspended mass events outdoors and at educational institutions until 1 July, authorities have announced.

This follows the mayor of Moscow urging residents to refrain from travelling around the capital.

31 minutes ago:

Former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, said on Saturday that Russia will not allow the Wagner mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin to turn into a coup or a global crisis, Russia’s state news agency TASS reports.

Answering questions from journalists, Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, said the whole world would be on the brink of catastrophe if Russian nuclear weapons fell into the hands of Wagner.

“The history of mankind hasn’t yet seen the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons under control by bandits,” Medvedev said. “Such a crisis will not be limited by just one country’s borders, the world will be put on the brink of destruction.”

He added: “We won’t allow such a turn of events.”

The New York Times is also providing live updates here.

I’m going to end there and get this posted. This could get even more interesting.