Sources of British special services have reported that the Russian secret services threatened to hurt the families of chiefs of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) before Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner and leader of the Wagner PMC, stopped his offensive on Moscow.
Not a lot of this event is making sense. Yet…
I’d hazard a guess that it was a joint mission between Putin and Prigozhin to flush out potential traitors. I mean, what’s a better time to monitor communication channels when you have ‘an invading army storming the capital’ to find out who’s with/against you?
Then you send the ‘invading army’ to a Putin-controlled border country, and offer any of his soldiers that didn’t invade with him a place in your military….
I mean they sent a women’s basketball player to prison for some cannabis oil, but a guy who tried to overthrow the government gets a vacation next door? His soldier’s get the same vacation? The soldier’s that didn’t join them (why? where were they?) get jobs with the government?
Doesn’t make sense unless the ‘event’ was nothing like it appeared. A ‘Red Herring’ if you will.
The actions taken after the 1-day event speak louder to the point of what actually happened then what they’re saying in the media.
It’s weird if it’s real, but it’s also weird if it’s fake. That’d mean that they moved a lot of troops out of Ukraine, split them up with some heading to Moscow and others staying in Rostov, destroyed the morale of the Russian soldiers staying in Ukraine and allowed Ukraine to continue their counteroffensive, shot down six of their own helicopters and a plane in the conflict, and killed and wounded several of their own soldiers, all just for show. They could have done this so much more efficiently.
While I like this take, we really don’t know if it was sincere or not. Maybe Prigozhin made a deal with the FSB, or maybe he’s already dead by now. He hasn’t been seen since he left for Belarus.
I think it makes sense if it’s the only thing they could do to him. Like, the threat against their families has the problem of “and then what”. The secret services can only carry it out once, and once its been carried out there’s still the issue of 25,000 war-criming mercenaries who are now super pissed off and have nothing left to lose. This deal makes a lot of sense when you consider that no one can actually do anything to Prigozhin that can actually physically stop him, the most they can do is to lean on his officers, and only if they never actually try to carry out any of their threats.
I think that the reason that Wagner rebelled now is because Russia was planning something with a nuclear power plant that would have put them up against NATO, in addition to making them part of the regular army. It was Moscow or fighting NATO and Prigozhin probably thought his chances were better in Moscow.
Everyone keeps talking Putin up like a genius, but they’ve been saying that since this invasion started and it seems progressively more unlikely. I think this is just what it looks like, a rebellion that was stopped by a last minute hail-mary. Because even if it was a secret plan to flush out traitors, Prigozhin still made Putin look weak, and a strong-man dictator can never afford to look weak. That means that even if it is a plan and it worked perfectly, Putin is still highly motivated to have Prigozhin killed. Prigozhin has to know this. I can’t imagine he’d agree to this plan.