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news from ukraine: the leader of wagner group has accused the russian military of bombing his forces. seems to be preparing some kind of
coupspecial military operation. russian generals are asking mercenaries not to join in. prigozhin has vocally criticized russian military leaders recently, but this is a massive escalation. could we see a civil war break out in the middle of this war?update: prigozhin claims that he has entered rostov without resistance. lots of unverified videos on twitter of wagner/russian convoy movements, and some combat footage; wagner claims to have shot down a russian helicopter.
video of supposedly wagner soldiers and tanks surrounding the MoD building in rostov.
As of writing this post, Wagner appears to be in control of Rostov and Voronezh, and en route to Moscow.
Prigozhin is playing the game of thrones, and he's going to win or he's going to die. The path to victory for him looks pretty much like he walks into Moscow and all the people with guns get out of the way and let him do what he wants. It's... optimistic but not completely impossible, given the lack of resistance he's encountered so far.
If that doesn't happen and he actually gets meaningfully challenged it's difficult to see an outcome where he survives the coming week. Wagner is more competent than the regular Russian army but also much smaller and if this turns into an actual civil war he surely gets crushed. One way or another, I expect we'll see a clear winner and a clear loser before very long.
Or go to Belarus.
I admit this wasn't at all how I expected the situation to play out, but even so I think there's still a pretty high likelihood that Prigozhin ends up dead.
Valar morghulis, I guess.
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By whom, though?
At this point, this isn't Wagner vs the Russian Army- because the Russian army is literally in, and committed to, Ukraine, in the 90+% range even as the Ukrainian counterattack is (still) a very real thing. (The recent pause was not a culmination, and the majority of collected Ukrainian assets were never committed.) It's not like there's a massive third army behind the Urals waiting to move against someone moving within Russia.
Moreover, the Russian Army is capital-U unreliable at this point, at least from an anti-coup perspective. The rivalries between Wagner and the MOD are at the leader level- but Prigozhin is far more popular than Shugoi, and we have visible evidence of entire military centers letting Wagner not only pass through unopposed, but take over Russian military and government institutional facilities. They are, at best, apathetic, not unquestionably loyal.
The answer is, of course, the various internal security forces... but these are largely local, and tend not to have the things like armor and artillery and coordinated airpower. With the armor and artillery, well, committed, you're looking more at the equivalent of American SWAT teams trying to learn to call in the air force.
None of this means that Wagner won't fail/is impossible to win, but this isn't likely to have a crushing overmatch with a climatic battle, because there's no unified conventional force to wage that climatic battle due to local availability and trust that they wouldn't just join Wanger.
What this is likely to look like is a militia-vs-militia-level fighting, which the Russian Security Forces will likely win in the defense, but a counter-attack will be extremely problematic in the inverse. The power- and assets- have to come from somewhere, and it's not readily apparent whom and from where.
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They made it within 150 miles of Moscow, so it seems it was pretty damn practical after all.
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What's impractical about driving down a highway? It takes hours and hours, but this insurrection started hours and hours ago.
More to the point, it seems clear to me that Wagner had two seperate groups go to Voronezh and Rostov. The capture of Voronezh happened way too soon after Rostov for it to be the same soldiers.
The Rostov group - which apparently includes Prigozhin himself - is very far from Moscow (although it's still not clear that anyone would be able/willing to intercept them in time - the bulk of the Russian army is also a long way from Moscow). But more pressingly, the Voronezh group seems to be heading straight for Moscow and at the time of writing I'm seeing a bunch of Twitter reports that they're in Moscow Oblast now and are maybe 2 hours away from Moscow city.
Putin does appear to have sent airstrikes to attempt to stop Wagner - it's not clear to me to what extent they have been successful.
Well it seems better for people there to let them go to moscow instead of stopping them and having them come at you. Civilians are not equipped to fight soldiers
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They did do that.
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there is already a convoy in lipetsk heading north, ~320 km from moscow.
It appears that Wagner is utilising the strategy that the Taliban used to rapidly conquer Afghanistan following the US withdrawal. That is, just brazenly walk in and have everyone lay down their arms and/or join you. It doesn't appear they needed to fire a single shot to take either of Rostov or Voronezh.
Does that tactic keep working all the way to Moscow? We'll see.
There have been some attempts to set up road blocks - some dump trucks filled with sand parked across the highway in some places, and I've seen video of excavators digging out sections of road in others. So far, they do not appear to have caused much delay.
It's possible that Putin's men blow the bridge across the Oka river. If they do, that might present a more serious speed bump.
I cannot predict what will happen but Prigozhin is trying to convince people to join his side by appealing to their grievances.
No one could convince Russians to protest the war. They are all united in their struggle for Russian supremacy. When the military incursion towards Kyiv started, Russians on social media cheered. But they also expressed that 300 casualties was a very high price. Little they knew that soon it would be 3000, then 30 thousand and 300 thousand is not so far away and still losing.
Prigozhin manipulated those sentiments by saying that he is not against Putin but against the corrupted generals who are to blame for this loss. Russians like to talk how bad is their corruption, how the government doesn't care about them at all etc. They might or might not see Prigozhin as their saviour but he has certainly changed the situation irreversibly and the narrative that the current leadership is not competent is not going to go away until something big happens.
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Agreed, the only way you pull a coup like this off is if the state essentially crumbles into dust, senior decision makers immediately lose authority, flee or are killed, and then whoever’s left shrugs and accepts the new boss.
As of now there don’t seem to be many likely reports of mass defections in the military or large numbers of elites coming out against Putin. Private jet activity shows rich people fleeing, but that’s expected. The logistics of a Wagner assault on Moscow remain fantastical, at least for now.
At the same time, Putin has no real ideological program and the military is demoralized and has dealt with heavy losses. Prigozhin’s government wouldn’t necessarily not be amenable to a lot of people in Moscow. Stranger things have arguably happened in [Russian] history than a Wagner coup, but I still think Prigozhin defenestrating Putin directly is unlikely, although the incident will damage him even if he hangs on.
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