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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.
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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