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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34938 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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What the hell is going on in Russia?

I've been following the Russo-Ukrainian war since the livestreaming of the first tank that spooked some poor border guard, and frankly speaking the whole affair has been great for calibrating my epistemics.

Did I expect the "3 days to Kiev" thing to work out? Yes. I thought Ukraine was fucked.

I was also wrong about the duration of the war, for reasons little more than vibes going off war exhaustion, I expected the fighting to wrap up in a year. Still going.

Did I expect the UA counteroffensive to be a success? Yes, I was sufficiently inundated with pro-Ukrainian memes and their anti-Russian counterparts that I thought the Russians would fold to a stiff breeze.

Turns out that attacking is a lot harder than defending, especially when the offensive was widely telegraphed and even your relatively incompetent adversary had plenty of time to prepare accordingly.

My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect. I wanted Ukraine to win, and badly, and not only was this desire reflected in the sources of news I peruse, but the sheer hatred for the Russian side was sufficient to bury most evidence of them ever doing anything right. The Just World fallacy is hard to avoid personally if all your sources of information fall prey to it.

On /r/CombatFootage, anything remotely pro-Russian, or even depicting their success without obvious bias, gets buried. While I'm fond of /r/NonCredibleDefense, its NAFO sympathies make a honest calibration impossible, and as the name suggests, its members aren't particularly focused on academic rigor or epistemics.

But with that said, the whole Wagner affair confuses me.

Prigozhin managed to get within 2 hours of Moscow, prompting a panicked evacuation, and then suddenly stopped and took his ball home.

What the fuck? In normal circumstances, I'd say he just signed his death warrant, is Putin really going to forgive him for his quasi-coup? Wagner shot down around 7 Russian aircraft in the process!

And there I was thinking Lukashenko was largely a lap dog, unable to exercise agency except when it came to desperately avoiding sending Belarusian troops to Ukraine since it would upend the only thing keeping his dictatorship going. How did he become powerful enough to mediate a truce between Prigozhin and Putin?

It's not like the dust has settled, even leaving aside more questionable rumors, I've seen footage of the VDV cartel-killing one of their own for expressing sympathies for Wagner. Even if Prigozhin himself manages to avoid most consequences of his actions, his men are going to be making their pants desert-camo'd.

So far, I've only come up with one model that I think reasonably fits the evidence, albeit it's more consistent with the era of warlords and medieval feudalism than what I expect to see even in a failed state today:

Prigozhin is actually loyal, or at least he thinks of himself that way, and came to believe that Putin, like the well-meaning Emperor kept in the dark by a coterie of eunuchs (Shoigu and Co), simply wasn't involved in the attempts by the Russian MOD to swallow up Wagner whole.

Thus, he embarked on his crusade more as a demonstration of his ability to perform a coup, rather than a genuine desire to do so. Like an indecisive general crossing the Rubicon, shaking his fist in the direction of Rome and then high-tailing it back.

Cause some chaos and embarrassment, but stopping before what he thinks the red lines are, namely an occupation of Moscow.

I'd also wager that Lukashenko has more agency and freedom than most suspect, or rather Putin's power has declined relatively, such that he can credibly offer to shelter Prigozhin and fend off the dogs.

As far as I can tell, his gambit only partially worked, because Shoigu hasn't gone anywhere, and Prigozhin ended up like a dog that finally caught that damn car but isn't sure what to do with it.

"Sure, let's try and Thunder Run to Moscow, I'm sure we'll run into some real resistance along the way, and we can both rattle sabres at each other and go home."

"Huh. This is awkward, everyone is just giving up and letting us walk right past them. Might as well shoot down a few helicopters, they're the only things that have directly engaged us."

"Uh.. We're about two hours away from Moscow. Now what?"

I'm not going to weight my assessment heavily since I claim no particular expertise, but I'm outlining it here for the more knowledgeable to poke at.

I'd like to see everyone at least attempt to make concrete predictions about the near future. Does Prig make it out of this alive and with his power base intact? Does Putin slip him some unusually heavy and radioactive teabags?

My three current hypotheses are:

  • coup gone wrong. Prig had some supporters he relied on, but they decided to sit this one out, so he got off on the first face-saving stop

  • escalation gone wrong. Prig had specific beef with the MoD, but they called his bets at every step until he ended up leading an actual coup, so he finally folded

  • hail mary move. Prig was told he would lose Wagner and his life, so he went all-in and took the first offer that was better than that

  • the meds kicked in, or what @2rafa wrote. No one is a purely rational actor, Prig could've been drunk, high, stressed out or just mentally unwell

coup gone wrong. Prig had some supporters he relied on, but they decided to sit this one out, so he got off on the first face-saving stop

The speculation is that it was Surovikin, who Prigozhin was complementary of but quickly came out with a cease and desist video.

Of course, that might be US intelligence trying to get him Rommel'd.

The idea that makes the most sense is Prig thought he had other support perhaps even Putin. When the best case scenerio became battle of Moscow and decapitating Putin he backed down since he didn’t want to be the barbarian that led to the fall of the Russian Empire.

All I can be confident of is that Prigozhin made a catastrophic political miscalculation. I'm not sure what that miscalculation was, people can delude themselves into all sorts of weird ideas about how things will play out. But this was surely not the outcome he wanted.

I don't think he could have possibly expected things to go better from a military standpoint - he encountered basically no resistance and had a clear run to Moscow.

Personally my best guess is that he expected Putin to side with him somehow. From where I'm sitting that seems like a crazy thing to expect, but he was always careful to avoid laying blame on Putin personally even in his most unhinged rants. He never declared a goal of overthrowing the regime, even though charging an army at the capital does carry a certain implication.

Also Putin was very slow to say anything publicly. I don't know what he was waiting for, but it's at least possible he was himself weighing the situation and deciding which way to jump.

Rule 1 of coups is not to announce them before you do them. The element of surprise is essential, as is being in the capital ready to go (not a thousand kilometers away in Rostov). Prigozhin didn't seem to have anyone outside Wagner supporting him (or if he did they didn't do anything). This is very strange.

I think this was a fake coup that was used to lure out Putin's enemies. Either Putin knew about this and decided to let it happen, in a controlled way, so as to unmask the disloyal, or he plotted it with Prigozhin himself. The governors and oligarchs who were not swift enough to give Putin their support have probably been marked down. Prigozhin is now disqualified as a competitor to Putin after withdrawing, even if he doesn't end up irradiated. Wagner is being dissolved as an independent actor, its soldiers mostly being integrated into the Russian military.

There's a precedent in the 2016 Turkey coup and the 2021 Capitol incident (how could a mob of unarmed protestors possibly get inside a hardened-against-terrorists building against the will of the government and why did they leave when the government activated the alarm system telling them to do so). A weak coup attempt can function like a vaccine, immunizing against political threats.

Furthermore, were seven aircraft shot down? There are photos circulating of a downed helicopter and a communications plane - are these contemporary, geolocated images?

how could a mob of unarmed protestors possibly get inside a hardened-against-terrorists building against the will of the government and why did they leave when the government activated the alarm system telling them to do so

Because the capitol building is not hardened against terrorists. You used to be able to just walk in without any screening whatsoever (this is still true of many state capitols) and even more recently the only security was a checkpoint with a metal detector manned by garden variety police officers. Breaches have not been that rare, though they seem to be quickly forgotten. It does seem like the idea of a "People's House" that any citizen can wander into to observe the miracle of democracy at work is just about dead and buried, so I suspect this won't be the case for much longer, though it had a good run.

As for why the protestors left when they were asked to, it is because for all their fiery rhetoric they were still the pampered residents of a first-world country and uncomfortable with violent conflict. I watched the video of Ashli Babbitt being shot and the reaction of the people nearest to her was telling; in an instant they transformed from would-be revolutionaries into scared children begging for help from the same officers that they had been pushing back and hurling abuse at for hours, as though the prospect of being hurt while battering down a door guarded by armed police was inconceivable. In a word, they were LARPing, and their bluff was called, just as Prigozhin's was when his forces got within striking distance of Moscow without any intent to follow through and overthrow the government.

I think thinking in terms of loyalty at all is a mistake; at least at oligarch levels.

Prigozhin wanted to be in Ukraine for aggrandizement (and financial) reasons when it looked like a sure thing; now that it is in doubt he wants to go back to larping as a rhodesian (and collecting rent on gold mines and such.)

He gets legitimacy and metal from being aligned with the russian state; but I can't imagine that's worth getting battle of the somme'ed.

That said, he must be pretty sure that Putin is either gonna be dead or gone before too long because Prigozhin is for sure on the isotope injection list now.

You will not grasp her with your mind

or cover with a common label,

for Russia is one of a kind —

believe in her, if you are able...

https://ruverses.com/fyodor-tyutchev/russia-cannot-be-known-by-the-mind/424/

Like many, I have overcorrected on Wagner's mutiny somewhat, though less so than e.g. Karlin who had found a new delightful opportunity for youthful wonder. At this point, the story looks boring and in line with what normal pro-Western analysts are saying, e.g. here or here (I don't follow the war very closely though, there surely are better sources).

For a while now, MoD has been in the process of first diminishing and then dismantling Wagner as an autonomous force (for understandable reasons that all functional states have figured out by, like, Renaissance). Prig is, well, a warlord whose relevance overwhelmingly rides on controlling a private army, so he was understandably opposed to it, justifying his opposition with (arguably, maybe, true) arguments about relative performance and the great common task of fighting the accursed hohol. His contempt for Shoigu was perhaps a little affected to resonate with the common man (and indeed, even pro-regime voenkors shitting on Wagner now can't bring themselves to say that Shoigu&Gerasimov have legitimacy, they'll just get clown-emojid to hell and back – incidentally, as of now there's 420K clown reacts under Prigozhin's declaration of turning back). His goals were ensuring his survival at a minimum, and his unchallenged control over Wagner at the maximum.

I believe we don't yet know how this will shake out. The default outcome, corroborated by the renewal of treason case against Prig, is that Putin+Luka have prevailed and shooed everyone into apparent compromise, which just means postponed execution for Prig and likely his inner circle. Maybe not – the murky current status of Wagnerites suggests there's uncertainty remaining. It was close anyway. Prig has failed in securing his maximalist terms (removal of MoD heads who directly threaten him) but has successfully demonstrated that their worthlessness is a Schelling point and the army's integrity is hanging by a thread. It's just a thicker thread than he hoped. Maybe it's thin enough for Putin to fear touching him again.

My prediction is 60% Wagner dissolving and Prigozhin being eliminated in some manner (maybe not killed but actually convicted, maybe he offs himself), 25% Prigozhin, Utkin etc. somehow weaseling out of it, brokering some deal with Luka and either just chilling in Belarus, «going missing», or escaping to… Africa?, and 15% «anything goes», because Russia is, after all, a magical place.

P.S. Lukashenko has always had more agency and character than Putin, this only changed somewhat after Russian aid in suppression of Belarus protests and EU issuing Luka a black mark; as you can see, he owes Putin his very survival, yet cannot be forced into substantially committing to the war. For years, he was propping up his quasi-Soviet economy with Russian subsidies and markets. Hell, he's the nominal supreme commander of the Union State, He's a tough and crafty man (also much taller, and Putin straight up fears tall people), a real self-made dictator who uses Russia/Putin for his convenience and ponders incurred obligations at his leisure. But the same is true for Kadyrov, Tokayev (also rescued by Russia, also lukewarm), probably even Shoigu – literally anyone with their own army and power base.

Putin's image of a strongman is as fraudulent and laughable as his mafia empire's image of some based Orthodox Christian Bear. He's our curse, nothing more. A murderous curse, but not particularly politically savvy.

Ok so I’m not understanding what people think Prigs goal was if it was not overthrow. He marched on Moscow unopposed. What didn’t he expect? Actually making it to Moscow and having a bloody battle? What were the alternate scenarios? Putin crushes Wagner faster or Putin made a faster proposal to make Prog happy? Or I he could have assumed more of the military would have backed him.

I have a big issue in not being able to see what scenerio Prog thought would play out. Putin telling Prog I love you bud here’s Shogs and Gerasimovs heads is the only better scenerio I see he could have expected other than taking power.

The 4-D chess scenerios just seem way out there because it made Putin look weak and that Moscow is exposed to the next general with some troops.

You’re forgetting here that Wagner Group are mercenaries. Mercenary armies marching against the cities which hired them happens all the time throughout history. They don’t do it because they want to overthrow the regime. They do it because they want to get paid.

I do not know the financial situation of Wagner. Perhaps this is not about payment in money. Maybe Russian troops really did fire upon Wagner mercenaries. What’s clear is that Prigozhin felt ripped off, and as a mercenary leader, marching his army to the doorstep of the palace is a tried and true method of litigating counterparty risk. It’s much easier for Putin to give these guys what they want than it is to risk urban warfare in Moscow.

“Merceneries”. These aren’t men without a country. They are still Russians. I don’t know the exact amount they have better pay, but they aren’t guys fighting for a random flag paying them more money.

I... don't have a good model of how mercenary these mercenaries are or how committed to Russia they are. I can definitely imagine having citizenship in a state and still having far more stake in my mercenary group than in that state. Especially in a state like Russia. And I think the believability of that is what makes marching on the capital a viable tactic for getting paid. (believability because, you don't even need to intend to ever follow through as long as you can win the game of chicken.)

There is no next general. The army is gelded and atomized; they could only support an external force articulating their dissatisfaction with S&G. And they failed to support that force.

Yes, I think Prig desperately gambled on Putin fearing general mutiny and loss of control of big parts of the army, and personally guaranteeing, overriding S&G's authority, that all attempts of MoD to absorb Wagner are hereby terminated. When it became clear that the army, for the moment, won't seriously stop him from getting to Moscow, but also won't actively help him fight whatever loyalist forces Putin can muster, and that Putin doesn't plan to give up on S&G or their plans, he folded. The key reason was probably high-ranking Army figures like Surovikin refusing to endorse the mutiny.

Kamil Galeev thinks there are more coming and he seems to have been right more than mosts. Putin looked weak. You just need a general popular with other generals. Or you could see a break away Republic by a local governor or some oligarchs. Siberia is where the wealth comes from so with the army artitted perhaps a few oligarchs try and take over some wealth. Who knows there are many possible scenerios that I don’t know enough about local power structures to know what they can do. When you lose a world war you usually lose your empire.

Galeev is a delusional Turkic supremacist and tries to conjure his dreams of Russian dissolution into reality with prolific twitter posting. He has been right exactly once – predicting that Russia will not succeed at conquering Ukraine, the rest is downstream of that take; but this could have been and was predicted by anyone with a modicum of insight into Russian system, e.g. me.

Putin looked weak.

This obsession with signaling is predicated on the idea that people in power don't know the real state of events and have to infer them from tea leaves and gestures, and is exactly why most popular analysis is hopeless. Looks don't matter, only actual capabilities. Putin looks like a pitiful monkey and he has been looking this way for a long time, but he has proven still having the capability to make Wagner run. This is enough. It'll be cold comfort for a rebelling general to know that as he dies, he's taking a few batallions' worth of FSO with him.

You just need a general popular with other generals.

So, Surovikin? He's refused to join the mutiny.

There isn't anyone. Putin has worked extraordinarily well to purge every charismatic figure from the army. Killing people cooler than him is his whole edge.

Or you could see a break away Republic by a local governor or some oligarchs.

Yes, well, which republic? Tyva or Chechnya, maybe. If Kadyrov and Shoigu remain "loyal", this doesn't happen. Governor, oligarchs – haha, as if.

Russia can well unravel, don't get me wrong. But this will have very little to do with the fact that Putin has looked weak the other day.

If you really want your bubble burst on Putin, read some of his Valdai speeches and chats. I don't agree with all of his politics or his war, but he's refreshingly direct and erudite. I can't recall seeing an American President speaking in such a way since Eisenhower.

I just randomly scrolled through this 2018 appearance and landed on this, a response to a question on mismanagement of government funds in hospice care:

Firstly, I completely agree with you that our discussions, our internal discussions should be centred on our problems, domestic problems, our people’s lives, which is actually a major part of our work. And as you said, the fact that we are discussing war – and not just war but terrorism and other similar issues – is due to the way our host Mr Lukyaunov organised the discussion, I am not the one who organises it, it is done by the host, so let us put all the blame on him.

As to the problem you raised, it is obviously very sensitive, demanding special attention and tact from the state. Ultimately – you said it yourself – the state allocated the funds. The fact that only 12 or 16 percent were used means the work was poorly organised. I assure you that it does not mean that I will say to you, “The money was allocated and you did not use it, so that’s it, good-bye.” Do not worry, this will never happen.

I know the way money is spent, and very often, funds allocated by the state to handle certain matters of absolute priority do not reach the end receiver. If they are returned to the budget, it does not mean that they will stay there for good and the necessary funds will never be allocated again. We will certainly keep doing it.

Yet we have to admit that whatever the state might do, it is impossible to completely solve any problem 100 percent. Life is more complicated and keeps throwing in more and more of new problems for us. Of course, efforts by the state are very important, as are those by society and religious organisations, by the way. It is religious organisations, and I mean our traditional faiths, that create the internal strength and internal basis for any person to feel secure in this fast-changing and fairly dangerous world.

The state will definitely pursue all the tasks in the context you have just mentioned. Do not worry. I will take your documents, of course. It does not mean we will wrap up the topic just because someone underused the funds. Have no doubt. I will see why such a small percentage was spent. It looks strange.

Maybe he's actually a bumbling fool and the English transcripts are a poor representation of what he's said, but I've never seen anyone assert that.

Russians in general are artistic. Putin, too, loves LARPing as this meticulous micromanager with a good grasp on detail, this genuinely impresses older technical folks. Again, as devarbol said of Stalin, this doesn't necessarily translate into anything like understanding of the war, what is at stake, which details matter, whom to trust, when to act. In fact he's often very much behind the times; why, it seems that Wagner mutiny caught him by surprise, even though Prigozhin was making these noises for months. Putin is performing a particular role; he has imagemakers and various Turkic speechwriters (whose successors now feed him Twitter right-winger context about teh gays, it seems) and all that staff and it's probably pretty compelling – from afar, and when you don't remember decades of vacuous big picture pointification interspersed with occasional autistic detail and coyly wagging the finger at some guilty official, as the country rusts and rots and is pillaged by his friends and people trying to do anything productive give up and escape.

When you have that context in mind it looks pretty demonic.

Stalin, though, is believed to have been rather smart (+3SD intelligence, at least) and someone who spent a lot of time reading on his own initiative.

Karlin suggests that with Putin, this is more of a facade than real - and that he at times has some solid speechwriters.

and people trying to do anything productive give up and escape.

I understand that cronies will want to acquire any up-and-coming company and thus the creative destruction seen in more functional market economies doesn't occur ?

Yes. Basically you either fail to pass the bureaucratic filter, end up insolvent, or get big enough to attract attention of some oprichnik who wants a personal turf. If it were a hard-and-fast rule we'd all have starved of course but it's enough to ensure that Russia never gets back to like 2013 levels of wealth. Like in many other mundane things I concur with Galeev in his analysis here.

Wait in, had there been no war, would the the economic climate re: business would be worse now than in 2013 ?

Well, the war had started in 2014 and so did Russian economic woes. I think metrics which suggest Russia had been successfully coping with that are not credible. Holistically, what we have now is… like… 2006 maybe. Only without the positive outlook.

There are plenty of Harvard and Yale (and before that Andover and Exeter) types in the State Department who can do ‘erudite statesman’ if you want them to (and they sometimes do, although usually not on CNN or the evening news). American politicians cater to the American public. As DeSantis is currently demonstrating, being smart and educated and intellectual does precisely nothing for you with the American public.

You find that convincing? Empty repetitions of "I hear your concerns, dear voters compatriots" peppered with equally vacuous applause lights. We have "direct" at home.

I don't know what convincing you're referring to, I don't know if the problem was actually solved.

I just can't recall any American politician admitting that there's a problem, getting into the details on use-it-or-lose budget rules, saying that this is an instance of a more general failure case, and then admitting the constraints of what the state can achieve.

Even admitting the existence of a problem that happened on your watch is vanishingly rare.

And this was just a random scroll.

Direct would be:

Next year, you‘ll get 12%, and you‘ll like it. Money doesn‘t grow on trees, my good man. Extra hospice money is obviously a matter of low priority to the state, and I personally couldn‘t care less. Have no doubt. Most of the time I don‘t even know where the vital bribe money goes. We will certainly keep doing it.

Life is very complicated for me right now. Society and religious organizations should get off my ass, or they will be folded into United Russia. I‘ll show them how fast-changing and fairly dangerous our world can be. So I need everyone in the traditional faiths to pray for my inner strength in these trying times.

I promise to look at the issue you brought up, when I‘m not doing PR or otherwise engaged. Do not worry, this will never happen.

What I find annoying about the whole things is that none of the talking heads manage to predict the way it will unfold. And yet I am supposed to take them and the news they bring of the war seriously.

Imma tap the "skin in the game" sign again.

There are basically no neutral sources on the war, with everyone cheerleading for one side or the other. That said, there's still degrees of credibility, and if you focus on the better sources you can get a decent idea of what's going on. The ones I keep up to date with are /r/credibledefense, Perun, and Kofman. There are also prediction markets for some things.

The fog of war will be thick around Prig's insurrection for a while yet, but from my outside observations it smelled like Prig launched the uprising because he was desperate. Despite this, he got surprisingly far with it, and likely took the first offramp that would allow him to escape with his life (for now). The deal he got was interesting because Lukashenko wants to remain independent from Russia and this might give him some leverage somehow. I'd estimate Prig has a 90% chance of dying if he remains as high-profile as he was before the uprising, while the chances go down to 50-50 if he quiets down or goes fully pro-Putin. His power base is likely to be severely degraded in the short to medium term with many of Wagner's soldiers being switched to MoD control and Prig being effectively banished from Russia for the time being. His ability to reconstitute seems uncertain, but it's a possibility.

Falling in line with miras_chinotto that I've got little beyond speculation. I'd register another avenue of possibility that it could be a trojan horse-like situation. What better way to send an army into a formerly Russian territory than with the warm welcome of said countries president under the guise of refuge status. Clearly, and perhaps much too conspiratorially, Wagner "pisses off" Putin, is invited to refuge in Belarus, and suddenly Lukashenko finds himself with a dangerous and loyal (to putin) military force of 20,000 inside his gates. Simple bait and switch and now putin is simultaneously occupying two former territories. More to come?

What would be indicators of this? Perhaps Prigozhin resting in Minsk? or more likely a decrease in dollarization, and re-uptake of the ruble in the region.

With Lukashenko apparently indebted to Putin, I would wonder if the populace would even necessarily be aware of the direct reasoning behind said changes.

loyal (to putin) military force of 20,000

What makes them loyal to Putin? I can understand loyalty to Prigožin: he's the guy who pays them and at the same time he's not some celestial bureaucrat who manifests only as a payslip signature or an image on TV. The big man is right there in the compound, close enough to be relatable.

I find this hard to take seriously.

Putin has been moving military forces through Belarus for months, and they literally staged there.

Further, Russian false flags tend to be less than perfect, certainly not to the extent that they burn 7 aircraft and Putin's prestige over it.

Prigozhin survives, the regular Russian army slips out of direct civilian control. Civilians in eastern Ukraine find out that things can in fact get worse. Putin keeps bumbling along and attempts to replace Shoigu with an even more incompetent and unpopular yes man, but he proves unable to control the Russian army. The chechens become Moscow’s security force and fragging becomes a common practice.

Putin keeps bumbling along and attempts to replace Shoigu with an even more incompetent and unpopular yes man, but he proves unable to control the Russian army.

I love devarbol Shoigu-posting.

Putin: pathetic, afraid, hides in a bunker, an international war criminal

Shoigu: chills in the palace in Tuva, does woodworking, afraid of nothing, even of the goblin-looking guy with a person army who promises to kill him, hasn't done anything wrong

People have a lot of discourse about "Putin will remove/will not remove Shoigu" and reasons for it but why do they assume that Putin can remove Shoigu in the first place?

There is a schizoid Kremlinology point that Shoigu can be actually more powerful than Putin (at least he is politically older for sure) and hence all the current stuff.

The role of Shoigu in the political system of Russia is far weirder and more important than you normally get from any news about him (just this incompetent clownish guy), but he is one of the few people who took Yeltsin into the government and is still in power, for example.

The official theory is that Shoigu is the reincarnation/avatar of this person, they talk about it in his personal museum in Tuva.

Some quite good YouTube travelogues on Tuva. Apparently Feynman was obsessed with it. Shoigu himself is only half-Tuvan, which makes sense since he looks Hapa.

For non-romantic, non dewy-eyed take on Shoigu, Tuva and Tuvans, see this.

How Shoigu Got His Post - The Tuvin Mafia Conspiracy

If combination of hardcore Russian nationalist takes, mystical anti-Christianity, deep conspirationism and vantablack pills is your thing, this substack is the place to get it.

There's a paywall unfortunately.

I can't recall any cases when Shoigu isn't just a regular nobody who's only good quality is loyalty to Putin. I guess loyalty for Putin is the main attribute he values, quite understandably. Any other good qualities are just getting in the way of loyalty. Is there any cases which suggest more complicated relationships?

Shoigu isn't just a regular nobody

I wish Craig Manzin made a sequel to Chernobyl. Not about Fukushima, obviously, but about Spitak. That's when Shoigu stopped being just a regular nobody, in 19-bloody-88.

Does it play any role currently?

Yes, yes it does. There aren't that many politicians in Russia that have their own legitimacy that isn't lent to them by Putin. Shoigu and Kiriyenko (First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration) are probably the biggest ones remaining. Medvedev and Sobyanin are weird cases. On one hand, they drew upon Putin's legitimacy to win the elections; on the other hand, they both won them relatively fair and square.

A true loyal nobody is someone like Vaino, a terrified worm who owes Putin his everything (not much) in life. Shoigu is, indeed, closer to the generation that had made Putin, he has an aggressive cult of personalty and clearly was being groomed into a possible successor at some point, possesses an ethnic stronghold in Tyva (which, incidentally, had been sovereign until 1944, and iirc has elite continuity from pre-Soviet era – in a sense, it's more ripe for secession than Caucasus or, certainly, Tatarstan meme), a private army (Patriot) on top of control over the regular army and, indirectly, МЧС, and fails upwards with zero reproach for thirty years now. I'm not sure there's anything to the «shizoid Kremlinology», but he does look like a genuinely powerful figure, with his obsequiousness not much more indicative of his essence than Kadyrov's exaggerated insistence that he's «Putin's infantryman» is the reason his people can harass federal center siloviki when they feel like it.

I do not actually believe the theory that Putin is just a frontman and that the real power is behind the scenes, but if Putin was just a frontman it would be a good choice because, various conspiracy theories about his "true" ethnic background notwithstanding, most Russians seem to buy the idea that he is an ethnic Russian. Having an Abramovich, Shoigu, Kadyrov, or even Lavrov in charge might rankle too many feathers given their mixed or entirely non-Russian ethnic backgrounds. On the other hand, many Russian ethno-nationalists respect Stalin even though he was not Russian, so who knows. Probably you have to either be Russian or at least seem competent and tough. A leader who is non-Russian, incompetent, and weak is too much for even the Russian people to put up with.

That is plausible. It works every which way, of course – one can speculate either that Russia is ran by a cabal of noviops, or that the all-powerful Putin allows said noviops to amass power, secure in the knowledge of his ethnically based legitimacy.

many Russian ethno-nationalists respect Stalin even though he was not Russian

I very much doubt they do. Unless one subscribes to the (popular among formerly occupied peoples but completely incoherent) school of thought that Soviet Communism is great Russian ethnic nationalism, in which case that's true by definition.

In practice there's a grain of truth here, Russians who stan Stalin can be arbitrarily casually racist toward non-Russians, gloat about resettlements, endorse The Great Purge on grounds of «at least he got some Jews» etc. But very rarely (that is, much rarer than outside their camp) do they have any sort of positive ethno-nationalist belief, whether mild or extreme, such as interest in Russian demographics, advocacy against immigration, blood purity maxxing, or losses of ethnic Russians themselves from Stalin's policy successes or failures.

I very much doubt they do. Unless one subscribes to the (popular among formerly occupied peoples but completely incoherent) school of thought that Soviet Communism is great Russian ethnic nationalism, in which case that's true by definition.

Well, if you were non-Russian, it looked this way. Capital of the empire was in Moscow, official language of state, army and administration was Russian, Russian culture was promoted in schools and all media, higher education was Russian, non-Russians who wanted something else than herd sheep or pick cotton had to learn Russian.

Of course, Russian nationalists had higher standards.

(similar case was the Habsburg empire - hated by non-German nationalists as oppressive Germanizing tyranny, and by German nationalists as mongrel Slavic shithole crushing German people)

It's not a question of standards, it's a question of purpose. Would Estonian nationalists approve of a reversed empire, where everyone has learned Estonian and the capital is in Tallinn, but you still live in the Soviet Union, have no protected representation even in Estonia, and then get purged by Georgians, Russians and Jews? No, I think they consider the current condition much more nationalistic.

I have nothing charitable to contribute to most of this. I find 99% of the speculation about this conflict to be in bad faith and based on very little in the way of facts (which as faceh points out, we don't have and can't separate from non-facts reliably or quickly). I find myself intensely frustrated with the expert class and their endless essays and videos that at this point seem clearly to be little more than self aggrandizement and wish casting.

That out off my chest, I would like to point out that over the last couple of months Prigo had made a few videos that seemed increasingly unhinged and paranoid. He was complaining about the contract negotiations with the MoD falling through and them straight up refusing to communicate with him about it and he was convinced the MoD was going to assimilate and take Wagner from him when the contract ended (I believe in July). With the current rumors of Prigo's deal with Putin and Lukashenko consisting of cash, voluntary exile for Prigo and his men who mutineyed, and assimilation of the rest of Ukraine-front Wagner into the MoD, I think it is quite likely that this entire event was the result of a banal contractual dispute mated with (justified) paranoia and personal enmity with the military bureaucracy. Yes, yes, I know, it's a lot more boring than it being some 4D chess by Putin or [long philosophical argument on the inherent inability of those subhuman Russians to self govern because of reasons].

As you point out there are still some very big questions left here. There were videos at the time of Rostov's occupiers denying that they were Wganer. There is the effectively painless penetration of Russia almost to Moscow in just hours despite this being exactly the kind of thing Russia has been worried about, preparing for, and strategizing over since the czars. I don't know what to speculate other than that I do not think it was 4D chess, but once Wagner mobilized, it may have been used that way for a variety of reasons (did Putin's very close relationship with Prigo keep the MoD from raining hellfire on them until a settlement could be worked out?) Will there ultimately be a shake up with the MoD in the next months? Will Belarussian Wagner open up a new line of attack into Ukraine? Where were the Rosgvardiya, who report directly to Putin in my understanding, in all of this and why is the death toll almost non existent?

IMO I’m not sure why people thought the Ukraine offensive would be fast. Supposedly most of their offensive troops haven’t been deployed. Ukraine seems cautious in their offensives then aggressive when they can be.

Removing Russia from Kherson was very slow too. Attritional warfare until they retreat. Kharkiv was a bit different but supposedly that’s because Russia had moved troops to protect the south and was very opportunistic. Ukraine just seems very fine with attritional warfare and degrading Russias rear with HiMars etc.

Ukraines goals are not entirely to take back territory. Attrition has its own benefit of hollowing out Russian personal so they can’t attack again for a generation.

That's a fair point. I was given the impression by NAFO-adjacent commentors that NATO vehicles would be such a massive advantage that the current anaemic pace of progress seems slow and fitful.

Also some people mistakenly thought that Russian combat effectiveness degraded to such degree that the Ukrainian counter-offensive will be a repeat of Operation Faustschlag of the First World War when Germans completely obliterated Russian defenses and took most of Ukraine and Baltics in just a couple weeks. But by then Russians fought for 4 years, and two Revolutions happened. Right now, they are nowhere near this point.

is Putin really going to forgive him for his quasi-coup?

Based on past actions, nope, and he'd better book a seat on Musk's mission to Mars because there's hardly anywhere on Earth he'll be safe.

I have no idea what the hell was going on there. Plainly he could see the writing on the wall when the attempt to fold his mercs into the conventional army was put forward, so he was losing whatever happened. I can only imagine this was "with your shield or on it" attempt that if he did this, and there was anyone willing to pull the rug out from under Putin, this would be their chance and then he could later make a deal with the new guy.

Well, didn't turn out that way, and in his shoes I would not bank on Belarus as any kind of guarantee of continuing breathing in the long run.

book a seat on Musk's mission to Mars because there's hardly anywhere on Earth he'll be safe.

I'd say safer to book a ticket to visit the Titanic wreck.

I know the feeling. I was also surprised that Russia wasn't able to even get to Kiev with the main body of it's forces. Miles-long convoys, a dominant air force, and an underprepared defender should have, one thinks, enabled a Thunder Run to the Capital and they should have been able to at least temporarily control the territory.

It's like if the U.S. decided to invade Mexico and could only penetrate about 100 miles from their own border before bogging down. But then again, if China was providing ample material support to the Mexican fighters maybe that is what would happen.

But man, there's simply no systemic way to exercise good rationality here for various reasons:

  1. Russia is pretty good at the propaganda game. They're even better at the 'muddy the waters and deny objective reality as much as needed' game. Being confident that Russia is lying or withholding the truth doesn't actually help you determine the real truth.

  2. War is chaos. Determining which signals are good and which are misleading at best is nigh impossible in the moment.

  3. Ukraine has massive incentive to lie about stuff too (Ghost of Kiev, etc.) and will exaggerate Russian 'atrocities' and casualties as a matter of course.

  4. The "Russia is evil empire, Ukraine is brave freedom fighters" narrative is firmly locked-in, so anything that makes Ukraine look bad or weak will be downplayed and ignored whilst likewise Russia's 'wins' will be minimized by Western media.

  5. As seen from the Wagner situation, the nature of the conflict can shift unexpectedly on a dime, so any prediction over the medium-long term is eminently susceptible to black swans.

  6. The situation on the ground is subject to information you simply cannot get. Local knowledge which can't be easily summarized and translated.

So you can't understand a situation this complex and dynamic simply by absorbing all possible information you can find. You have no way to verify said information, and the information you DON'T have will probably end up being critical to accurate predictions anyway. And the good info will become outdated rapidly. Adjust your confidence levels accordingly.

In lieu of making predictions on week-to-week occurrences I've tried my best to understand the broad-strokes motives, capabilities, and weaknesses of the relevant parties. A few things I'm relatively confident about:

  1. 'Russia' (the government that is representing it, at least) has to view this conflict as existential, since they need to control certain geographic positions if they are to be safe from future invasion. Further, they are now beginning a terminal decline in demographics. Beyond anything else, they'll never have as many fighting-age males as they do now. So they are committed to see this through and will throw bodies at the problem as long as it can.

  2. Ukraine's demographics are even worse. They cannot win a war of attrition unless Russia knuckles under.

  3. Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.

  4. Russia's logistics are in atrocious shape, so Ukraine is punching above its' weight regardless of anything else because their soldiers have ammunition, food, and working equipment.

  5. Even the U.S. Manufacturing capacity isn't quite filling the gap, however.

What do these facts allow me to predict? Not much. Other than a long, bloody, conflict which will probably result in a Russian 'victory' but also with Russia ceasing to be any kind of major player in world affairs.

'Russia' (the government that is representing it, at least) has to view this conflict as existential, since they need to control certain geographic positions if they are to be safe from future invasion.

This is flatly wrong. Russia could leave whenever it wanted to and their security situation would not change significantly, even if Ukraine joined NATO (which is very much still an open question, not a done deal by any means). The Russian fever dream of NATO launching an unprovoked ground invasion Barbarossa-style is ludicrous in the age of nukes and China. The invasion of Ukraine has always been about Russian influence, not security.

Russia's logistics are in atrocious shape, so Ukraine is punching above its' weight regardless of anything else because their soldiers have ammunition, food, and working equipment.

Russian logistics are performing reasonably well actually. There are problems of course, and they're not up to US standards, but that's pretty high bar.

The Russian fever dream of NATO launching an unprovoked ground invasion Barbarossa-style is ludicrous in the age of nukes and China. The invasion of Ukraine has always been about Russian influence, not security.

I was always under the impression that it was precisely nuclear security that had Russia concerned, specifically NATO missile interdiction systems, which was one of the motivating factors behind their development of hypersonic weaponry. Beyond that, security and influence are heavily tied together - good luck selling all your fossil fuels to Europe if you can't stop your pipelines from getting blown up.

US missile shields could never credibly protect from most, or even just many Russian nukes. They can protect from single strikes which eliminates some of the bargaining power of nuclear blackmail, because you'll be hemmed into all-or-nothing strats even more than normal. Again, it's about influence, not security.

Security and influence are two distinct concepts. They can interact in some cases, but it's not like Belgium fears getting invaded by Germany or France these days if it doesn't maintain Belgian Influence in those countries. Russian pipelines weren't getting bombed until the war started.

US missile shields could never credibly protect from most, or even just many Russian nukes. They can protect from single strikes which eliminates some of the bargaining power of nuclear blackmail, because you'll be hemmed into all-or-nothing strats even more than normal. Again, it's about influence, not security.

A missile shield doesn't even have to credibly protect most of the US. All it needs to do is give US decision-makers the false belief that they could survive or win an exchange and then the world is in such catastrophic danger that it would be worth letting the holocaust happen twice over in order to prevent it. That's the threat that the Russians are concerned with, and my estimation of American politicians is such that the Russians are absolutely correct to be concerned about what Bill Kristol wants for them.

Your position is not backed up by recent evidence. If US politicians thought the missile shield would give them an overwhelming advantage, why were they so cagey against Russia's invasion? Why did Biden come out so quickly against sending US troops or establishing a no-fly zone? Why have people like Jake Sullivan had so much influence to make each weapon system like pulling teeth when it came to sending them to Ukraine (e.g. HIMARS, MBTs, Patriots, F16s). The cautious tiptoeing does not strike me as US politicians being blinded by hubris.

If anything, the endless Pascal's Muggings that have occurred around discussions of Russia's nukes have been one of the clearest incentives towards proliferation that we've seen in decades. A large-scale nuclear exchange would be absolutely terrible, but that doesn't mean the reaction should thus be to always back down in the face of nuclear blackmail. Doing so means vastly more nukes in the world in the long term, which means the likelihood of an eventual nuclear exchange goes up by orders of magnitude.

Your position is not backed up by recent evidence. If US politicians thought the missile shield would give them an overwhelming advantage, why were they so cagey against Russia's invasion? Why did Biden come out so quickly against sending US troops or establishing a no-fly zone? Why have people like Jake Sullivan had so much influence to make each weapon system like pulling teeth when it came to sending them to Ukraine (e.g. HIMARS, MBTs, Patriots, F16s). The cautious tiptoeing does not strike me as US politicians being blinded by hubris.

The missile shield system is not actually in place yet - do you think the US military is setting up large anti missile defence batteries in the middle of Ukraine right now? They presently do not have confidence that they would survive a nuclear exchange, and we are not actually in the position that Russia was so scared of (in no small part due to the invasion). As for why the US has been so cagey, that's an incredibly complicated question with an equally complicated answer. The short answer is that the US absolutely does not wish to be seen as the instigator of the conflict - they will be unable to muster popular support for military intervention, both domestically and among the international community. Their usual strategy for this is to manufacture or make up an incident like the Gulf of Tonkin, and that's a lot harder to do in the modern day. As for why they are so cagey with specific weapons, there's a lot of reasons for that too - they don't want Moscow getting hit with missiles covered in American flags that say MADE IN THE USA, they don't want their fancier weapons getting visibly and public shown up on the battlefield while wielded by undertrained conscripts, etc etc.

If anything, the endless Pascal's Muggings that have occurred around discussions of Russia's nukes have been one of the clearest incentives towards proliferation that we've seen in decades. A large-scale nuclear exchange would be absolutely terrible, but that doesn't mean the reaction should thus be to always back down in the face of nuclear blackmail.

Actually I think the clearest incentive was what the US did to Libya, but what Russia did to Ukraine is another. Both the US and Russia have made it clear that if you get rid of your nuclear weapons your security is irreparably harmed. But this isn't a case of Pascal's mugging - nuclear war is absolutely a world-ending event and that threat should be taken extremely seriously. The idea that you should just ignore the legitimate security concerns of a nation like Russia and trigger a nuclear exchange that ends all life on earth that isn't a cockroach or bacteria because you don't want to make them think that they can stand up to the US is such a dangerous proposition that I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. A nuclear power is a nuclear power and while I agree that having more of them is a bad thing, the US and Russia together have made it clear that if you disarm you are going to cease to be a legitimate state in short order.

Doing so means vastly more nukes in the world in the long term, which means the likelihood of an eventual nuclear exchange goes up by orders of magnitude.

Having more nuclear powers in the world does indeed make a nuclear exchange more risky - but I don't think just starting the nuclear exchange right away and setting the probability to 1 is a better outcome.

Russia could leave whenever it wanted to and their security situation would not change significantly, even if Ukraine joined NATO (which is very much still an open question, not a done deal by any means).

I'll point to the demographics issue as a key factor once again. They're going to run lower and lower on fighting-age males over the coming decades.

It's less about NATO invasion, per se, and more about the various states that border Russia that might consider a land grab if their military no longer appears up to the task of repelling invaders.

To me this presents a really simple calculus: either commit to an aggressive offense now, with hopes of shoring up your defensive posture (i.e. making it possible to defend your land with fewer people and less equipment) or risk being parceled up 15-30 years down the line as you lose the means to hold the territory you claim.

You have to make the call now because even if your people suddenly start popping out kids en masse today it'll be 18 or so years before they grow into a useful fighting force.

Russian logistics are performing reasonably well actually.

Considering they're apparently not even palletizing their equipment for shipment, I guess.

I would assert that they would have lost this war a long way back if the territory they're fighting in wasn't right across the border. So poor logistics doesn't doom their efforts so long as they can shovel enough weapons and men to the front without losing most in transit.

Because for comparison I'm looking at the United States' ability to maintain a conflict in Iraq, which it doesn't even share a continent with, for years.

It's less about NATO invasion, per se, and more about the various states that border Russia that might consider a land grab if their military no longer appears up to the task of repelling invaders.

Which? Estonia? Finland? Georgia? Mongolia taking their shot at it again?

The only credible threat to Russia is China, but it's indeed some 6d chess — to attack Ukraine in order to be better prepared for a possible war in the Far East.

The impact of population is becoming less and less of a factor for militaries as technology advances. Modern soldiers are so ridiculously lethal that wars are fought with a fraction of the manpower that previous wars were. A nation's economy, human capital, and technology base are going to be far more important in wars to come, and all of these have been damaged in Russia's case due to this conflict. Future wars won't be won by conscripting a horde of musketeers like it's the 1700s.

Also, this completely ignored the points about nukes and the rise of China.

Because for comparison I'm looking at the United States' ability to maintain a conflict in Iraq, which it doesn't even share a continent with, for years.

The US's logistical capacity flatly outmatches every other country by far, so it's not a great comparison for a nation like Russia who's mostly going to be focused on conflicts near its borders. Russia's ability to supply absurd numbers of artillery shells to its units has been a key driver of Ukrainian casualties, and doing so while under fire was a big reason why the Kherson offensive took as long as it did.

The impact of population is becoming less and less of a factor for militaries as technology advances.

Good luck maintaining a technologically advanced military without the people to maintain the increasingly complicated systems said militaries rely upon.

Modern soldiers are so ridiculously lethal that wars are fought with a fraction of the manpower that previous wars were.

We haven't seen any modern war that was fought in the style of years past... until now.

And it's looking a lot like standard trench warfare with some fun additions like kamikaze drones.

Future wars won't be won by conscripting a horde of musketeers like it's the 1700s.

Allow me to do a reducio ad absurdum.

Would you be willing to pit a 12 man squad of modern soldiers with a single modern tank against 100,000 soldiers who are limited to WII-era weaponry?

There's clearly a tradeoff here, where the sheer weight of manpower allows attrition against a technologically superior foe.

Especially if the foe has their own population issues.

Also, this completely ignored the points about nukes and the rise of China.

I mean we can get into all of this but I don't think it really changes the calculus from Russia's POV.

Especially now that we've seen that security threats can come from DOMESTIC sources, and I doubt Putin et al. were willing to nuke their own soil to stop Wagner.

So again, either Russia establishes geographical security as fast as possible or it risks getting parceled up.

We haven't seen any modern war that was fought in the style of years past... until now.

Ukraine vs Russia is mostly fighting using old Cold War tech on both sides, and the troop concentrations are still far lower than they were in Barbarossa.

Would you be willing to pit a 12 man squad of modern soldiers with a single modern tank against 100,000

Bad example since population levels aren't falling by 99.99% like in this scenario. they're falling by around 20% in the most extreme cases by the end of the century.

I'm not saying population doesn't matter; rather, I'm saying it matters mostly in the economic and technological spheres. If Russia loses 20 million people over the next century then that impacts its ability to have a large economy to produce extremely lethal modern weapons. Worrying about population in terms of "nobody will be around to hold the guns" on the other hand is not particularly credible.

Especially now that we've seen that security threats can come from DOMESTIC sources, and I doubt Putin et al. were willing to nuke their own soil to stop Wagner.

This is a non-sequitur. Priggy's revolt was a case of internal Russian factionalism boiling over. There are some pro-Russian cheerleaders who think Prigozhin was a NATO plant in some 4D chess sort of way, but that's not particularly credible.

The Russian fever dream of NATO launching an unprovoked ground invasion Barbarossa-style is ludicrous in the age of nukes and China.

I disagree with that, alongside the majority of russians i believe. Situations change, opportunities arise, provocations happen, things change and if west at some point decides that now can be a good opportunity to solve its Russia problems with some sudden strike or occupation or anything else - noone really thinks that you won't use it because you're "good guys". I can easily imagine those good guys can easily kill 150mil people and spend the rest of their days writing books and directing TV shows how it was necessary, lesser evil and it saved much more lives so it was totally justified (and what's worse - some soldiers had PTSD pressing buttons killing everyone, so they're sad now!). And i'm as far from being Putin's supporter as you can imagine. So no matter what you think about the possibility of that, being good guys and all that, it's not an obviously ludicrous fear. Consequently it is definitely a factor, or at least can be named as a casus belli in the invasion of Ukraine.

If you want to handwave nukes and the geopolitical impact of the rise of China and everything else, then maybe, but at that point you could handwave everything with "maybe it will change at some point in the future, perhaps". That's a blank check to invade all neighbors at all times... which is arguably Russia's MO for most of its history. It's completely understandable for people outside of Russia to look at that and say that's unjustified.

It's completely understandable for people outside of Russia to look at that and say that's unjustified.

Yes, and they are right fearing it too. Where's the error in any of those fears? People were genociding each other since forever, it's hard to justify that now suddenly we're free from that somehow. Even if it's not genocide, it can be bad and scary. It's enough to pose a big enough threat(existential threat is a fine term i guess) for you to start considering nukes/coups/inverventions/occupations and other nasty things which are completely justifiable from your point of view. And that other guy can think the same way and consider to do those things to you. That's what the whole cold war was about, remember? So how the hell is Russia's fears unjustifiable exactly? The only solution is to avoid escalation of the threat from both parties, but western elites thought it's no longer necessary after the cold war was won. Well, here we are. People fear each other with all the reasons to do so and eventually it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

You can reasonably fear an invasion, you‘re just not allowed to allay those fears by invading another country. Build a fort or something. Everyone fears invasion by their neighbours, and would love an extra one hundred km or two of defensible terrain. And if you think you‘re special because nukes: if we tolerate your invasion for that reason, soon every two-bit country will nuclearize, claim land phobia, and expect free real estate.

Glad that someone unambiguously lays the actual rules, finally! However i fear Putin already got the tip from Americans so he may think he still has a quota to invade 2-3 more countries, just like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and so on.

Whatever, I'm not american. I'm just telling you the rules for little fishes with an italy-size gdp. All the other little fishes in europe think your actions are unjustified, and if that's the way it's gonna be, they'd like karelia and königsberg back to allay their reasonable fear of russian invasion.

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Russia is pretty good at the propaganda game. They're even better at the 'muddy the waters and deny objective reality as much as needed' game.

I'm always puzzled by that statement. Let's just say russians have exactly the opposite point of view, no matter their affiliations. However what I do notice is that west gets constantly confused by their own propaganda narratives which often go against each other, which sometimes looks like Putin outsmarted everyone.While in practice it means your own previous propaganda narrative was wrong and it can't explain well what's happening. So someone comes up with some new bullshit explanation and everyone are suddenly experts on Russia for a while, until the next happening. Sometimes Russia tries to help some of those narratives, but i'm not sure those efforts convincing many.

I'm talking about stuff like Russia denying that there had been any missile strikes when the Moskva was sunk and indeed tried for a long time to deny that the ship had been sunk at all.

I don't even feel confident that it WASN'T just an accidental fire caused by incompetence.

Keep in mind that Russia is good enough at muddying waters that most people were betting against Russia actually invading Ukraine, even as they massed forces on the border.

I would guess a lot of people were betting against Russia invading because they, including myself, thought this would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Year and a half later, I stand by this assessment.

It also isn't clear what the smart move would be if we assume that Russian goals (as defined by Putin) is to enhance the security of the country, avoid turning into a vassal of the West/America.

How do you maintain your functional independence in such a scenario?

Like, there was literally never going to be a better opportunity in the foreseeable future, with the rest of the world reeling from Covid and attendant supply chain and energy issues, and with Russia's supply of fight-age males about to enter a long period of decline.

So why would we expect Putin to wait for another few years?

No excusing the grievous miscalculation that they apparently expected to be able to seize Kiev in the opening moves of the war, of course, but I don't think they hinged their entire war plan on that.

I dunno, I think armed military conflicts tend to be stupid choices simply because they destroy the wealth of all involved nations, but if the alternative is to surrender to the Western Cultural blob and lose control of your country's own destiny, I think I can understand the logic.

I wonder what makes this line of thinking so tenacious that I have to keep having this conversation again and again. Maybe its time to compose a copypasta for this occasion or something...

Anyway, a state with a nuclear triad just doesn't suffer the same risks as Russia did during the times of Napoleon or Hitler. It's true that any state would prefer to not have potentially hostile neighbors on its doorstep, but for Russia, this train has departed long time ago. As for Ukraine, it didn't look like they would be invited to NATO anytime soon, especially not after annexation of Crimea. (I would say that, at least, was a well executed operation, but still argue that it did Russia more harm than good).

Moreover, let's say they seized Kiev, and everything to the east of Dnipro. Now what? You still got an aggressive "anti-Russian" half of Ukraine on your border. Let's say they conquered Ukraine in its entirety. It has to be pacified, at quite a steep cost. What is achieved? Security against Western land invasion (really outlandish scenario)? Not even that, there is still Baltic border, even closer to Moscow, and Kremlin would never have the balls to invade a NATO country.

As it is, I'm actually mad at Putin for not being able to present an alternative to the West, a multipolar world as he says. He had infinite money, common cultural heritage that he could leverage to expand influence in eastern Europe, instead he preferred to get high at his own supply, believing that Ukraine is a pseudo country that would collapse the moment Russian soldier's foot stepped into it, and that Ukrainians are Russians anyway, and decided to play conqueror.

Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.

They found a bunch of large natural gas deposits in Eastern Ukraine and in the sea off Crimea, in the early 2010s right before everything kicked off.

The world is awash in fossil fuels. The amount of natural gas and oil that can be extracted at an economical price is far in excess of the world's needs for at least the next 2-3 decades.

Perhaps Russia is that boneheaded, I don't know. But it feels unlikely. Similarly, the U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn't about oil. For the cost of the war, we could have purchased the entirety of Iraq's oil reserves (more or less).

Oil is cheap.

Neither the U.S. nor Russia are short on natural gas as of the moment.

Europe, maybe.

Europe's not short on natural gas either. In a pinch, they can revert to burning coal just like they did in 2022. And the world has centuries worth of coal that can be easily extracted.

Europe was only short on natural gas because they chose to be.

Short story - Wagner as a private mercenary group was a useful tool for MoD/Putin when they were doing something in Syria/Africa. However after they've relocated to Ukraine MoD was increasingly annoyed by them for several reasons:

  1. Prigozhin seems to be very vocal about certain things which aren't discussed publicly. And what's worse - he gradually raises his rhetoric, adding some stabs against MoD(he always was very careful to not touch Putin personally in his speeches, and until only very recently he wasn't even mentioning Shoigu directly) and clearly trying to raise his own significance using Wagner's perceivable successes for that(so basically he became a political figure, a dangerous position to be). He clearly assumed a posture of a "folk-hero", just a simple no-nonsense guy who's doing his job, he talks things plainly as they are, without any PC nonsense and not trying to save someone's feelings. He wasn't saving his words for the state of the army and especially the level of commandment and basically the only one(together with Strelkov i guess) who was for some reason allowed to do that.

  2. MoD doesn't have any notion of private military contractor company, so noone really understood of what to do with them officially. So i guess the communication and logistical support with Wagner was always done by semi-official connections, rather than official. Basically Prigozhin knew who to speak with, who to ask, who to pressure in MoD so things would be going forward. But the fact that MoD didn't had any direct control on a significant portion of military with heavy armaments was very annoying to them. Also as i understand due to the personal nature of Prigozhins contacts in MoD, it was very hard for them to force Prigozhin to do anything.

So basically it was going towards the conflict for a long time. Strelkov(a guy who's largely responsible for 2014 Donbass insurrection and who always heavily criticised russia's actions, he's basically much more of a hard-liner than Putin/MoD) was saying that directly, rebellion, mutiny and so on. But he was just translating what everyone else were thinking. MoD tried to get rid of Wagner by refusing arms to them as well as logistics(a lot of Prigozhin memes came out of it), and recently they were trying to force any armed people in the conflict to sign direct contracts to MoD, which is a direct stab at Wagner's mercenaries, an attempt to put Wagner under MoD control. Prigozhin said that noone in Wagner will sign them.

Basically MoD were avoiding the direct conflict and tried to gradually push Prigozhin under it's control and Prigozhin was refusing any attempts to it increasing his rhetoric while a week or two ago he went completely ballistic, started directly naming Shoigu, was saying a lot of things which are openly hostile to MoD(that they were lying to everyone, they were using people as a meat in a meat grinder, shells cost more than people to them, the operation goes badly and so on) and it ended up with that direct conflict.

It's essentially boils down to the fact that Prigozhin wasn't under MoD/Putin control, and it was increasingly dangerous to allow that to continue. MoD were trying to increase the pressure to Prigozhin under the table(they tried to gradually boil the frog, basically), but he double-downed and eventually broke leading to the direct conflict. It seems like the direct conflict was a bit of a surprise to MoD(or maybe not?), based on their urgent actions after it all started.

What's up with the whole Lukashenko deal - noone is really sure just yet. The simplest explanation is that Prigozhin made some emotional decision and after realizing that there's no way back he just took any deal which allows him to prolong his life. Lukashenko is just in a position when he can broker that, but it doesn't seem that Prigozhin can be a chooser. So the exact nature of the deal is likely not very interesting.

Thank you, that helps put things into context.

That being said, this seems to be to suggest that there's a large degree of misalignment between the MOD and whoever sanctioned the creation of Wagner in the first place. It seems to me that Wagner largely behaved itself, both abroad and at home, and the MOD's hardline approach suggests more of an internal powerplay than something that Putin was directly orchestrating. Of course, I don't think Prigozhin could lash out at the MOD and not insult Putin in the process, you don't beat the servant without asking the master, especially if you're another servant.

You're trying to infer the nature of MoD relationship with Putin, as well as Putin motivation out of the situation, that's very understandable. However it's worth noting that Putin himself goes into great efforts to hide his involvement and the nature of his involvement with MoD(or anything and anyone else). It allows him to bank on the winner effectively and to maintain the image of 10D player while he's not doing anything or doing very little. So I wouldn't overestimate Putin's involvement or 300 iq moves out of it. He's likely to largely follow the flow making simple, boring and suggestive, however consistent decisions. Whatever happens - you can always smirk and suggestively joke about it maintaining composure. And half of the world starts - oooh, he planned it 15 years ago! Aaah, 10D chess! He's just consistent and avoids emotional steps, that's the whole chess.

Wagner was created to solve external military tasks in Syria/Africa, and proved it's an effective tool there. But then MoD screwed the war and were scrapping for anything they can throw in the fire, so Wagner was relocated. So Wagner is by nature of its creation is quite an independent corporation, which makes sense abroad, but that independence backfired in Ukraine clearly. MoD tried to control it but failed. Or "succeeded" if you can count the current state of things as success.

That being said, this seems to be to suggest that there's a large degree of misalignment between the MOD and whoever sanctioned the creation of Wagner in the first place.

Presumably that was the point - what passes for separation of powers in an autocracy.

It may just be that it's apparently no longer a luxury Russia can afford in such a pivotal and unsuccessful war. Or Prigozhin is now sufficiently weak/used up that it isn't worth it.

I don't think the attempted gelding would have gone ahead without Putin's support, given he set up this situation, but it's hardly the most transparent regime.

And there I was thinking Lukashenko was largely a lap dog, unable to exercise agency except when it came to desperately avoiding sending Belarusian troops to Ukraine since it would upend the only thing keeping his dictatorship going. How did he become powerful enough to mediate a truce between Prigozhin and Putin?

Why would you not assume that Lukashenko was used as a more palatable face of an existing negotiation?

As you point out, it's kind of insane that Prigozhin isn't dead already (assuming he isn't). Hearing that Putin personally reached out to him to turn back would be an even bigger blow to prestige.

I'd also wager that Lukashenko has more agency and freedom than most suspect

You wouldn't be the first. But it doesn't mean that Putin wasn't across this.

My takeaway from the above is that forecasting something as anti-inductive as war is incredibly difficult, and that's it far too easy to fall for a cheerleader effect.

I thought, and still think, that warfare is highly mathematical. I guess it stems from my love of games like Panzer General, or Hearts of Iron. There are things like esprit de corps, or civilian morale, or troop experience that still can be modeled — e.g. through modifiers. There are political events that are difficult to simulate (like the recent putsch) — but surely you can simulate events on an operational level, like Zaporizhzhia/Western Donbas front? Wargaming is a thing, but do they utilize a huge progress in compute to quickly work through numerous scenarios to find the most optimal ones?

I agree that war is in principle fully simulatable, but in practise it's not particularly effective.

The reason is that data collection is incredibly difficult, since both sides will do their best to obfuscate.

Further, a lot of high level decision making still hinges on the decisions of a very few people, who are also near impossible to model. Seriously, how would anyone model Rommel in code?

To the best of my limited knowledge, even modern wargaming heavily relies on humans to mediate the rules, there's no single program or set of programs that is capable of doing so. No, not even my beloved Arma 3 :(

Plus the risk of black swans.

Maybe one of your best generals gets taken out by a pulmonary embolism prior to a critical battle. Or adverse weather conditions delay the arrival of your fleet or, worse, sink your fleet before even engaging the enemy. Maybe a lucky enemy spy manages to sneak a bomb into a factory that is critical to your war effort.

To a large extent these will average out over the course of a long, large scale conflict, but it can also result in a series of dominoes falling such that outcomes you didn't intend or expect are the result.

And thus the problem is that computerized models tend to be sterile and overly deterministic where such crazy events don't get proper consideration.

Right, but people like Rommel have just bigger phase space of possible decisions which stems from their better intuition and greater experience. I had in mind simulations like what they do e.g. in astronomy when they try to simulate formation of star systems, galaxies, and such. It is also highly probabilistic — they'll say something like "with the probability of 60% the planet with Jupiter mass will form at the distance of 1 au away from the central star" based on thousands of simulations they run; unlike wargaming where you have only a specific scenario you run several times with imperfect humans.

I read somewhere that US DoD has some precise models for logistics — I'll try to research.

It's simple really. No one involved wanted Russia to lose the war, and a full blown fight between Wagner and whoever else would mean just that. No one involved wanted to start an actual civil war. Prigozhin probably thought that almost everyone would support him and quickly transfer him the power, or maybe that air strike on his troops really did happen after all, by mistake or as a false flag. Either way, that didn't happen and therefore he conceded the moment he was offered acceptable terms. Lukashenko is just a trusted third party that mediated the dispute.

I am somewhat surprised by the amount of bizzare theories about the coup. Seems like people have been told the Russian state is about to collapse and implode so many times, they find it really hard to believe the Russian troops would actually go to great lengths to avoid shooting at each other.

What the hell is going on in Russia?

In general, I think far too little credence is given to what one might call the "retardation hypothesis", namely that a lot of powerful people are kind of stupid, or at least - if they are intelligent - also impulsive, prone to anger and lack of self-control and often unwilling to consider the advice of smart people around them.

I don't think Prigozhin's run to Moscow was a psy-op or 5D chess. At the same time, I also think it was never likely that the few thousand fighters that made it to Moscow would be able to make a play for the whole country. He lacks the regional powerbase, lacks the ideological column, lacks the administrative expertise, much of the public still has some degree of fondness for Putin, and the estimated 50,000 strong FSO, plus the air force, plus large remaining portions of the military appeared to stay loyal to Putin. It was not a 1917 situation, and nor was it a present-day Sudan situation where the rebel/mercenary army was much better funded and much larger relative to the official military.

Assuming I'm right that it isn't 5D chess, I think Prigozhin's initial gambit was to occupy Rostov-on-Don as a 'protest', win some major concessions from Putin (maybe firing Shoigu, giving Prigozhin more of what he wanted, maybe money, whatever) over the phone immediately, then go back to Ukraine. Instead, something seems to have gone wrong, maybe Putin played hardball, and some portion of Prigozhin's forces decided to march on Moscow. This caused some degree of panic. Putin eventually semi-relented and here we are.

It's obvious why Prigozhin accepted the deal: he never actually wanted to die, he wanted concessions. Marching on Moscow forreal forreal, to borrow from the zoomers, would have been certain death for him and the men he might care about (eg. senior Wagner officers). He couldn't escape to the West or any Western-friendly country because he'd be extradited to the Hague for war crimes. He's too hot for the Arabs to accept him now, and neither them nor the Iranians want to annoy Putin. A Prigozhin that was Putin's enemy would be stranded with nowhere to go, wanted by both Russia and the 'West'.

Taking Lukashenko's deal (which Putin might have put him up to) was Prigozhin's only option by Saturday evening. As to why he attempted the move in the first place, I think a combination of impulsive rage and a desire to show Putin he was serious explain it pretty easily. Putin called Prigozhin's bluff and - at great cost, I'd argue, but nevertheless - he won.

In general, I think far too little credence is given to what one might call the "retardation hypothesis", namely that a lot of powerful people are kind of stupid, or at least - if they are intelligent - also impulsive, prone to anger and lack of self-control and often unwilling to consider the advice of smart people around them.

I'd normally be behind this, but I think this undersells a bunch of things. Like how stable or sensible things are in a cutthroat oligarchy in the middle of a war that threatens to drag many of them down.

This isn't some country ruled by common law pedantry with six million precedents and the comfort of a stable constitutional settlement. You can have "experts" in the former you can just offload most things to. This is the late Republican trap: there is no easy guarantee of safety in the game and the "smart people" don't necessarily have the same skin in the game (or anything to offer you). Caesar would have been an idiot to stay in his camp and trusting in the Republic's processes, even though we certainly would have called him an idiot for marching and losing.

In this situation Prigozhin was seeing himself lose a battle for internal influence and what made him valuable to his feudal leader had basically been burned taking Bakhmut for some reason that the more militarily inclined might know but I certainly don't. His men were going to be signed with the government and his men are his power. What future he would have had is unclear in a place you really don't want to be in a gray zone in.

It's a situation that provides a rational incentive for "dumb" behavior

Generally, it aligns with what is known

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/06/25/putin-was-nowhere-to-be-found

In general, I think far too little credence is given to what one might call the "retardation hypothesis", namely that a lot of powerful people are kind of stupid, or at least - if they are intelligent - also impulsive, prone to anger and lack of self-control and often unwilling to consider the advice of smart people around them.

To be charitable, I think acting irrational is often the most rational course of action. The whole point of anger is that you're willing to engage in mutually destructive behavior, to your own detriment, if you feel slighted. This ideally works as a deterrent against being taken advantage of too much.

I am sympathetic to this hypothesis, God knows that centuries of fetal alcohol syndrome can't have done good things for the average Russian warlord.

I'm still surprised that Lukashenko had that much autonomy, and even if Putin put him up to it, that still reflects poorly on Putin's control. Sure, it could have been the least bad decision he had available.

It sounds like you have been absorbing the narrative instead of looking at the concrete facts. In the big picture, nothing has changed. Russia has superior manpower and production. In a war of attrition Russia will eventually win unless the government collapses.

This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine, NATO wants regime change in Russia. It stands to reason that this coup attempt was in some capacity supported by NATO. If I had to guess, Prig was fed bad intel by NATO spies in the MoD. Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig. We may never know. My prediction is that Prig lives for at least a few years.

This has been the strategy from the start. Russia wants to bleed out Ukraine

It was not. Russia opened the (hot phase of the) war with a series of incredibly ambitious maneuvers and risky airborne operations, indicating they expected to be able to end the war very quickly. These efforts all failed, mostly disastrously (the southern axis of advance towards Odessa stumbled at the gates of Mykolaiv and :checks notes: Voznesensk?, but they still wound up in possession of Kherson Oblast and didn't get mauled, so massive W compared to the northern axes).

Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.

The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.

The people saying that are idiots. Not only do they have zero evidence, it doesn't make any sense. The "accounting error" was not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account. It's games with the valuation of equipment transfers.

It's somewhat besides the point. It was probably not a $6.2 billion ACH transfer. The point is that "aid" being given to Ukraine is not being tracked particularly carefully and bribery of Russian officials is hardly out of the question.

I don’t believe it was even an accounting error. It honestly sounded to me like they wanted to spend more money without announcing they were spending more money. I believe they changed some accounting from “replacement costs” to “historical costs” - which I think is just lifo accounting to fifo accounting.

Just so. There's a lot of creative accounting that can be done to make numbers look the way you want them to look. If you want to provide more aid but don't want to get a new authorization, just fiddle the books a bit.

"Prigozhin accepted CIA bribe, coordinated with Putin to put on a good show until the bribe was paid, then turned back" is apparently popular on the Chinese internet, and fits what we do know pretty well. Russia letting its men be sacrificed in the ruse seems brutal, but it's not unheard of. Also possible that the helos could have have been destroyed without killing anyone, and the deaths manufactured as part of the ruse.

and fits what we do know pretty well.

Prigozhin was possessed. Then he was exorcized, and then he recalled his troops. Fits pretty well, doesn't it? It's like epicycles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle

when ancients astronomers wanted to explain the movement of planets using geocentric system.

No, it doesn't. Putin's legitimacy and power rest on the appearance of strength and stability. This proposes he decided to jeopardize that so an unruly subordinate could scam the CIA. That's far more of a stretch than "Prigozhin acted out of desperation and then lost his nerve or was persuaded/threatened into backing off."

It is never 5D chess.

It is never 5D chess.

Whenever someone claims that n-dimensional chess is being played in the FSU, my go-to response is "Gary Kasparov has repeatedly said nobody in the FSU is playing n-dimensional chess and the cock-up theory of history applies the same there as everywhere else - are you claiming to know more about chess than him?"

NATO wants regime change in Russia.

NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?

Russia has superior manpower and production.

This simplistic thinking lead to wide assumption about Kyiv falling in first days, or Donbass army being surrounded etc.

If I had to guess, Prig was fed bad intel by NATO spies in the MoD.

And Putin has doubles.

Some say the mysterious $6.2 billion accounting error was paid to Prig.

No, triples! Why are you saying stuff that has zero relation to reality?

NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?

Because Biden said they wanted it. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3982406-we-need-regime-change-in-russia-but-how/

While Biden's obviously a checked out zombie who can be animated with a bevy of top shelf stimulants and given detailed instructions with the important bits in all capitals, he is still ostensibly the US president and so when he says things like “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” people assume he means that he doesn't want "this man" to remain in power - and that would obviously entail regime change.

NATO doesn't want it (apart from hardliners from Estonia, or wherever). Why is it gets repeated?

I'm not going to put in the effort to convince you, but it is my view that they have been pretty clear about this. Sure, NATO will never have a press release that says "DEATH TO PUTIN" but their actions and their propaganda has made the intent clear to me and many others. I am not intending to persuade you, but you merely contradicting me is not going to persuade anybody either.

This simplistic thinking lead to wide assumption about Kyiv falling in first days, or Donbass army being surrounded etc.

I predicted day 1 that Russia was not going to take Kiev any time soon. Just because you fell for it does not mean that everybody did.

I appreciate the concrete prediction, but I find the idea that Russia was will due to manpower and production advantages dubious at best.

Leaving aside the former, in the latter regime they're not just competing against Ukraine's anemic MIC, but the largesse of NATO as a whole. Even breadcrumbs dropped from the whiskers of Uncle Sam hit like MOABs.

I see the most likely outcome becoming a stalemate and white peace, or withdrawal after an internal collapse of Russia, most likely the former. What I don't see are decisive Ukrainian or Russian victories.

I'm also highly leery of claims of NATO being able to subvert the Russian military hierarchy to that degree. If that was the case, they'd be able to outright buy out most of Russian leadership. Russia might be corrupt, but I don't think it's that corrupt.

I appreciate the concrete prediction, but I find the idea that Russia was will due to manpower and production advantages dubious at best.

Leaving aside the former, in the latter regime they're not just competing against Ukraine's anemic MIC, but the largesse of NATO as a whole. Even breadcrumbs dropped from the whiskers of Uncle Sam hit like MOABs.

Russia has a population of around 150 mil while Ukraine's population is around 40 mil. Russia simply has much deeper reserves to pull from. It is true that NATO is committing some production capacity to the Ukraine war, but it is still a fraction of what Russia is willing to commit. The Russian regime will fight the war of attrition until the regime collapse.

I see the most likely outcome becoming a stalemate and white peace, or withdrawal after an internal collapse of Russia, most likely the former. What I don't see are decisive Ukrainian or Russian victories.

If Russia is able to consolidate on its territorial gains, this is decisively a win for Russia. It is not the total victory that they originally hoped for, but it is still a clear win based on the instigating causes of the war.

I'm also highly leery of claims of NATO being able to subvert the Russian military hierarchy to that degree. If that was the case, they'd be able to outright buy out most of Russian leadership. Russia might be corrupt, but I don't think it's that corrupt.

A lot of my favorite anon Twitter accounts said that the rebellion was overblown from the beginning and was a nothingburger. But still, it went farther than most people would have thought possible the day before. Given that NATO's win condition is regime change in Russia, the reason for suspicion is obvious.

It seems like Russia has more manpower reserves to pull from, but Ukraine is willing to pull deeper.

  1. A coup can only succeed if key military leaders support it, or at least refuse orders to oppose it

  2. A person who wants to launch a coup can never know for sure whether what those military leaders will do once the coup starts.

  3. So, if I start marching on Moscow, my subsequent steps are dictated by what those military leaders do. If I do not see tangible indications of support PDQ, continuing my march becomes very, very risky.

  4. So, the best bet for me at that point is to negotiate an end to the coup attempt in a manner which at least gives me a reasonable chance of avoiding lethal repercussions.

That seems to be what happened here.

My issue with that is that "a reasonable chance of avoiding lethal repercussions" seems to be very small indeed.

Putin is certainly not known for being particularly forgiving.

Also, "marching" is kinda eliding what Prigozhin did, there's a world of difference between a demonstrative march and one that involves seven aircraft downed in anger, and possibly deaths on the ground too.

Phrased another way, if you're looking for plausible deniability and leaving room for de-escalation, you don't go this far.

To me it, it seems one of the following is likely true:

  1. Prigozhin pussied out and wasn't fully on board the coup process even if he'd crossed nominal red lines already. I'd hesitate to call that outright irrational, but it's certainly questionable.

  2. Putin is so weak that this was a rational demonstration of strength, and he's quite confident that no punishment will come, or at least little of it.

I'm going to leave aside the option of Prigozhin having actually succeeded in his aims, because preliminary evidence suggests that's not the case.

My issue with that is that "a reasonable chance of avoiding lethal repercussions" seems to be very small indeed. Putin is certainly not known for being particularly forgiving.

Very true. I would certainly be wary of people bearing umbrellas were I him. But at some point he had two choices: 1) continue the coup and almost certainly die within a week; 2) negotiate and create a chance, small though it might be, to eventually die of natural causes.

Also, "marching" is kinda eliding what Prigozhin did, there's a world of difference between a demonstrative march and one that involves seven aircraft downed in anger, and possibly deaths on the ground too. Phrased another way, if you're looking for plausible deniability and leaving room for de-escalation, you don't go this far.

I was using "marching on" in the sense of a military advance, not a protest march. And I said nothing about plausible deniability; that would be dumb. The only way to get people to come out in favor of your coup is to make it clear that a coup is exactly what is happening. No one is going to stick their neck out for a coup that might not be happening.

Basically, what happened is exactly what one would expect to happen in the case of an unsuccessful attempted coup that fails in its earliest stages.

Very true. I would certainly be wary of people bearing umbrellas were I him.

Please. This is the Bulgarian MO. KGB were never that subtle.

History also shows us that being declared emperor, or figurehead of the revolution, is dangerous even if you disclaim any intention of leading it. If Prig becomes a figure of veneration on the Russian far right, he's dead whether he'd accept the crown or not.

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