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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?
A coup can only succeed if key military leaders support it, or at least refuse orders to oppose it
A person who wants to launch a coup can never know for sure whether what those military leaders will do once the coup starts.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please. This is the Bulgarian MO. KGB were never that subtle.
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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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