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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?
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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