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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?
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.
I love devarbol Shoigu-posting.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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