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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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