I would guess there was a cash payment involved. Russian just seized $47B (us) in cash from a van parked outside his office in Moscow. Either that or they had some of his family
If Prigo had the proper amount of respect for and/or fear of Putin, he never would have brought his army to the edge of Moscow and scared the entire population in the first place. THAT does not make Putin look good in the eyes of Russians. Russians may be relieved that no violence was brought to bear on Moscow, but all of the rumors of the war going really badly (with infighting between units) just received an exclamation point. I'm fairly certain that even the most dense of Russian citizens figured that out a long time ago. Putin is an extremely bad wartime president, and this is a perfect example of that. Add in the economic suffering caused by the sanctions, and Russians have to be fairly miserable as well as sick and tired of this war. And yes, they can and should blame Putin for it. They are NOT going to "eat it up". Sounds like you are channeling Tucker Carlson again. Get your antenna set for a different frequency and try again.
It was just about as good a game of Chess as Stalin was playing when he executed most of the military leadership in the years leading up to WWII. Pure genius. Next level stuff right there. Set his military back a decade or more. Got lucky when the weather bailed him out as Germany was closing in on Moscow.
Opinion: It’s not over yet in Russia, not by a long shot | CNN Above all there was the long-unspoken belief by many Russians who feared to make their voices heard that fundamentally, the war in Ukraine is not worth fighting or dying for — far from it. Now, that dirty little secret has had a full, if not yet complete, airing. And the consequences of that alone could be monumental. The most immediate and perhaps epiphanous moment began on Friday when Prigozhin released a stunning 30-minute video describing the invasion of Ukraine as “a racket” carried out by a corrupt elite, though he carefully avoided any direct mention of Putin. “The oligarchic clan that rules Russia needed the war,” Prigozhin said. “The mentally ill scumbags decided: ‘It’s OK, we’ll throw in a few thousand more Russian men as cannon fodder. They’ll die under artillery fire, but we’ll get what we want.’ ” Of course, it wasn’t the first time Prigozhin has spoken so directly about the corruption he believes is eating away at the Russian state and military. Last month, he gave an incendiary interview to pro-Kremlin blogger Konstantin Dolgov, charging, “While the children of the elite smear themselves with cream on the Internet, ordinary people have children in battle, torn to pieces, and a mother cries over her son.” Noting that the war had accomplished none of its objectives of disarming Ukraine, Prigozhin added, “If (the Ukrainians) had 500 tanks before, now they have 5,000. If 20,000 fighters were skillful then, now it’s 400,000.”
I don’t know. Speculations run from 30 pilots dead to it never happened to Russian helicopters massacring the Wagner convoy.
There are a lot of really bad takes in the media and by politicians right now. Varying from Swag to conspiracy nutters.
I agree, nothing else makes much sense. Mr P probably gets his own compound, private army and billions in cash. Bling was right- a nation of gangsters.
Let's see how smart Mr Prog is. If he ever agrees to meet Putin in the Kremlin, he will go flying from the 20th floor.
That is not accurate in the sense that you mean it. Brief explanation of the air tasking order (ATO) process, and please bear in mind, this is for U.S. and NATO forces; I’m sure Russia has a similar process, but it probably isn’t this. There is a 72-hour planning cycle for the ATO. But that starts with apportionment, which is priority and percentage of available air support three days from now. In other words, you’re looking at what you think will be combat ready and deciding how much to throw at, say, deep strategic targets, air interdiction, close air support, combat air patrol, maritime support, etc. Over the next two days, you take that apportionment and allocate it to the different subordinate elements of the joint task force, say, V Corps, I MEF, Sixth Fleet, and Ninth Air Force before finally allotting specific missions to aircraft call signs and publishing it on the ATO roughly 24 hours before the missions take place. And that cycle is going continuously: one group is always planning three days from now and hands off the plan to another group planning two days who hands off the plan to the group publishing the order. An entirely different group is assessing those effects and giving inputs to the group planning three days out, and on it goes. In terms of an emergency situation like the one that happened in Russia, it’s important to understand that you wouldn’t just start the planning at the beginning to respond to that. You already have sorties scheduled for the next 24 hours, so you would dynamically retask those on to new targets instead of what they were scheduled to do that day. Some of those sorties would be what we call in the West “XCAS,” meaning that would not have specific targets just an alert period either in the air or on the ground and would respond to immediate requests for air support. I’m sure Russia does something like that, too, if they are even close to being in the same league as us. The reports are, in any case, that Russian fixed and rotary wing assets did attack the Wagner convoy mostly without success.
Whatever else could be said about the shortest civil war in history … (1) Russia got rid of Prigozhin, which it had been wanting to do. (2) Took control of Wagner, which it had been planning to do. (3) Didn’t skip a beat annihilating Ukrainian armored vehicles and troops on the frontlines.
