A tank got stuck in the gates of Rostov circus. Photo was taken yesterday and seems to illustrate the situation quite succinctly.
After a successful march to Moscow, the Wagner columns are turning around (supposedly to go to their deployment locations somewhere in occupied Ukraine), charges against Prigozhin are dropped, and Lukashenko claims credit for resolving the situation.
Something did feel a bit fishy yesterday, but what the actual fuck.
Most recent Prigozhin (my translation):
They wanted to disband PMC Wagner. We left on June 23 for the "march of justice". In a day we traveled to 200 kilometers from Moscow. During this time, we have not shed a single drop of the blood of our fighters. Now is the moment when blood can be shed. Therefore, realizing all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed on one of the sides, we deploy our columns and leave in the opposite direction to the field camps according to the plan.
Source: meduza.io/...
Three questions remain:
1. Was it scripted or improvised?
2. If scripted, who was in on it?
3. If improvised, who blinked?
I talked to several people in Moscow, and what kept striking me is how detached they had seemed from the war — way more detached than even people in the US. Not justifying Putin, not supporting the invasion, just keeping it completely compartmentalized and going on with life as usual. Now this may have started to change, as at least two of my correspondents acknowledged, with a realization that a huge and well-armed military unit can literally reach their city from the war theater in less than 24 hours.
Finally, regardless of the amount of forethought (if any) involved in yesterday’s Wagnerite excursion to Rostov and along the Don Highway, one important outcome is permanent damage to Putin’s image. He definitely appeared slow, weak, and sidelined throughout the debacle — the saddest clown in the circus. Perhaps that had been the goal? Or am I giving too much credit to the instigators of the events?
Historical note. Something similar happened during World War I in the run-up to the Bolshevik November coup of 1917. In September of 1917, a war hero, general Kornilov, led his troops on St. Petersburg with a proclaimed goal to purge the government of people sabotaging the war effort (sounds familiar?), he was charged with mutiny (well, charges against Prigozhin were armed rebellion), and turned his troops around before reaching St. Petersburg. A few years later Kornilov got fragged in the midst of a bloody civil war. That happened in Taganrog, about 70 km from Rostov-on-Don.
Here is an important video to ponder in light of the situation.
