Reality is that of course the Kremlin fully funds the Wagner Group.
Wagner is not independent and self-sustaining, the way Putin has needed us to believe.
So we've got Pregozhin running around in Africa and Syria, et al, committing atrocities we'll find hard to believe could ever be carried out by honest-to-god humans. And those will be the atrocities that the investigators and their bosses will allow us to be aware of because some of them are bound to be so horrendous, nobody wants to know about them. Ever.
The point that needs to be hammered on is that this shit is not simply being done by rogue actors who are unaffiliated with Moscow.
Putin sponsors Wagner, Wagner is acting on behalf of Putin, Putin is largely responsible for Wagner's behavior. The Russian government is committing war crimes everywhere it goes.
Clarence Thomas finally gets a little relief for his bruised ego self-loathing.
The guy got some of his schooling under Affirmative Action. I get the feeling he's always been eager to pull the ladder up behind him because he's spent 35 or 40 years listening to "conservatives" as they told him, almost straight up, that he didn't deserve anything he got because he stole the place that rightfully belonged to some white kid and blah blah blah.
Thomas has been gunning for Affirmative Action since before his appointment so this one may not look like some kind of outlier - unless...
Let's take Paranoid Mike's little tour and see how we might get to these odd-seeming decisions.
First:
All of these "conservative" justices were chosen for nomination specifically to address particular pieces of the Project Plutocracy agenda. They've all been groomed and placed on the court in order to have a desired effect on whatever items their handlers deem appropriate at any given time.
Second:
Nobody is outright buying decisions from this court. That's totally illegal, and even though these dark-money yacht-buying assholes don't really care about following the law, they don't have to do it that way.
They pick a justice they're pretty sure is sympathetic to their side of the issue-du-jour, and they treat that justice to a really spiffy time at an exotic vacation spot, or they arrange a nice little junket to speak to a group of 'concerned citizens', having arranged for the justice to receive a right handsome honorarium from a grateful bunch of just regular hard-working Americans.
And they do all of that well before they start any legal action.
The point of the exercise is to make all the legal steps fit with an overall strategy - combining political campaign funding, Voter Education SuperPACs, advertising and other media manipulation - together with some client head-hunting in order to get the right people with the right standing, in front of the right judges in the right lower courts, making the right arguments based on whatever loophole, gray area, or cockamamie "theory" they can come up with.
As the case works its way through the system, they keep refining the terms and testing the arguments on focus groups and OpEd pages and white papers and speeches and and and.
I'm betting it's way more gnarly and complicated than the picture I have in my cluttered little brain, but no matter how twisty-turny it gets, or how carefully it's set up, there can be surprises - it doesn't always work.
But this is Political Capitalism, and the players are going to do everything possible to be sure they know the outcome before the voting even starts.
We're told all our lives that we really don't want to see how they make the sausage - and we've been able to convince ourselves the ugliness of it was pretty well concentrated in the Legislative Branch. And maybe they've been mostly right. But this is definitely not the case now - not anymore.
Affirmative Action
Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.
The 6-3 ruling could drastically alter college admissions policies across the country. Criticizing the decision, President Biden said this was “not a normal court” and directed the Education Department “to analyze what practices can build a more inclusive and diverse” student body.
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Activists celebrate the affirmative action opinion at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
There's a reason - or many reasons - why Prigozhin's march on Moscow met with practically no resistance, and then halted as abruptly as it started.
I think the big one could be that the Russian general staff have had enough of Putin's little war.
The longer it goes on, the more they look like the incompetent bozos many of them are
...the more it's revealed just how deep the corruption runs
...the more damage is done to the overall "prestige" of the Russian military
...the more likely it is that whole big bunches of them will be integrated into the Siberian biome
So I think one of the weird little wrinkles is that some commanders told their guys to stand down and not interfere with the Wagner gang.
If that's how it went, it had to come as a very loud and very clear message that Putin and Shoigu are not the only power-holders. Putin has the FSB and GRU, and the reason he keeps Shoigu around is that Shoigu has always been willing to pledge his troth to Putin, using Putin's guys to coerce the military.
Now it looks a whole lot like Shoigu's hold on the Russian military is either badly weakened, or that maybe it's all but gone. And that could mean Putin will have to expend even greater time and effort to keep people in line and to re-establish the illusion of his omnipotence.
Like I've said - nobody knows what all is going on, including me.
Russian General Knew About Mercenary Chief’s Rebellion Plans, U.S. Officials Say
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, may have believed he had support in Russia’s military.
A senior Russian general had advance knowledge of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to rebel against Russia’s military leadership, according to U.S. officials briefed on American intelligence on the matter, which has prompted questions about what support the mercenary leader had inside the top ranks.
The officials said they are trying to learn if Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the former top Russian commander in Ukraine, helped plan Mr. Prigozhin’s actions last weekend, which posed the most dramatic threat to President Vladimir V. Putin in his 23 years in power.
General Surovikin is a respected military leader who helped shore up defenses across the battle lines after Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year, analysts say. He was replaced as the top commander in January but retained influence in running war operations and remains popular among the troops.
American officials also said there are signs that other Russian generals may also have supported Mr. Prigozhin’s attempt to change the leadership of the Defense Ministry by force. Current and former U.S. officials said Mr. Prigozhin would not have launched his uprising unless he believed that others in positions of power would come to his aid.
If General Surovikin was involved in last weekend’s events, it would be the latest sign of the infighting that has characterized Russia’s military leadership since the start of Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine and could signal a wider fracture between supporters of Mr. Prigozhin and Mr. Putin’s two senior military advisers: Sergei K. Shoigu, the minister of defense, and Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of general staff.
But the infighting could also define the Russian military’s future on the battlefield in Ukraine, as Western-backed troops push a new counteroffensive that is meant to try to win back territory seized by Moscow.
Mr. Putin must now decide, officials say, whether he believes that General Surovikin helped Mr. Prigozhin and how he should respond.
What happens next? In their first remarks since the revolt ended, Putin tried to project unity and stability as questions swirled about his grip on power, while Prigozhin claimed he wasn’t trying to overthrow the Russian president. With Wagner’s future in doubt, it is unclear if the mercenary army will still be a fighting force in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, the Russian domestic intelligence agency said that it was dropping “armed mutiny” criminal charges against Mr. Prigozhin and members of his force. But if Mr. Putin finds evidence General Surovikin more directly helped Mr. Prigozhin, he will have little choice but to remove him from his command, officials and analysts say.
Some former officials say Mr. Putin could decide to keep General Surovikin, if he concludes he had some knowledge of what Mr. Prigozhin had planned but did not aid him. For now, analysts said, Mr. Putin seems intent on pinning the mutiny solely on Mr. Prigozhin.
“Putin is reluctant to change people,” said Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “But if the secret service puts files on Putin’s desk and if some files implicate Surovikin, it may change.”
Senior American officials suggest that an alliance between General Surovikin and Mr. Prigozhin could explain why Mr. Prigozhin is still alive, despite seizing a major Russian military hub and ordering an armed march on Moscow.
American officials and others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. They emphasized that much of what the United States and its allies know is preliminary. U.S. officials have avoided discussing the rebellion publicly, out of fear of feeding Mr. Putin’s narrative that the unrest was orchestrated by the West.
Still, American officials have an interest in pushing out information that undermines the standing of General Surovikin, whom they view as more competent and more ruthless than other members of the command. His removal would undoubtedly benefit Ukraine.
The Russian Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
General Surovikin spoke out against the rebellion as it became public on Friday, in a video that urged Russian troops in Ukraine to maintain their positions and not join the uprising.
“I urge you to stop,” General Surovikin said in a message posted on Telegram. “The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to worsen in our country.”
But one former official called that message akin to “a hostage video.” General Surovikin’s body language suggested he was uncomfortable denouncing a former ally, one who shared his view of the Russian military leadership, the former official said.
There were other signs of divided loyalties in the top ranks. Another Russian general — Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev — made his own video appeal, calling any actions against the Russian state a “stab in the back of the country and president.” But hours later, he surfaced in another video, chatting with Mr. Prigozhin in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where Wagner fighters seized military facilities.
“There were just too many weird things that happened that, in my mind, suggest there was collusion that we have not figured out yet,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said in a phone interview.
“Think of how easy it was to take Rostov,” Mr. McFaul said. “There are armed guards everywhere in Russia, and suddenly, there’s no one around to do anything?”
Independent experts, and U.S. and allied officials said that Mr. Prigozhin seemed to believe that large parts of Russia’s army would rally to his side as his convoy of 8,000 Wagner forces moved on Moscow.
Former officials said General Surovikin did not support pushing Mr. Putin from power but appears to have agreed with Mr. Prigozhin that Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov needed to be relieved of duty.
“Surovikin is a decorated general with a complex history,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “He is said to be respected by the soldiers and viewed as competent.”
General Surovikin and Mr. Prigozhin have both brushed up against Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov over tactics used in Ukraine. While the Russian military’s overall performance in the war has been widely derided as underwhelming, analysts have credited General Surovikin and Mr. Prigozhin for Russia’s few successes.
In General Surovikin’s case, that limited success was the professionally managed withdrawal of Russian troops from Kherson, where they were nearly encircled last fall and cut off from supplies. Based on communications intercepts, U.S. officials concluded that a frustrated General Surovikin represented a hard-line faction of generals intent on using the toughest tactics against Ukrainians.
Similarly, Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries achieved some success in taking the eastern city of Bakhmut after a nine-month slog in which, by Mr. Prigozhin’s own count, some 20,000 Wagner troops were killed. U.S. officials and military analysts say tens of thousands of troops died in the fight for Bakhmut, among them Wagner soldiers who were former convicts with little training before they were sent to war. Mr. Prigozhin frequently complained that senior Russian defense and military officials were not supplying his troops with enough weapons.
Russia’s entire military campaign in Ukraine has been characterized by a musical chairs of changing generals. Last fall, when General Surovikin was put in charge of the Russian Army’s effort in Ukraine, he was the second man to get the job, replacing a general who had lasted barely a month. General Surovikin did not last much longer, but performed far better during his weeks at the helm.
Nevertheless, by January, General Surovikin was demoted, and Mr. Putin handed direct command of the war to General Gerasimov, who promised to put Russian forces back on the offensive. General Surovikin’s demotion, military and Russia analysts say, was widely viewed as a blow to Mr. Prigozhin.
This Peter Zeihan guy gets a lot right. He indulges himself in his own hype sometimes, but he's a smart guy and knows some real stuff.
If you believe a Putin stooge like Lukashenko stepped up and became the key figure in a potentially world-changing series of events - still roiling and nowhere near played out yet - then you have to believe Putin either stood aside and let one of his flunkies take the spotlight, or you have to see Putin as a weak-sister paper tiger who is not actually running the show in Moscow.
But there's a third probability too. And a fourth, and a fifth, and a thirty-seventh - cuz nobody knows jack shit what's really going on or what's going to happen until it happens. We're all just passive observers.
One thing that comes to mind is that Putin doesn't have the strangle hold on the Kremlin we thought he had, and his "magnanimous gesture" is a way for him to calm things down a bit - to buy himself a little time - to get people thinking, "Maybe the Russians aren't quite the maniacs they've been showing us they are. Look, Putin is being all generous and cooperative and shit. Let's all just cool out and see if we can get back to business..."
I'm not saying Putin is playing the game at a level we can't even imagine. He's not. He's a guy who made some really fucked up decisions, tried to bull his way through when the plan blew up, and now he's in a desperate scramble to make it look like he's still got a good handle on everything so he can avoid "retiring to his dacha for a much-needed and well-deserved rest".
One last point:
I don't want to underestimate the guy, but Lukashenko? Seriously?
Lukashenko claims he persuaded Putin not to kill Wagner boss Prigozhin
RIGA, Latvia — When Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko tried to convince Yevgeniy Prigozhin to call off his rebellion against Moscow, the mercenary boss was “half-crazed,” Lukashenko said, pouring out obscenities for half an hour — and unaware, perhaps, that his life was at risk.
The swearing in their phone conversation Saturday “was 10 times more than normal,” Lukashenko said in remarkably frank comments during a meeting Tuesday with his generals. He claimed to have stopped Russian President Vladimir Putin from making a “harsh decision” — a suggestion that Putin planned to kill the Wagner Group chief. Lukashenko’s comments were published by Belarusian state media.
Prigozhin said he wanted to speak to Putin, Lukashenko said, and demanded that frequent targets of his ire — Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff — be handed over to him. That wasn’t going to happen, Lukashenko said.
Lukashenko, perhaps improbably, played a central role in brokering the deal between Putin and Prigozhin that led to the enraged mercenary boss diverting a column of fighters that were advancing on Moscow with surprisingly little resistance. Putin, in exchange, agreed to drop insurgency charges against Prigozhin and to allow him and Wagner to move to neighboring Belarus, all but a client state of Moscow.
Putin also allowed Prigozhin to leave Russia alive — a point that seemed uncertain until Lukashenko on Tuesday confirmed that the mercenary chief had arrived by private plane in Belarus.
Lukashenko’s version of events could not be verified. He is widely viewed as a dictator and an abuser of civil, human and political rights. The president of Belarus since 1994 claimed reelection most recently in a 2020 vote widely viewed as fraudulent, igniting months of protests that were brutally repressed. And he’s known for making aggrandizing, far-fetched and at times bizarre statements.
In September 2020, for instance, Lukashenko claimed that reports of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny being poisoned were falsified. He released a transcript of what he said was a conversation between a Polish intelligence officer named “Mike” and a German agent named “Nick” intercepted by Belarus that confirmed the fraud. Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, announced the findings of a German military laboratory that Navalny was poisoned with chemical weapon personally.
But however checkered Lukashenko’s reputation, the Kremlin confirmed that he was a central figure in the deal. And in his remarks on Tuesday, Lukashenko described conversations with Putin and Prigozhin in unusually granular terms.
While speaking with Putin on Saturday morning, Lukashenko said, he concluded that the Russian president planned to “whack” Prigozhin. He said he convinced Putin that while that option was theoretically available, it risked causing major bloodshed.
“I say, ‘Don’t do this, because then there will be no negotiations,’” Lukashenko said.
Wagner fighters, the Belarusian president said Tuesday, are battle-hardened and “will do anything — these guys know how to stand up for each other.”
“And this is the most trained unit in the army,” he said. “Who will argue with this?” If Putin had taken harsh action against Prigozhin, he said, thousands of civilians and Russian forces would die in the conflict.
Lukashenko’s detailed account of sensitive conversations at the heart of the greatest crisis of Putin’s career was highly unusual. He conveyed the sense of a warm relationship with Putin, who he said addressed him as “Sasha,” a diminutive of Alexander.
At the same time, he offered a complimentary assessment of Prigozhin at a moment when senior Russian officials are trying to sully his reputation.
“Who is Prigozhin?” Lukashenko asked, and answered: “He is a very authoritative person today in the armed forces. No matter how much some would not like it.”
Lukashenko said he had received alarming reports about Prigozhin’s mutiny when he was informed through links between the Belarusian KGB and Russia’s Federal Security Service that Putin wanted to speak. When they talked shortly after 10 a.m., he said, he realized Putin was planning tough action and urged him to wait until Lukashenko had spoken to Wagner.
“The most dangerous thing, as I understood it, was not what the situation was, but how it could develop and its consequences,” Lukashenko said.
“I suggested that Putin take his time,” he said, but the Russian president responded: “Listen, Sasha, there’s no point. He doesn’t even pick up the phone. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”
In Lukashenko’s telling, he succeeded in persuading Putin to wait until he reached Prigozhin in Rostov-on-Don, the city in southern Russia where Wagner fighters had seized control of an important military headquarters and airfield.
“A bad peace is better than any war,” Lukashenko said he told Putin. “Do not rush. I will try to contact him.”
“He once again says, ‘It’s useless.’ I say, ‘Okay, wait.’”
Putin also discussed the war in Ukraine, Lukashenko said, claiming that it was proceeding “better than before.”
“I say, ‘You see, not everything is so sad,’” Lukashenko said.
Lukashenko and Prigozhin spoke at 11 a.m., Lukashenko said.
Wagner’s commanders, who had just come from the front in Ukraine, were upset that so many fighters had been killed in the war, Lukashenko said. Prigozhin said some in Russia’s military wanted to “strangle” Wagner. Prigozhin has publicly accused Shoigu of trying to destroy the mercenary group.
“The guys are very offended, especially the commanders. And, as I understand it, they greatly influenced … Prigozhin himself,” Lukashenko said. “Yes, he is such, you know, a heroic guy, but he was pressured and influenced by those who led the assault squads and saw these deaths.”
He said Prigozhin denied that Wagner had killed any Russian service members on the way to Rostov-on-Don — contradicting claims Prigozhin made earlier Saturday on camera to Yunus-bek Yevkurov, when he said Wagner shot down three Russian military helicopters because they had fired at the mercenaries.
Lukashenko said he believed Prigozhin’s assertion that Wagner had not yet killed any Russian service members or civilians. He asked what he wanted.
“Let them give me Shoigu and Gerasimov. And I need to meet Putin,'” Lukashenko said Prigozhin told him.
“I say, ‘Zhenya [the diminutive for Yevgeniy], no one will give you either Shoigu or Gerasimov, especially in this situation,’” he said. “You know Putin as well as I do. Secondly, he will not only not meet with you. He will not talk to you on the phone due to this situation.”
Prigozhin was silent at first, Lukashenko said, but then burst out: “But we want justice! They want to strangle us! We’ll go to Moscow!”
“I say, ‘Halfway there you’ll just be crushed like a bug.’”
“‘Think about it, I say.”
“No,” Prigozhin responded.
“I spent a long time persuading him,” Lukashenko said. He told Prigozhin that he could do whatever he wanted but Moscow would be defended, he said.
When Prigozhin complained about how hard his men had fought, Lukashenko said he soothed him: “I know.”
The conflict, Lukashenko said, was caused by unhealthy competition between Wagner and the military. “An interpersonal conflict between famous people escalated into this fight.”
