To recap yesterday's events in a nutshell, this is a story of the individuals whose only expertise is in lies,
fraud, manipulation, and rip-offs.
That's exactly what they were busy doing yesterday.
Putin first screwed his army and pilots and then screwed his cops and prosecutors.
Putin himself was screwed by propagandists, law enforcement,
and everyone who was supposed to protect him.
Prigozhin screwed Putin and the Russian army on whose side he previously fought.
Later in the day, he screwed his PMC and the military who believed his call for a rebellion,
only to trade it all for lucrative retirement plan perks.
During yesterday's fight between the unscrupulous and the unhinged, everybody lived up to the billing.
Let's talk about it today.
Let’s begin by recapping what happened yesterday.
PMC Wagner headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin crossed into Russia and captured the southern city of Rostov
with a population of over 1M, including the HQ of the Southern Military District.
At least two generals, including the Deputy Defense Minister, became PoWs.
He asked for the heads of Defense Minister Shoigu and Gen. Gerasimov and marched toward Moscow,
downing six army helicopters and one military plane.
As the Wagner convoys were zooming along, the only resistance they had to face were road obstacles,
blown-up bridges, and stern TV warnings.
When Wagner was a two-hour drive away from Moscow, it all ended abruptly
in a classic M. Night Shyamalan movie denouement.
It was announced that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had called Prigozhin
and talked him out of further moves. They said Wagner was making a U-turn and getting back to their rear camps.
The rebels who were earlier denounced by Vladimir Putin as public enemies and traitors were pardoned by nightfall.
The criminal charges against Prigozhin would be allegedly dropped if he left Russia for Belarus.
This is a literally unprecedented and unparalleled event.
Armed rebels are roaming the country, only for us to be later told by the officials that it was all a mere optical illusion.
Nothing really happened, just a paltry miscommunication. The sides cleared the air and called it quits.
Let’s stay away from guesswork and, instead, focus on what is backed by evidence.
We know for a fact the Russian state failed to mount any resistance.
The law enforcement dissipated leaving citizens face to face with career criminals.
We also know that citizens harbored no hostility toward the rebels.
WELCOME, COME ON IN
You may remember Ukrainians meeting the invading army last year.
They staged protest rallies, rallied against the armed troops, and blocked their vehicles.
They made it clear that they wanted the occupiers out of their country and displayed unambiguous
hostility toward them. The guidelines issued for the Russian military advised them against taking food
and drinks from the locals for fear of being poisoned.
The residents of the occupied provinces have made their stance 100% clear.
Conversely, Prigozhin’s army of rebels faced no resistance.
Rank thugs whose trademark is sledgehammering people to death breezed through the Russian towns and cities.
Aviation attempted several strikes, but to no avail.
But there was no land combat. Mind you, everywhere Wagner went there were hordes of armed men,
including cops, deactivated army units, the Russian Guard forces, the FSB, and sundry militarized detachments.
But where were they?
We know the drill all too well. If a hundred residents took to the streets of Rostov, Voronezh,
or any other city where Wagner was roaming free to advocate for Alexei Navalny, they’d suddenly face
a legion of SWAT police outnumbering the protesters 10:1.
So, they do exist. Many of them, in fact. Except yesterday, they were nowhere to be seen.
But screw that. Nobody ever expected law enforcement to act any differently.
More importantly, have you seen Prigozhin and his goons being shown out of Rostov by the locals?
They were treated like national heroes or movie stars strutting along the red carpet.
Again, those were somebody whom Vladimir Putin labeled as public enemies, outlaws, and traitors working for the enemy.
Now, what do the Rostov polls show with regard to Vladimir Putin? What do the survey findings tell us?
How many people vehemently support the regime and the way things stand?
People couldn’t care less about politics.
That’s a fact. People are convinced they can’t make a difference.
99% of the time, that’s what the regime is shooting for. But it works both ways, it turns out.
When people don’t feel responsible for their country and when they know their opinions are of no value, don’t expect
them to be ramming into battle tanks in a desperate effort to stop them.
The opposite is true, in fact.
Whenever a tough dude is out to kick your goddamn a__es, he’s a shoo-in for a national hero’s role,
even though he’s an obnoxious felon with a long rap sheet.
Today, we’ve finally gotten an answer to the age-old question, “Who but Putin?” The answer is anyone.
Anyone with the guts to put together an armed gang would fit the bill.
He’ll breeze through the country, with people’s reactions ranging from indifference to support.
What if Prigozhin got what he wanted? What if he got his hands on both Shoigu and Gerasimov?
What if he executed the duo by impalement smack in the middle of Moscow’s Red Square?
Would anyone shed a tear? Would anyone protest? Maybe the military?
Nah, the military along with the entire pro-war crowd loathe them with a bigger passion than the liberals do.
Rather, liberal Twitterati would go, “Hey, why would anyone go medieval on human beings?”
The far-right crowd would probably wish they were burned at the stake, too.
By the way, what about the disappointed conspiracy theorists?
For two days, they kept spouting nonsense about Putin’s secret plan, with Prigozhin being a mere puppet.
Putin wanted to make a point — I’m not sure which.
What about it? Did he succeed? What was the point?
Was it that anyone can march through the country, seizing power and shooting down attack helicopters
and military planes, while the state is crumbling?
Was it that a person branded by Putin as a traitor and a criminal and expected to be tortured and executed
The oddity of yesterday’s short-lived rebellion can be explained by the fact that the regime was saved
by its very own framework.
It’s full of crap, propped by shams, and fueled by hot air. A bogus state supported by PR stunts produces bogus rebels.
If Prigozhin weren’t a mere trash-talker, just like his owners, if he hadn’t traded his march
on Moscow for personal security assurance, he may have succeeded.
Every single stately moron acted according to the script. The fearsome law enforcement holed up underground.
The TikTok army of Ramzan Kadyrov left for Rostov, never made it, but is now acting out Rambo stuff on camera.
Everyone was doing what they were expected to do: trying hard to impress the crowd.
And thank goodness, the rebels’ leader proved to be of the same ilk.
Otherwise, they’d now be thinking of their next propaganda move as they crash-landed on their faces.
They’d be somehow convincing their audience that it all followed the plan to a T.
If the mutiny was plotted not by a crooked media manager owning both a private army and a troll factory,
but by a full-bore power-crazed psycho, it would’ve long been over by the time we’d recorded this video.
Prigozhin would be the new president. He would be covered by major federal TV networks.
Governors and ministers would be waiting in line for his approval.
No doubt about that.
But to hell with the Russian state system along with the people’s attitude.
The Russian state was humiliated, and it just accepted the blow. This aspect aside, what did Prigozhin really want?
ENDGAME, ANYONE?
To be able to answer this question, we need to rewind the events back to the Wagner origin story.
The group emerged in 2014 at the height of the Donbas war and was conceived
as a bunch of assassins receiving orders from the intelligence agencies.
The Donbas commandos, those self-appointed leaders of the “Russian world,”
were mostly bats__t crazy fringe elements that proved hard to control.
They sincerely believed that after they bought into the fabricated media narrative,
put together a gang of fellow car wash clerks, and headed to the Donbas “to fight for the Russian people,”
the Russian state owed them.
The Russian state, meanwhile, had a different vision.
Once the DPR and LPR projects fizzled out, they started a large-scale purge.
They killed both the commandos and the entire units.
That’s what the Wagner Group was intended for.
Remember the guy who first begged Wagnerites to stop and then jokingly okayed their request
to get their hands on Shoigu and Gerasimov?
It was Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, deputy chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate.
In the video he recorded for the Wagner Group, he says he’s been carrying out “combat missions”
together with the group ever since its inception.
What kind of “combat missions” is he talking about?
How exactly was a top-2 individual in Russia’s military intelligence linked to private militants?
The answer is, they were never a private structure.
The Wagner Group was a proxy unit for the military intelligence as it purged the Donbas
of those who became a pain in the Russian state’s butt.
Why is the backstory important? It’s simple.
For years, Prigozhin was the wingman of the Russian state, and there’s no way he didn’t know what it was all about.
He knew what Putin did to those who challenged him.
Most likely, his contacts in the Russian intelligence circles had warned him he was a dead duck.
The manner of execution doesn’t matter.
Maybe they would’ve created the Beethoven Group or given him a 3-pack of boxers generously coated
with the Novichok poison as a birthday present.
Alternatively, they could’ve helped the Ukrainians aim their HIMARS systems.
This is immaterial. The fact of the matter is, the decision was made, and Prigozhin was already as good as dead.
Prigozhin found the only way out: create a scenario where Putin would be forced to offer him airtight assurances.
Not a vow, not a decree, not even a federal law — no set of words would work out. Only real assurances would.
The love triangle of negotiations consisting of Putin, Lukashenko, and Prigozhin must be
a hilarious sight to behold.
These are the three pathological liars who know that the other two are prone to lying and
who therefore can’t take each other’s word for anything.
Make no mistake about it. To be able to scrap the plans of turning Moscow into the capital of Prigozhinland,
our justice fighter must’ve been granted some sort of retirement insurance plan that couldn’t be revoked.
What really transpired there is anyone’s guess.
It’s hard to imagine what kind of assurances can be offered by someone whose biggest area
of expertise is hoodwinking anyone gullible enough to trust them. Nevertheless, they somehow figured it out.
Someone convinced Putin that in their duo, it’s not Putin that got Prigozhin by the balls — it’s the other way around.
Someone made the case for it so that Putin did the unthinkable: he publicly backed off.
In a televised public address, Putin berated them as traitors and threatened to have them prosecuted.
It wasn’t done the usual way, that is, out of the public eye. No, it was officially announced.
Prigozhin is exonerated, the Jun. 24 events were all a momentary reality warp,
the rebels can go home, and the military pilots who are survived by their families will be offered a closed funeral.
WHAT’S NEXT?
With armed people capable of screwing over the country no longer on the agenda, the state is trying to get over
that hump. It seeks to readjust the propaganda effort to stave off the ugly impression it made
yesterday on everyone and on war supporters, above all.
The official pro-war crowd’s narrative now goes along the lines of, Putin together with Lukashenko
showed tremendous grit and wisdom to steer Russia away from the brink of the civil war.
That’s the caliber of Putin’s current victories. Ukraine has nothing to do with it.
Not losing to your own troublemakers is already a big win.
That’s all that can be deduced from yesterday’s aborted rebellion.
The Russian state faced the mutiny — the Russian state surrendered. There are no two ways about it.
The army, the law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, and the overall power structure —
all of these proved to be phony and inefficient.
At a critical juncture, the Russian state crawled into its shell, and its leaders were solely preoccupied
with saving their own buttocks.
Meanwhile, the citizens were spectating in awe, waiting for someone to come out on top.
That was akin to watching a football game where you aren’t rooting for either team.
We’ll cover the political repercussions of the event in our next video.
See you tomorrow!