Before we kick things off, let’s mention something that happened in the late evening hours.
An unexpected address by Vladimir Putin was announced, and done so in a dramatic tone of voice
that could easily imply a declaration of war against NATO.
But it all smacked of one big oddity.
The long-running palace intrigue-themed TV show suddenly cut to Vladimir Putin giving a terse speech.
He extolled himself, upbraided the unnamed instigators, and that’s it.
Weird as it was, it looked like a snippet of a longer speech.
No cabinet reshuffles and no new legislation was announced.
Although he often goes MIA when something really bad happens, this time Putin went public
and grabbed the limelight for seemingly no good reason at all. And he did all this to say nothing of substance.
The 5-minute address boils down to answering the question of what everyone was doing on day X.
Why, at the height of the armed rebellion, did law enforcement, propagandists, officials,
and 100% of Russians do precisely zero to protect the regime that, to quote the regime itself,
they so vehemently support?
Why did everyone crash-land in their armchairs with the biggest bucket of popcorn they could get their hands on
and binge-watch the fight between the unscrupulous and the unhinged?
They were trying to figure out if it was high time they pledged loyalty to a new boss.
It’s an eerie feeling when you enjoy vast support but a live stream of your execution proves to be just as popular.
That’s why Putin emphasized the importance of public unity and praised the military and intelligence agencies
that nipped the rebellion in the bud.
He also thanked the state institutions and citizens who unanimously proved their allegiances to stability.
The most obvious reply to that would be, “You’re welcome.” Just because none of it was true.
Instead, everyone, including those who were supposed to protect the regime,
was catching a live online episode of a trending TV series titled The Coup.
KEY TAKEAWAY
The key takeaway of the past few days is that the state has screwed everyone.
Everyone who trusted, served, and worked for it was left to deal with the trouble on their own.
Everyone was busy protecting themselves the way they deemed fit.
Take Deputy Defense Minister Col. Gen. Yevkurov who was captured by Wagner in Rostov.
What kind of warped reality and twisted state would allow this to happen?
Prigozhin didn’t strike in the dead of night without a warning. He announced his march and his destination.
In the late hours of Jun. 23, it was known he was headed to Rostov.
But the top brass who stayed at the HQ of the Southern Military District weren’t even evacuated.
It looked like a pretty straightforward move: given the severity of the threat, get at least the high command
of the HQ on board a plane and jet them off.
That’s what we said in our first video covering the rebellion.
Putin could’ve easily blown out Col. Gen. Yevkurov’d brain on camera. Nothing could’ve stopped him back then.
He was already looking at life without parole, so what the hell?
In fact, the list of counts of Prigozhin’s crimes would be so long, he’d have to spend a millennium behind bars.
The colonel general who is the Deputy Minister of Defense was left to face the guy who had nothing to lose.
The guy had lost his marbles. The search of his office turned up, and I quote, “packages full of white powdery substance.”
Should I hazard a guess, he wasn’t stockpiling laundry powder.
An armed ex-con and a potential drug addict announced he was blitzing Rostov,
while the generals who represented the command of the MoD that the criminal christened
as the public enemy were left behind in that same Rostov.
Federal authorities had all sorts of business to attend to, except protecting their people.
Above all, they sought to avoid a bad rap by spinning a cool story for the media.
True, we would’ve been naive to think that the authorities couldn’t give a rat’s a__ about those
whom they disparagingly refer to as “population.”
But Yevkurov is no regular hillbilly. He is the creme de la creme.
He was a longtime leader of the Republic of Ingushetia.
He is a United Russia honcho who heads the Main Directorate of the Army Combat Drills.
That’s the top flight of power where you have a beeline to Putin and where you navigate the safety
of Moscow streets in a heavily guarded motorcade.
The guy has the highest security clearance. And he was just ditched in Rostov.
As Prigozhin was headed to the city of Voronezh, a colleague of ours, one of the very few
who stayed behind in Russia, turned out to be on a collision course.
She’s just a regular employee, not even a manager or my family member.
But an hour after the unhinged thugs were reported to be heading her way, she boarded a train to Moscow.
12 hours later, she boarded a flight out of Russia.
That’s the only acceptable level of responsibility. These are the fundamentals of security.
You must protect the life and well-being of those who work for you and trust you.
That’s the foundation of everything, and that’s why people keep their loyalties.
But when it comes to Putin and his system, it’s the exact opposite.
If you’re hanging from the rooftop of a skyscraper, you should be good at pull-ups.
The system is only a tight-knit unity when it’s smooth sailing. When things go south, it’s every man for himself.
This principle pretty much epitomizes the system.
The real system is the lack thereof. Instead, there’s a bunch of people who enjoy getting rich together.
That’s it. They’ll screw each other over at the drop of a hat.
What about the military pilots? Six helicopters and one plane were down.
For the first time throughout this war, the military pilots were doing the noble thing:
protecting their country against the gang of convicts who went on a rampage and were out to wreak havoc,
as opposed to striking the cities in the neighboring country.
They didn’t get airborne on a bird’s eye-view sightseeing tour. They were following orders.
They died while on duty.
They died for Putin since he’s the Commander-in-Chief.
Meanwhile, Putin wasn’t looking for ways to punish those who launched the war against him.
No, he was busy saving his a__ and protecting his power.
To accomplish it, he was ready to sell everything, surrender anyone, and pardon anything.
The lives of those pilots weren’t on his priority list. Putin was ready to give Prigozhin a couple of regions.
Neither the generals, nor the pilots, nor ordinary Russians, nor Shoigu, nor Gerasimov mattered a little bit.
Putin was protecting himself, and that solo survival scenario sat well with him.
I wonder if the families of the fallen pilots will be paid compensation on par with Prigozhin-led convicts.
After all, they weren’t killed in the “special military operation” zone.
Far from it, they were killed in circumstances that would be waved off as immaterial 10 hours later.
WRONG TARGET
Clearly, Wagner mainly consists of professional mercenaries who kill left, right, and center for a handsome paycheck
and pardoned convicts who would do anything that would keep them away from prison.
But there must’ve been some who trusted Prigozhin.
Over at least six past months, Prigozhin has acted as a public politician.
He’s been advocating for some sort of social causes.
For example, he talks about the flawed army supply system, the commanding officer’s terrible attitudes,
rampant corruption, and gross incompetence.
Along with Col. Igor Girkin, he couldn’t care less about censorship and called a spade a spade.
Official military speakers have almost reinvented the concept of lying.
Putin has been insisting that everything “goes to plan.”
The propaganda has already landed in Warsaw and enslaved the U.K.
The entire state system appears to have invaded a parallel universe where they’re waging a high-precision
and technologically advanced war devoid of hunger, blood, and mayhem.
As opposed to all of them, Prigozhin’s statements seemed sobering.
When you’re neck-deep in mud, hungry and thirsty, listening to an affluent Vladimir Solovyov whimpering about
the arrest of his Lake Como villa must be a sorely disgusting experience.
True, Prigozhin may look like he’s going to smash both the camera and the cameraman.
He’s a typical hoodlum and a walking caricature of a jailbird. But that’s the zeitgeist, lump it or like it.
The authorities keep rambling about the wildest stuff imaginable.
A person may be spouting platitudes, but if they’re true, they pass for a decent human being.
You don’t need to be MLK to rock the stage.
Whenever this person says, “We’re going punish the scumbags who feed off our blood — join in!”,
those who’ve felt bitter injustice for two years straight predictably fall for it.
Given the Russian state’s attitude to Russian society, the “Punish the scumbags” slogan suddenly appealed to many.
The rebels who were marching toward Moscow were prepared to die.
We know that some Wagnerites called their families to say their final goodbyes.
Nobody expected the Russian state to be that feeble. They expected to be fought back.
Those guys were ready to perish for their boss.
All the while, their boss was haggling over a lucrative retirement insurance plan.
Putin’s regime was challenged by the trash-talker and crook of the same ilk.
He was one step away from the throne, and the Kremlin’s gate was wide open for him.
The Russian Guard, the only militarized force in Moscow, can’t engage in hostilities.
They are powerless against battle tanks. They can’t, and, as the events in Rostov showed, they won’t lift a finger.
No one can for a certainty if Prigozhin could’ve held on to power, if the s__-scared elites would’ve endorsed him,
if they would’ve had a say in it, in the first place, or if the new
Russia would’ve been manageable.
The list goes on and on.
But for all the murkiness of his prospects, Prigozhin could’ve taken power in the world’s largest and seventh-most
populated country, armed with nukes.
A couple of days in the Kremlin would’ve etched his name into history books. That’s not something you easily snub.
You don’t snub it if you’re an ambitious military leader, politician, or revolutionary.
If Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky had been in Prigozhin’s shoes, the Russian flag over the Kremlin would’ve
already been replaced with that of the Wagner Group.
Revolutionaries seize power come what may and then decide what they’ll do with it.
But if your ambitions don’t go beyond petty squabbles and small-time swindles
and if you only seek money and security for your own a__, that’s where Prigozhin’s conduct makes sense.
Then you tell your trusted allies, “Yeah, we haven’t reached our goals, but I’ve changed my mind.
So, let’s do a U-ey and get out of here.”
SPITTING IMAGE
Those who knew them both have always said that Prigozhin is a pocket-sized Putin.
The structures he’s leading are modeled after the Russian state system,
its management principles and decision-making patterns.
But now, we’ve all seen that Prigozhin is literally the spitting image of Putin.
Both were busy doing the exact same thing: saving their own a___s.
Both were ready to screw everyone over and walk their promises back. Putin betrayed his soldiers and generals.
Prigozhin did the same to his mercenaries.
Both the pilot who was hit by the missile and the mercenary
who launched it were screwed by those who were in charge of their actions and whom they were supposed to obey.
Just imagine the improbable picture of dead bodies, mangled equipment, crushed highways,
and a tilted power vertical — these wildest events in recent Russian history only occurred
because Putin wanted to screw Prigozhin, but the astute and crooked Prigozhin struck first.
Two seasoned card sharps squared off for a hell of a national-level game, and that was a nail-biter.
Putin surely considers himself a first-ballot hall-of-fame swindler and an unsurpassed con man.
Trouble is, over the past decades, he’s been conning those who trusted him.
They thought the Russian president couldn’t act like an online scammer defrauding
gullible old ladies of their savings.
It would seem that someone whose words carry that much weight and are capable
of causing market crashes, nationwide crises, and irreversible damage can’t be ad-libbing gibberish.
When your resume says “the President of Russia” and you’re treated accordingly, you can screw people all you want.
But Prigozhin is a black belt in lies and fraud. He’s the ultimate champion.
Besides, he knows Putin like the back of his hand. He knows the fate of those who were dumb enough to trust Putin.
That fate was similar to that of Prigozhin’s own victims.
Here they are, the two caricature prototypes from the roaring St. Petersburg of the 1990s.
A rapacious lieutenant governor notorious for his unbridled corruption
and a fresh-out-of-jail hustler running a chain of hot dog carts. The latter proved to be shrewder.
Russia experts from foreign media outlets can now reconsider their career choices.
For many years, they’ve been disseminating two outrageously dumb myths.
One is that Putin “never backs down.” The other one is that he’s “a man of his word.” Like, he always walks his talk.
It’s all a load of bunk. Not just that, it’s a dangerous load of bunk.
This one underlies decisions made by Western politicians who don’t want to “provoke” Putin but,
instead, seek to appease him and help him save face.
But the truth is, the only language Putin understands is the language of force.
And as soon as this crook sees that his opponent calls his bluff, doesn’t flinch, shiver, or begs for forgiveness,
he instantly makes a mad dash for safety, screwing everyone else all along.
But that’s not just Putin — the entire power structure is identical.
Putin’s system is one made up of people who are as much corrupt as they’re cowardly.
Whenever events take an unexpected turn, they’re petrified. And this helps him retain his grip on power.
The best his oligarchs, ministers, officials, cronies, and aides can manage when their boss is dragging them
all into an abyss is tremble in fear and drink themselves into oblivion.
This configuration may work wonders in times of peace when the only challenge they’re facing is having enough
pockets to line. But once disaster strikes, cowards tend to do what they do best.
They turn into silent onlookers waiting for the fight to end and for their chance to pledge loyalty to the victor.
The key takeaway of the recent events should better be seized on by those who are misidentified
as the “Russian elites.”
Those who surround Putin and still hope they can ride out the storm. Prigozhin himself is immaterial.
The thing is, any individual in charge of an armed group, any active-roster army colonel can seize power in Russia.
The recent events showed our country for what it’s worth.
If the s___ hits the fans, the power vertical will crumble in the blink of an eye, and it’ll be every man for himself.
And Col. Gen. Yevkurov would’ve dreaded the day he’d met a full-bore psycho intent on executing people
and toppling the incumbent, as opposed to a PR manager and trash-talker.
No one would come to his aid and no one would ever pull the strings.
The situation would be officially “under control” even when your brain would be sitting right next to your lifeless body.
You’re afraid of Putin. You’re s___-scared. But you better be terrified of a time when his a__ is on fire and he ditches you.
It won’t necessarily be a matter of life and death for him. He just doesn’t want to shake in front of a camera.
The entire law enforcement apparatus is a load of rotten baloney — everybody knows that much.
You’ve been super-busy building a police state, protecting yourselves, and passing the legislation to suit your cause,
but bear in mind that when push comes to shove, this protection will be gone in a jiffy.
All your 10-foot-tall razor-wire fences and armored Mercs will fall apart.
There are no safety barriers separating you from the armed plebs that are growing in number by the day.
Just keep this in mind, folks. If you’re building a replica of Somalia, make sure to keep your machine guns loaded.
Nobody has your back.
See you tomorrow!