This is gonna sound privileged but migrant boats sinking is not new news. This has been over the headlines since at least 2015 so people aren’t going to be receptive any more. But it’s not every day that millionaires die in a submarine
Doubt it. I think this guy wants control of Russia.
I strongly advise you not to give Prighozin the benefit of the doubt- he's a HUGE Nazi, and has the tattoos to prove it (plus he literally named Wagner after... well, Wagner. Hitler's favourite musician).
Best case here is mutual destruction of russian leadership.
I find it very strange how much Russia relies on this mercenary group. I know there are other groups like this in the West (I’m mainly thinking about Blackwater), but Wagner seems many orders of magnitude larger and more powerful, seemingly rivaling Russia’s own military itself.
I’m surprised that someone as notoriously paranoid as Vladimir Putin has allowed this man to gather so much power, and indeed, his own personal army. Putin will probably still come out on top, but this is going to hurt him tremendously in the PR arena.
Wagner is almost a completely different entity compared to a traditional mercenary group. It’s evolved past that. It has its own political objectives, independent sources of income from mining, oil, etc.
It was a convenient thing for Putin to have a layer of plausible deniability. It’s Wagner committing atrocities, not him. And how much money is the Russian military spending in a place like Syria? They aren’t, they’re making secret payments to Wagner. How many casualties in the conflict there? It’s not Russian casualties, it’s Wagner casualties.
In Ukraine Putin got desperate and started to rely on Wagner more and more. And allowed Wagner to grow it’s ranks and become bigger and more powerful. Another big miscalculation for Putin.
So TL;DR, Putin relied on Wagner too much because he was desperate.
Interesting situation. Prigozhin has criticized the Russian military over the past few months and Putin has stayed silent. Now this and the military responds but Putin remains silent. Putin needs a weak military to avoid being overthrown, but the FSB opens an investigation, why? Prigozhin threatens to attack the russian military and comes up with a story/lie that he realizes the Ukrainian invasion was based on lies. What does Prigozhin want, money a coup?
Alina Polyakova, of the Centre for European Policy Analysis, a think-tank in Washington, DC, tweeted that Mr Putin’s silence was “another signal that this is a Shoigu-Prigozhin power struggle”.
In a dictatorship, it’s common to keep underlings competing for power like this. That keeps any one underling from gaining too much power, making them a risk to the dictator. That’s because dictatorships are structured not to best benefit the people, but to keep the dictator in power.
Yeah Saddam Hussein would have one underling suggest to another about working together against Hussein. If the other underling didn’t report it, he’d have him killed.
It’s imperative for a dictator to have the underlings distrust one another and be incapable of working together. If they can work together they can overthrow the dictator.
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