March on Moscow

There was something wrong about Prigozhin's coup attempt.  For one, Putin didn't seem overly worried and no one seemed to challenge the Wagner chief as he led his 40 km. caravan of military vehicles along the M-4 highway from Voronezh to Moscow. The international media acted like he was right next door forgetting how big Russia is.  Even with a normal vehicle it would take over 7 hours to reach Moscow, with a military caravan you would have to think a couple days.  But CNN gleefully reported that he was right outside Moscow.  

After taking more than 10 months to seize Bakhmut and leaving nothing more than burnt-out ruins of the former city of 73000 inhabitants, the vast majority having long since left, the Wagner group was supposed to cede the site to the Russian army and move on.  Well they did, but not exactly as everyone expected.  Prighozin led his mercenaries, which reports estimated at 25,000 soldiers, on a March on Moscow, supposedly to remove Shoigu and Gerasimov from their top positions.  Prigozhin has long been claiming that the only reason his siege of Bakhmut got bogged down over winter was because Russia's military top brass refused to supply him the ammunition he needed.   

Yet, he is a man worth billions, who has been funding his private army for nearly a decade now.  If Bakhmut was so important, you would think he would funnel all his money and power into this battle site.  He probably did but embarrassingly came up short and needed to blame someone for his overlong siege. He took aim at Shoigu and Gerasimov, as they didn't really care whether he took Bakhmut or not.  It was never considered to be of major strategical importance.  It was important only to Prigozhin, who wanted to show Moscow how strong he was.

It seemed to work to some degree as Prigozhin was greeted as a conquering hero in Rostov-on-Don, where he claimed authority in less than 10 hours.  The media treated this as a massive rebellion, but like so many stories coming out of Russia it was probably staged.  For what reason, no one is entirely sure, but it seems the main intent was to lure Ukrainian forces into attacking Bakhmut where the Russian army had repositioned tens of thousands of troops.  Ukraine didn't bite.  The whole thing was too fishy.

Prigozhin rolled on, shouting to the world that he would serve up Shoigu's and Gerasimov's heads on pikes, never once blaming Putin for not resupplying his private army when they desperately needed the ammunition.  A common narrative in Russia throughout the war.  The popular television hosts never blame Putin directly, instead focusing their fury for the many failures on the generals.  For some odd reason, the caravan suddenly stopped, purportedly 200 km. from Moscow, but to listen to the news you would think they were just outside the capital.

Apparently, the embattled Belarussian President Lukashenko had stepped in and worked out a deal where Prigozhin would turn himself into Belarussian authorities and save Moscow.  At this point, you knew it was a farce as why would Putin allow Lukashenko to be the man who saved Moscow?

I suppose if there was any reason it was an opportunity to improve Lukashenko's standing after he got deathly sick last month and looked like he would never leave the hospital.  It also made Putin look good, or so he thought, as a disaster was averted.  Mostly, it seems Putin wanted a pretext for allowing Prigozhin to mobilize his Wagner Group in Belarus, as Lukashenko has been too squeamish when it comes to using his own forces to distract Ukraine along their shared border.  Lukashenko knows he is hanging by a thread in his country, which is truly open to rebellion at any moment.  Now, he has the Wagner Group to put down any uprising and challenge Ukrainian forces along the border.

This has been the entire purpose of these "green men" from the start.  The Wagner Group was created in 2014 and used extensively in the Donbas region during the civil war.  It was Putin's way of claiming Russia had no hand in the matter, yet the Kremlin was supplying Prigozhin with the military ordnance he needed to boost the break away "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk.  That war similarly bogged down for 8 years with the band of mercenaries and local forces steadily losing ground.  Eventually, Putin had no choice but to call his own troops in.

Meanwhile, Prigozhin had leased out his forces to African dictatorships to stifle rebellion in these countries.  The Wagner Group used exceedingly brutal tactics that earned the group a notorious reputation.  The aim was to seize key minerals in the Russian attempt to horde the international market of precious metals and minerals.  Prigozhin's troops can be found all over the world, but mostly are located throughout central Africa, which has the most untapped resources.

Up to now, the Wagner Group served Putin well.  It allowed him to keep a safe distance from these conflicts, but all that changed last February when he chose to invade Ukraine.   Now, Prigozhin has become a headache for him.  One he doesn't quite know how to deal with.  This helps explain the very odd case of allowing him to flee to Belarus, although Peshkov claims there is a warrant for his arrest, and that his forces will be allowed the option of joining the Russian military without facing criminal charges.  No matter, as the Russian army already conscripts prisoners to fight its battles in Ukraine.

While on the surface, the Russian army appears bogged down in the occupied territories of Ukraine, it has no shortage of manpower.  The aim is to hold the line and hope that one of these "peace initiatives" gains traction and that Russia will be able to retain its acquisitions.  The latest one is headed by delegation of African countries sympathetic toward Russia.

Earlier this month, Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa, led a delegation of African leaders to Kyiv, where he outlined his path to peace.  The odd thing about these ten components was that much of the onus was placed on Ukraine, such as blaming the country for the impasse over badly needed grain and fertilizer, and calling on the Ukrainian government to be more friendly toward African nations.  

I think this too was nothing more than a propaganda effort on the part of the Kremlin, designed to try to make Zelenskyy look like a racist when he rejected the peace offering.  Russia badly wants to put some kind of peace proposal on the floor of the UN and who better than his African allies.  However, Zelenskyy accorded himself well, refusing to take the bait.  He politely met with the African leaders and held a press conference with Ramaphosa, welcoming the proposal but noting the serious flaws.  Until Russia leaves the Ukraine, Zelenskyy sees no point for negotiations.

Even if we were to take Russia at face value, allowing them to claim Crimea and the Donbas region as their sovereign territory, they have taken large swathes of Ukraine, including portions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and claiming them as their own.  This flies in the face of the fourth component of the African peace plan, "the sovereignty of states must be respected."  Clearly, there is no respect for Ukraine's territorial integrity here.  Russia wanted to create a land corridor to Crimea, not satisfied with the bridge it built a few years ago.

Using African leaders as a front is one of Putin's most cynical moves yet.  Russia has a long history of racism, which has gotten particularly ugly in recent years.  But, it also has a Soviet past of having defended African independence movements, most notably in South Africa, where the ANC was finally able to gain control of the country in 1994.  Putin is trying to claim this legacy as his own, when he was nothing more than a low level KGB operative stationed in East Germany at the time.  The only thing contemporary Russia shares with the Soviet Union is its autocratic nature.  The current country is rife with virulent nationalism that treats any non-Russian, particularly Black Russians, as unwanted aliens.  This despite Pushkin's great grandfather being an African.  A heritage that Pushkin was very proud of.

These are the Russians that Prighozin appeals to.  He is an ultra-nationalist who uses much of the same language of Nazi Germany.  He's been coy about where the name for his military group comes from but it is no coincidence that Wagner was Hitler's favorite composer, and one that plays well in contemporary Russia.

Putin's strategy has always been to deflect the ills of his own country onto others.  This is why he calls out the Ukrainian leadership as "drug addicts and neo-Nazis," and recently called Zelenskyy a "disgrace to the Jewish people."  Interesting, considering the Rabbi of Moscow fled the country fearing his own safety and that of other Jews in Russia.

So, there is no real difference between Prigozhin and Putin.  They are birds of the same feather.  For the time being, Prigozhin has been conveniently cast aside in Belarus so that Putin can restore confidence in his leadership before the next "elections."  It also allows Lukashenko to show that he is still relevant.  Meanwhile, Russian forces bide their time, hoping that the world will get weary of war and force Ukraine to negotiate a peace deal if it can't make any headway with its counter-offensive.

It's pretty easy to read between the lines.