My tinfoil hat conspiracy is that the "deal" is spin. What actually happened was that Lukashenko tried to negotiate, but ended up pissing off Prigozhin so fucking much that he decided to take a detour to fuck up Belarus first.
I think this ends with Prigozhin as president of Belarus.
Does anyone else feel like this is some kind of Putin-led theater to redirect blame for Ukraine on his own military leadership instead of himself?
"Oh look, it was the military leaders all along... they were colluding with the west to weaken Russia! What a patriot Prigozhin is for uncovering this horrible western conspiracy!"
We'll know better when the dust settles, but there's credible evidence that Wagner shot down a number of aircraft that Russia really, really needs. If this was purely for show that wouldn't have happened.
Exactly right. Authoritarian regimes are all about presenting an image of control and power. We've now seen chinks in the armor. Prigozhin was able to take two 1-million population cities in mere hours, and get a deal to back down. This shows Putin's weakness. Russia is less a traditional nation state and more a loose coalition of mafia crime bosses. People thinking that this is over or settled because Prigozhin backed down are mistaken.
I don't know that he bothered today to take any cities along the way. It seems they just took his statement of "stay out of my way and no one gets hurt" to heart and hunkered down, so he just cruised right past them on the way to Moscow.
Lol yeah was weird to read for me too. Not the ending of the season though, only ending of today‘s episode. I feel like that Wagner character set off a death flag there.
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