Russia/Ukraine conflict

[Alset Srotom]

You all can't see because you want to believe this was real.

Yevgeny will be leading the Belarusian military into The Ukraine within 3 mos.

 

[RobStark]

I thought Prigozhin was going to be exiled in China or Venezuela.

He is still a threat to Putin in Belarus.

I see defenestration in his future.

 

[Skryll]

You all can't see because you want to believe this was real.

Yevgeny will be leading the Belarusian military into The Ukraine within 3 mos.

You probably have it backwards

 

[tivoboy]

The IA in me says this could be a red herring, sweep around attack via Belarus to Kiev which Ukraine would totally not be expecting.. Prigozhin and Wagner could have never moved their forces from eastern Ukraine west towards Kiev, or up and redeploy them easily without drawing too much attention. So, mis-direction, put everyone in a state of confusion and move forces half the way UP at least, and then move them west quickly and attack Kiev? Or have Prigozhin lead Belarussian forces in a Kiev offensive. I think we’ll see a lot happen in the next 48 hours, and that COULD include a standing down of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

I’m placing some bets over at polymarkets… ;-)

 

[SmokyPeat]

Putin would never allow himself to be so openly humiliated for some ridiculous Prigozhin lead attempted offensive on Kiev from Belarus. Prigozhin had better sleep lightly- he won't be any safer from FSB assassins in Belarus than he would be in Russia.

 

[tivoboy]

Putin would never allow himself to be so openly humiliated for some ridiculous Prigozhin lead attempted offensive on Kiev from Belarus. Prigozhin had better sleep lightly- he won't be any safer from FSB assassins in Belarus than he would be in Russia.

Well, and Prigozhin should’t ever leave the first floor of any building or drink any Tea.

 

[heltok]

It's been interesting to observe how fast people are at calling how this will end and who was wrong about what. Whenever their side of the argument seems to be winning they are doing victory laps and when it turns around they are silent and few apologies are given. The fog of war on this coup has been very heavy and so many plot twists in such a short time frame. Imo we should be a bit humble and wait for the results before we call who was right and wrong.

Anyway this disorder is a very bad look for Russia, Russians must be even more confused than before. Putin made some strong statements that a few hours later were taken back. He will have to do some pretty messy work in the dark to come out as having made the right call when he made those statements or look very weak. Will be interesting to see how they try to spin this.

Anyway here was a nice video:

 

[navguy12]

Anyone having a tiny wee bit of PPCD – Post-Prigozhin Coup Depression?

Any funny coup memes out there?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1672379677770391561

I would like to know the magic secret used to talk Prigozhin into shutting this whole thing down, especially after Putin apparently did a replay of the Shah and took to flying away from the capital city.

Whatever magic potion was presented and accepted, I wish I could bottle it and sell it. /s. Well, sort of /s.

 

[wdolson]

Where are the nukes...and who has control..all other questions are secondary.

They are all in storage where they belong. Russia is more paranoid than western countries about the misuse of nuclear weapons and have more interlocks to make them work than western countries do. And western countries have some pretty complex systems to make the weapons work.

When Kazakhstan and Ukraine inherited a bunch of nuclear weapons in 1991, they were incapable of using them at any point in the near future. They would have had to dismantle them and rebuild the interlocks to make them work.

Any rogue army seizing Russian nuclear weapons would have probably months of work to make them viable. If they haven't rotter away to dirty bombs from lack of maintenance.

Prigozhin also stated yesterday that he is against the use of nuclear weapons.

When he makes those statements ( you can see them in the June 5th video Igor translated https://twitter.com/igorsushko ) he is speaking on behalf of his "team" to the west. He has close connections to some of the wealthiest oligarchs in Russia, people opposed to the MOD clique of Shuigo Gerasimov etc. That's where his real backing comes from, he didn't start Wagner as a food caterer. He started Wagner with serious support from the GRU and Oligarchs.

Prigozhin didn't start Wagner. It was founded by Dmitry Utkin (who has SS tattoos and was born Ukrainian). Prigozhin took it over as oligarchs are wont to do.

GRU is a group of nasty F'ers. Scum...like the worst of the old KGB come back to haunt Russia. Prig is a natural for them. No promise will mean anything, no agreement will mean anything. At the same time the oligarchs are losing billions every month this continues. Nothing this Prig guy says is "true". When he says he has no ammo...well that was clearly not true. He had plenty to start a coup and his troops are dripping with ammo. They are even carrying Javlins. They have been preparing for this for months, not a new thing. You don't just get a column on the road within a week driving across Russia. He was clearly planning on something having happened in that June 5 interview. Either Putin would shoot Shoigu or something bad was going to happen. We can eat popcorn now but the best situation is clearly for neither side to win quickly and for the troops in Ukraine to withdraw.

The old KGB guys have been running Russia since the early 90s. They were the people in position to take over as Yeltsin tried to privatize Soviet industry. Most of the oligarchs today are ex-KGB.

Prigozhin has back channels to the Ukrainian govt. They negotiated a withdrawal of Ukrainians from Bahkmut- he was deemed untrustworthy. The connections are there. However, he is untrustworthy. No agreement will mean anything. IMO the Treaty of Versaille was useless because it was far too lenient..not the reverse. US general Pershing did not want to stop and he was right, he thought we should have marched on til Berlin, and then burnt to the ground. Anything less invited another war in his opinion and he was right. Oh well.

In this case it is different than 1919 Treaty of Versaille. The 1917 treaty was the end of the german-russian side of things that allowed russia to fall apart and into the control of the Bolsheviks.

First problems first, get russians out of Ukraine.

The worst thing about the Treaty of Versailles was the reparations which crippled the German economy and opened the door for extremists to come to power. There were quite a few safeguards in there such as limits on what the German army could have, what aircraft it could have, and so on. It also demilitarized and sort of split off some regions of Germany such as the Rhineland industrial corridor. That not only further weakened Germany's economy when it had big debts to pay, but it left some parts of Germany in a kind of limbo.

The French and British were supposed to enforce the treaty, but by the early 1930s the political will to do it wasn't there in those countries. That gave openings for the Nazis to come to power and for Hitler to rebuild the military.

I know how to end this war even faster. It appears Lukashenko has taken a timely vacation to Turkey with his family. How to checkmate Russia is just have the Belarusians who are in control of the nukes just transfer them to Ukrainian control. I think that would expedite the end game even more quickly once Ukraine has a substantial retaliatory threat against Russia.

Belarus is not in control of any nuclear weapons. Putin based some weapons there to try and freak out the west, but Lukashenko has no control over them. The number of nuclear weapons in Belarus are also a very small number. Russia has the nuclear triad of nuclear weapons: missiles (ICBMs and tactical weapons on smaller missiles), submarines, and airborne.

The weapons based in Belarus are a small number of tactical weapons on smaller ballistic missiles like Iskanders. That's it.

As far as the peace deal between Putin and Prigozhin, my guess as to what happened is Putin knew Prigozhin was going to take Moscow unless something was done because the forces defending Moscow were not reliable and not very well armed. Most of the military vehicles I saw in pictures of the defense of Moscow had shiny new paint jobs which tells me these were parade vehicles. Chances were that they either didn't have working guns or didn't have ammunition for the guns.

Anyway, Prigozhin's stated aim was to get rid of Shougu and Gerazimov and he refused to put Wagner under MoD control. Lukashenko knows that he in on shaky ground in Belarus. The people of Belarus want to be more like Ukraine than Russia and his army is very unreliable which is why he didn't cave in to Putin's attempts to get Belarus into the fight. If the Belorussian army was sent to Ukraine, the bulk of it would likely defect to Ukraine in short order. There are already a large number of Belorussians fighting for Ukraine.

Because of the shaky nature of Lukashenko's hold on his own country, he agreed to hire Wagner to keep the peace in Belarus to stop any revolts there before they get started. Putin is rid of Prigozhin, Prigozhin doesn't have to join the MoD, and Putin gets to keep his job.

This revolt has left Putin in a difficult spot. He has shown that revolt against Putin's regime is possible. Prigozhin may have accepted the deal because he realized that while he could probably take Moscow, he didn't have the forces to win a civil war if the bulk of the Russian army stayed loyal to Putin.

This rebellion does demonstrate how weak the Moscow regime is to internal revolt though. People in the provinces that want to break away from Moscow may be plotting now. Moscow demonstrated in the Chechnya campaign that they were willing to commit genocide to keep a province inside Russia, but now this coup has demonstrated that Moscow doesn't have the military strength to do that anymore.

The Russian Revolution almost happened in 1906 after the loss to the Japanese in the war with Japan in which Imperial Russia lost all its navy. The revolt then was put down because the army was mostly intact after that war. 11 years later the revolt started in the army and with the army committed to a war outside the country, when the rebellion quickly spread back to Russia, there was nothing in place to stop it.

Putin is in the same position as Czar Nicholas in 1917, the army is in another country, is very unhappy with their situation, and old animosities back home are brewing up. Prigozhin demonstrated that Russian internal security is weak and unreliable. This phase of the rebellion is over, but something else is going to happen. It may take months, but something will happen.

The IA in me says this could be a red herring, sweep around attack via Belarus to Kiev which Ukraine would totally not be expecting.. Prigozhin and Wagner could have never moved their forces from eastern Ukraine west towards Kiev, or up and redeploy them easily without drawing too much attention. So, mis-direction, put everyone in a state of confusion and move forces half the way UP at least, and then move them west quickly and attack Kiev? Or have Prigozhin lead Belarussian forces in a Kiev offensive. I think we’ll see a lot happen in the next 48 hours, and that COULD include a standing down of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

I’m placing some bets over at polymarkets… ;-)

You do realize that Ukraine has fully fortified the border between Russia and Ukraine as well as between Belarus and Ukraine. And the defenses are manned with the Territorial Defense Forces who would be capable of slowing down any Russian attack across the border for a few days until the mobile reserves could be thrown into the fight.

Additionally Russia is incapable of carrying on a fight more than about 90 km from a rail line. Northern Ukraine does not have the density of rail line the Donbas has and what there is has been pre-targeted by the Ukrainians to be taken out in the event of a re-invasion. The reason the original attack in the north failed was because Russian truck logistics could not support the army in an environment without a good rail network to rely on.

And to top all that off, a major operation can't happen without a lot of preparation. In the fall and winter of 2021-2022 it was obvious Russia was building up for a cross border invasion. All the experts who knew something about military operations knew that Putin was going to pull the trigger and invade.

Russia has shown no sign of any similar build up in the north since pulling back last spring. Any future attempt would require a build up which would allow Ukraine to further reinforce their existing fortifications.

Ukraine has not left any border undefended except with the border with Poland, which is a friendly country. Prigozhin is not going to lead an invasion across the Belarus border. He's being put out to pasture in Belarus.

 

[SmokyPeat]

I would like to know the magic secret used to talk Prigozhin into shutting this whole thing down, especially after Putin apparently did a replay of the Shah and took to flying away from the capital city.

Whatever magic potion was presented and accepted, I wish I could bottle it and sell it. /s. Well, sort of /s.

More likely it rhymes with scholars than poodles.

 

[nativewolf]

@wdolson i have to say that I have 0 faith in the tactical weapons safety. 0 . I am not discussing theoretical bands of rebellious soldiers but an organized army that wants to grab them. I do not believe Putin could have stopped Wagner from breaching the facility. Do they have security layers that would inhibit using the tactical nuke in a gun? Maybe they could prevent it from arming…properly.

We have seen the old tactical nuke storage site outside belgorad. Physical security was not impressive. Nobody, trustworthy, has inspected these facilities in decades. You should know better than most that what exists on paper is often not there in reality. Are there any tactical nukes at all? Who knows

 

[Xepa777]

Uhhhh what did Prigozhin get from the treaty???

 

[Alset Srotom]

They are all in storage where they belong. Russia is more paranoid than western countries about the misuse of nuclear weapons and have more interlocks to make them work than western countries do. And western countries have some pretty complex systems to make the weapons work.

When Kazakhstan and Ukraine inherited a bunch of nuclear weapons in 1991, they were incapable of using them at any point in the near future. They would have had to dismantle them and rebuild the interlocks to make them work.

Any rogue army seizing Russian nuclear weapons would have probably months of work to make them viable. If they haven't rotter away to dirty bombs from lack of maintenance.

Prigozhin also stated yesterday that he is against the use of nuclear weapons.



Prigozhin didn't start Wagner. It was founded by Dmitry Utkin (who has SS tattoos and was born Ukrainian). Prigozhin took it over as oligarchs are wont to do.



The old KGB guys have been running Russia since the early 90s. They were the people in position to take over as Yeltsin tried to privatize Soviet industry. Most of the oligarchs today are ex-KGB.



The worst thing about the Treaty of Versailles was the reparations which crippled the German economy and opened the door for extremists to come to power. There were quite a few safeguards in there such as limits on what the German army could have, what aircraft it could have, and so on. It also demilitarized and sort of split off some regions of Germany such as the Rhineland industrial corridor. That not only further weakened Germany's economy when it had big debts to pay, but it left some parts of Germany in a kind of limbo.

The French and British were supposed to enforce the treaty, but by the early 1930s the political will to do it wasn't there in those countries. That gave openings for the Nazis to come to power and for Hitler to rebuild the military.



Belarus is not in control of any nuclear weapons. Putin based some weapons there to try and freak out the west, but Lukashenko has no control over them. The number of nuclear weapons in Belarus are also a very small number. Russia has the nuclear triad of nuclear weapons: missiles (ICBMs and tactical weapons on smaller missiles), submarines, and airborne.

The weapons based in Belarus are a small number of tactical weapons on smaller ballistic missiles like Iskanders. That's it.

As far as the peace deal between Putin and Prigozhin, my guess as to what happened is Putin knew Prigozhin was going to take Moscow unless something was done because the forces defending Moscow were not reliable and not very well armed. Most of the military vehicles I saw in pictures of the defense of Moscow had shiny new paint jobs which tells me these were parade vehicles. Chances were that they either didn't have working guns or didn't have ammunition for the guns.

Anyway, Prigozhin's stated aim was to get rid of Shougu and Gerazimov and he refused to put Wagner under MoD control. Lukashenko knows that he in on shaky ground in Belarus. The people of Belarus want to be more like Ukraine than Russia and his army is very unreliable which is why he didn't cave in to Putin's attempts to get Belarus into the fight. If the Belorussian army was sent to Ukraine, the bulk of it would likely defect to Ukraine in short order. There are already a large number of Belorussians fighting for Ukraine.

Because of the shaky nature of Lukashenko's hold on his own country, he agreed to hire Wagner to keep the peace in Belarus to stop any revolts there before they get started. Putin is rid of Prigozhin, Prigozhin doesn't have to join the MoD, and Putin gets to keep his job.

This revolt has left Putin in a difficult spot. He has shown that revolt against Putin's regime is possible. Prigozhin may have accepted the deal because he realized that while he could probably take Moscow, he didn't have the forces to win a civil war if the bulk of the Russian army stayed loyal to Putin.

This rebellion does demonstrate how weak the Moscow regime is to internal revolt though. People in the provinces that want to break away from Moscow may be plotting now. Moscow demonstrated in the Chechnya campaign that they were willing to commit genocide to keep a province inside Russia, but now this coup has demonstrated that Moscow doesn't have the military strength to do that anymore.

The Russian Revolution almost happened in 1906 after the loss to the Japanese in the war with Japan in which Imperial Russia lost all its navy. The revolt then was put down because the army was mostly intact after that war. 11 years later the revolt started in the army and with the army committed to a war outside the country, when the rebellion quickly spread back to Russia, there was nothing in place to stop it.

Putin is in the same position as Czar Nicholas in 1917, the army is in another country, is very unhappy with their situation, and old animosities back home are brewing up. Prigozhin demonstrated that Russian internal security is weak and unreliable. This phase of the rebellion is over, but something else is going to happen. It may take months, but something will happen.



You do realize that Ukraine has fully fortified the border between Russia and Ukraine as well as between Belarus and Ukraine. And the defenses are manned with the Territorial Defense Forces who would be capable of slowing down any Russian attack across the border for a few days until the mobile reserves could be thrown into the fight.

Additionally Russia is incapable of carrying on a fight more than about 90 km from a rail line. Northern Ukraine does not have the density of rail line the Donbas has and what there is has been pre-targeted by the Ukrainians to be taken out in the event of a re-invasion. The reason the original attack in the north failed was because Russian truck logistics could not support the army in an environment without a good rail network to rely on.

And to top all that off, a major operation can't happen without a lot of preparation. In the fall and winter of 2021-2022 it was obvious Russia was building up for a cross border invasion. All the experts who knew something about military operations knew that Putin was going to pull the trigger and invade.

Russia has shown no sign of any similar build up in the north since pulling back last spring. Any future attempt would require a build up which would allow Ukraine to further reinforce their existing fortifications.

Ukraine has not left any border undefended except with the border with Poland, which is a friendly country. Prigozhin is not going to lead an invasion across the Belarus border. He's being put out to pasture in Belarus.

I mean your analysis up to now has been spot on, so why doubt this?

Oh WAIT...literally every forecast you've based on you or your "partner's" analysis has been incredibly wrong.

The TMC war strategists have an easier job than meteorologists...it doesn't matter if you're wrong, just make a new bold prediction that people want to hear.

You literally believe that an army of 25,000 was marching freely to Moscow only to be turned away by a job opportunity. You can't make this SUGAR up.

Mod: Keep it civil or keep your bags packed. This thread is extremely lightly moderated but if it’s necessary to turn up the interventions, it will happen.

 

[AudubonB]

re Lukashenko’s purported flight to Turkey:
That silenced tracker as his plane flew over Russian airspace between Belarus and Klamydia (ps: I’m still burning with shame I knew nothing, including its existence, of that republic prior to yesterday. And as above, not even its proper name. A Tibetan Buddhist country inside Europe! The mind boggles!) - is it possible it touched down within Russian territory in order to conduct his supposed mediation? Has anyone enough information to determine whether the elapsed time of its silenced mode does or does not gibe with the length of time that leg should take?

Has Lukashenko been sighted in Turkey? In Minsk? Anywhere?

 

[madodel]

I would like to know the magic secret used to talk Prigozhin into shutting this whole thing down, especially after Putin apparently did a replay of the Shah and took to flying away from the capital city.

Whatever magic potion was presented and accepted, I wish I could bottle it and sell it. /s. Well, sort of /s.

I don't care what these sociopath murderers deal was. I'm sure it involved stealing someone else's wealth and eventually Putler will steal back unless someone else offs the both of them.

 

[SageBrush]

Uhhhh what did Prigozhin get from the treaty???

Off-hand I think more than even he hoped for.

• An out from UKR that was reducing his army to ashes
• Stature in Russia
• New recruits from the Russian MoD
• A tactical position to either take over the Russian MoD or Russia itself
• Time to choose his next moves. I won't be surprised if he moves on Moscow with consolidated forces. A long-lived retirement at the Lukashenko villa is not in the cards

 

[Alset Srotom]

I mean your analysis up to now has been spot on, so why doubt this?

Oh WAIT...literally every forecast you've based on you or your "partner's" analysis has been incredibly wrong.

The TMC war strategists have an easier job than meteorologists...it doesn't matter if you're wrong, just make a new bold prediction that people want to hear.

You literally believe that an army of 25,000 was marching freely to Moscow only to be turned away by a job opportunity. You can't make this SUGAR up.

Mod: Keep it civil or keep your bags packed. This thread is extremely lightly moderated but if it’s necessary to turn up the interventions, it will happen.

@Mod: Please PM me with the portion of my post that was out of line so that I can modify behavior. In my eyes the post was relatively mild and the (incorrect) claims made by wdolson are well documented in the early pages (and later pages, and current pages) of this thread.

 

[MC3OZ]

Anyway, Prigozhin's stated aim was to get rid of Shougu and Gerazimov and he refused to put Wagner under MoD control. Lukashenko knows that he in on shaky ground in Belarus.

I think Prigozhin has probably achieved his main aim, and that was to survive, and keep most of his loyal troops intact.

I achieve coup he needs a bigger force and broader support.

Had Wagner troops stayed in Ukraine under MOD control most of them would have died, it would be easy to the MOD to assign them the most risky assignments and slowly whittle down their numbers.

Eventually it would be easy to isolate and finish Prigozhin.

We don't know if Prigozhin has any desire to lead Russia or any prospects of conducting a successful coup.

If he does organise another coup it will be a typical coup, with arrest of the leadership being step 1.

If is possible he may be able to stage a coup in Belarus. I have no idea what he is planning, but I don't see the situation as being fully resolved, Both sides lived to fight another day.

Putin and the MOD probably want to whittle away at Wagner forces, probably by recruiting the soldiers to their side. But even that is a dangerous path.

Many of us briefly had hopes that this might accelerate the end of the war, I don't think it was staged. It seems more likely that Prigozhin crunched the numbers and decided survival was the best policy.

 

[MC3OZ]

You literally believe that an army of 25,000 was marching freely to Moscow only to be turned away by a job opportunity. You can't make this SUGAR up.

What is your explanation of what happened?

We are trying to understand what often seems to be bizarre and hard to explain behaviour by the Russians.

IMO Prigozhin seems like a smart guy and there was an element of planning, which perhaps including staging a false-flag operation in advance.

So what was it all about?

 

[madodel]

UN puts Russian forces on blacklist for killing children in Ukraine

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in the report to the Security Council that he is “appalled” by the high number of “grave violations” against children in Ukraine in 2022, “shocked” at the number of attacks on schools and hospitals, “concerned” by the detention of children, and “troubled” that some Ukrainian children have been transferred to Russia.