Julius Caesar, Redux? C'Mon, Man, It's Russia!

OK. Please forgive what might comprise gibberish from an amateur with access to a keyboard, a working internet, and time to kill on a sunny, hot Raleigh morning after walking the dogs. 

Do the events of the past few days in Russia make sense to you? If they do, tell me. They don't make sense to me, but that'll not going to stop me from expounding. I don't charge a cent for this, right?

Hanging out on Twitter, I saw the usual "Slava Ukraini!" crowd most of whom have shown themselves  wrong about everything from Trump-Putin collusion, the Hunter laptop as Russian disinformation, the effectiveness of the Wuhan jab, climate change, etc., etc. and etc, now cheering the Prighozin Wagner thugs as some sort of liberators. Prighozin as Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC . . . yeah, yeah, yeah. Then, almost as suddenly as it all began, Prighozin announced he had negotiated a "deal" via Belarus President Lukashenko in which Wagner, now supposedly only 200 Kms from Moscow, would return to its "bases," and Prighozin would fly off to "safety" and exile in Belarus.

The press and the "experts" have loads of speculation about what all this means. Nobody knows, and neither do I, but . . . for what it's worth . . . let me lay out a few possibilities, with more questions than answers. 

How about an ill-conceived plot by Western intelligence agencies and money (the mysterious $6.2 billion of accounting error fame?) trying for Iraq-type regime change on the cheap? Could be. It certainly looked muddled enough. Let's put that aside, for now, because if it were, our leaky intel services will soon let us all know, anyhow. Seymour Hersh, call your office.  

Or, Prighozin had a genuine antipathy for Russian senior commanders and the Mindef? He felt disrespected, unsupported, and even betrayed when it was Wagner that had achieved Russia's wins in Ukraine. Possible. He might well have thought that his populist anti-corruption message combined with a "let's win or get out" theme would draw widespread support, and that mid- to lower-ranks of the military, at least, would refuse to block him, and perhaps even a few senior commanders might join. He might have envisioned a triumphal march on the capital taken from another figure in Italian history, Benito Mussolini. In the end, however, it would seem, he did not get the support he wanted, especially from the air force which could have wiped out his column; he decided to give in. Maybe.

That brings us to another issue. 

What sort of offer did Lukashenko, acting for Putin, make Prighozin that got him apparently to yield his prized and profitable Wagnerians? A plomo o plata deal (lead or silver) a la Mafia and cartels? If Prighozin is really an enemy of Putin and his claque, will Belarus under Lukashenko, a Putin puppet, prove a safe place for Prighozin? Stay away from tall buildings, buddy. What about the thousands of Wagner mercs who followed Prighozin? Will the Russian military honor their safety? I don't know, but they better keep looking over their shoulders.

There, of course, exist many other scenarios, including a combination of the two above, that you can conjure up. Including, that this was all some bizarre theater, undertaken for mysterious Kremlin reasons.

Who won? Well, on the surface it appears as a messy Putin win. Lots of chapters yet to follow, but we can speculate that Putin might have had to make deals with and concessions to the power elite around him that will cost him in the medium to long run. For now, however, he stays. Perhaps embarrassed and weaker, but he stays, well, as I said, for now. 

The PRC leaders, too, might rethink their support for Russia under Putin: a whole other issue worthy of much speculation. What does this do, for example, to their grand BRICS scheme? Anything?

More immediately, what does this do to the Russian "Special Operation" in Ukraine? Will that continue? Will Putin declare victory, and call it a day? Can the Ukrainians take advantage, and get their floundering offensive in gear? Will Zelensky ask for tons more of money? Well, that one's a given. The rest, we'll see. 

Russia is endlessly fascinating. No debate on that.