There was an attempted coup in Russia. Remember that? The Wagner Group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, turned on Russia. He took the Russian city of Rostov, the Russian military stronghold nearest Ukraine. The Russians couldn’t take Bakhmut, Ukraine, for months.
Wagoner took Rostov in a matter of hours and was greeted like a conquering hero by the crowds. Wagner then started toward Moscow. Suddenly it all stopped. There was some kind of deal. Prigozhin is in Belarus. Putin is still in power in Russia. Everybody watched this unfold. Now, everybody’s gone silent. Nobody is talking about any of it. Why?
The questions we need to be asking are: Why is there so little media coverage of this? What does this tell us about our intelligence about Putin’s Russia? What does it mean about our position with respect to Ukraine? Why does China have better intelligence about Russia than we do? Why aren’t we backing the Ukrainians to kick the crap out of Russia? Why didn’t we support Prigozhin? Why are we buying into another endless war?
Our military, intelligence, and State Department had no idea what the hell was going on with Wagoner. They didn’t see this coming. They didn’t see the risk. They didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. They were deer in the headlights… frozen in place.
A lot of the assumptions American leadership made about Russia appear to have been false. During the Cold War, the CIA was often in error, rarely in doubt. They said the Soviets were hugely strong, the Soviet economy was doing extremely well, and the Soviet military capacity was outstanding. Once the Soviet Union came crashing down, we realized that the emperor was wearing no clothes.
How could they have been wrong about this? The answer is that not only is our intelligence not very good, but it is almost always dictated by assumptions that are no longer tested. The Biden administration is making a lot of important decisions based on this intelligence about the Russians. Their position is we can’t provoke Putin. He’ll hit us. As Biden says, it’s going to be Armageddon, World War III. He’s going to hit us with nuclear weapons. But the emperor was wearing no clothes…
The thing this exposes is: Putin is not the viper that attacks. Actually, when confronted with pressure, a threat to his regime, he begs for mercy, negotiates or cuts a deal. So here is this guy, Prigozhin, who is Putin’s creature. Putin funded Prigozhin, created him and they were best friends. Prigozhin was Putin’s caterer, his most trusted ally. Lots of Prigozhin people from catering built a private army. That’s what happened in Russia. Prigozhin was Putin’s creation to counter-balance the military.
Why are we so afraid of him? Why are we afraid to give the Ukrainians long-range missiles because it might provoke Putin? Why are we afraid to give them Abrams tanks? Why are we afraid to give them F16 fighter jets because Putin might get upset? We are allowing a Putin strongman mystique to deter us. Aren’t we really just deterring ourselves? In reality, what we just witnessed shows us Putin is weak. Doesn’t the Wagoner action expose Putin’s weakness?
We are being subjected to the pacifist counter-arguments coming from Berlin and Washington. Could we, should we do more to destabilize the Putin regime? Do we really want him in power? Why did we say we were supporting Ukraine?
Putin was the key element in allowing the Assad regime to stay in power. Hezbollah couldn’t do it. Iran couldn’t do it, but the Russian troops actually saved Assad in Syria. For that, Putin got, for the first time since the Cold War, a port on the Mediterranean through Syria.
Russia is now supporting Iran, and Shia over Sunni. Russia is destabilizing a whole variety of other countries. Maybe Putin is nothing more than a paper tiger. If that’s the case, why are we not pushing on him harder?
The Ukrainians are asking for weapons to fight the Russians. Wouldn’t it be great if they won and Putin fell? Wouldn’t it be great if we did what we said we were in Ukraine to do and got the hell out?
And even if things in Russia were worse after Putin, the Russians would probably be internally focused for a while as opposed to focused on threatening the West and NATO. If the Ukrainians win quickly and Putin falls as a result, isn’t that good for us? And again, why the silence? Why the inaction? Why did we not seize the opportunity when it was presented? Who is lying, and what are they lying about? What are we not supposed to see here?
