Sources of British special services have reported that the Russian secret services threatened to hurt the families of chiefs of the Wagner Private Military Company (PMC) before Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner and leader of the Wagner PMC, stopped his offensive on Moscow.
Not a lot of this event is making sense. Yet…
I’d hazard a guess that it was a joint mission between Putin and Prigozhin to flush out potential traitors. I mean, what’s a better time to monitor communication channels when you have ‘an invading army storming the capital’ to find out who’s with/against you?
Then you send the ‘invading army’ to a Putin-controlled border country, and offer any of his soldiers that didn’t invade with him a place in your military….
I mean they sent a women’s basketball player to prison for some cannabis oil, but a guy who tried to overthrow the government gets a vacation next door? His soldier’s get the same vacation? The soldier’s that didn’t join them (why? where were they?) get jobs with the government?
Doesn’t make sense unless the ‘event’ was nothing like it appeared. A ‘Red Herring’ if you will.
The actions taken after the 1-day event speak louder to the point of what actually happened then what they’re saying in the media.
It’s weird if it’s real, but it’s also weird if it’s fake. That’d mean that they moved a lot of troops out of Ukraine, split them up with some heading to Moscow and others staying in Rostov, destroyed the morale of the Russian soldiers staying in Ukraine and allowed Ukraine to continue their counteroffensive, shot down six of their own helicopters and a plane in the conflict, and killed and wounded several of their own soldiers, all just for show. They could have done this so much more efficiently.
It makes sense, but there was so much… chaos. If the goal was to root out traitors, then he didn’t really find many except the ones in Wagner. and there is still a lot of unknown alliances except maybe the airforce.
It also had the unintentional consequence of making Russia look weak, and more importantly gave us a glimpse into their tactics, escape plans, defensive plans. But most importantly, that Russia has no reserve forces except drafting civilians and police in the event of a blitz on moscow.
While I like this take, we really don’t know if it was sincere or not. Maybe Prigozhin made a deal with the FSB, or maybe he’s already dead by now. He hasn’t been seen since he left for Belarus.