What's Going On With Putin, Prigozhin, and Wagner Group?
I can only guess
I think I finally figured out what happened with the “Wagner mutiny": there was a command power struggle at the front between Yevgeny Prigozhin and Russian General Ivan Popov- and Prigozhin won. Wagner Group hasn't lost. Wagner hasn't been sidelined or dispersed far and wide. Wagner prevailed. My surmise is that Prigozhin and his boys were tired of doing the heavy lifting, and they wanted some R&R. Defense is the easy part, leave that to the scrubs and the new recruits. Popov objected to Wagner Group units leaving the battlefield entirely to Russian Army units. Prigozhin won that power play. Popov lost.
General Popov Dismissed From Command
Popov: ““The top officers apparently saw me as a source of threat and rapidly issued an order to get rid of me, which was signed by the defense minister in just one day,” he said. “The Ukrainian military has failed to break through our army’s defenses, but the top commander hit us in the rear, treacherously and cowardly beheading the army at this most difficult moment…” Hmm. Are you sure you want to criticize the Top Commander that bluntly, ex-General Popov?
Well, maybe. I don’t know if Popov is done…wheels within wheels. However, Prigozhin is the guy who took a personal meeting with Vladimir Putin, not Popov. For what it’s worth, here’s something like the Russian official version(s). But my guess is that Wagner Group personnel will be training as many recruits as get referred to them by the official Russian Army, in Belarus or elsewhere, and Wagner Group (possibly renamed, admittedly) will remain in reserve to be called into action by Putin in the event that the Ukrainian Army forces a break in the Russian defensive line. If the Ukrainians can even manage to get that far, which remains to be seen.
Right now, the counteroffensive is is a cold-blooded war of attrition. One that the Ukrainians really can't afford.
As if either side could afford this horror. But strategically speaking, the Ukrainians will be the worse for this. They're mounting a frontal assault on a well-entrenched line, without air superiority. I can’t convey how horrific a full-scale assault would look like.
All we’re seeing presently are relatively small-unit skirmishes. Video of actual combat is scarce, but it’s possible to find some with a search. Here’s a video clip of what it looks like:
And no, I don't think F-16s would have made a decisive difference to the counteroffensive, or will make a difference. Modern antiaircraft artillery technology has evidently made some amazing advances in recent decades (as might be imagined.) A thicket of Russian air defenses is already deployed over the area of Ukraine, and they’ve been there for years. They’re on Russian bases, not on the Ukrainian territory being contested. Many of them are in Crimea. There are also a good number of them in Eastern Russia. There are also mobile units, of course. Additionally, the Russians have a naval surface-to-air missile capability. Russian Anti-Access Area Denial Capabilities c. 2017
Russian Air And Missile Defense
All you Ukraine War Hawks: President Biden is not being a coward by not giving the Ukrainians everything they want by six months ago, okay? Biden at least shows some signs that he doesn’t want to crash the ambulance. And I don’t know how long it takes for most people to feel in confident command of a semi-truck, but rest assured that it takes a lot longer for a pilot to figure out an entirely new model of supersonic jet. So there’s no magic wand that allows Ukrainian pilots trained on Russian jets to figure out how to master the basics of the F-16 in a fortnight. Ukrainian Air Force
Those challenges of becoming competent at operating new pieces of complex equipment are not just for jet pilots. There are no magic bullets. There isn’t some gaming token that instantly confers the recipient with superpowers.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive is a situation that could fracture in a number of different ways. In terms of military objectives and strategy, the worst case scenario for Ukraine is that their army gets worn to the limit over the next three months, punching itself out in futile efforts to make headway against an awfully thorough Russian line of defenses:
(Those little springy lines in the diagram next to the trenches are unspooled concertina razor wire. The diagram only shows one minefield- those little specks in the area between the second and third trenches. There are a lot more of them than are shown in the diagram. Diagram is not to scale. A more thorough explanation can be found in the Youtube video already posted at the top of the page.)
Under that worst-case scenario for the Ukrainians, by mid-October their army gets chewed to pieces, attempting to breach that defensive line (which they have yet to reach)- and then the hardcore veterans of the Wagner Group show up, reconstituted, along with all of the new units of soldiers they’ve been training for the Russian side. They overwhelm the remaining Ukrainian forces, and the Russians roll to Kyiv.
There are second-worst scenarios. But the Ukrainian Army continues to pay a terrible penalty in blood if any of them play out to their end game.
A moderate and sober Russian military strategy would simply make it clear to the Ukrainians that their effort to recapture ground is futile, and encourage them to settle the dispute at the negotiating table. At this point, that may or may not entail even more of a territorial grab in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. It depends on how much advantage and leverage Putin calculates that he has. But organized armed hostilities would be over. (It’s still a world full of guerrillas, though; and less territory is easier to control. Benefits vs. costs.) The Zelensky government would remain intact.
But there’s also the meta-worst case scenario, where Putin—not having been satisfied with a securely occupied eastern Ukraine, and high on victory—and having decided to press his luck by returning to his original objective, driving to Kyiv and toppling the Zelensky government—ends up eliciting such a clamor from influential sectors in the West (which at this point include an overwhelmingly propagandized populace) that NATO is drawn into direct participation in the war. If that happens, it won’t end there.
Is Putin crazy enough to run the risk of escalating popular madness in the West and starting a nuclear war that way—or another way—be it directly or indirectly—in the first quarter of the 21st century?
I don’t know.
Are the leaders of the West crazy enough to start a nuclear war? The ones who are presently discouraging the Ukrainian government from negotiating with Russia, massaging Zelensky and his faction with visions of holding a stronger position after a few more months of counteroffensive, or whenever the F-16s show up?
I don’t know the answer to that question, either.
Many of the most zealous of those Westerners and Ukrainians are incidentally insisting on the absolute moral imperative for a Ukrainian armed forces military offensive to expel the Russian military presence from the Crimean peninsula (local population 2/3 ethnic Russian; 3/4 Russian first language). Demographics Of Crimea
Are they crazy?
Yes.