What didn’t happen in Russia

Everyone is talking about what happened in Russia, but almost no one is talking about what didn’t happen in Russia.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, co-founder of the Wagner group, mustered about 8,000 men and entered Russian territory on what he called a march for justice. He was heading for Moscow. Prigozhin’s aim apparently was to take over the Russian defense ministry in Moscow. After all, he’d been able to occupy the local Ministry of Defense headquarters in Rostov-on-Don.

He demanded the immediate resignations of the current defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of the General Staff of Russia’s armed forces, Valery Gerasimov.

As is well known, his forces didn’t make it to Moscow. A convoy of a few thousand Wagnerites, under the command of the group’s other co-founder, Dmitri Utkin, stopped some 120 kilomters from Moscow. Prigozhin himself stayed in Rostov-on-Don at the Defense Headquarters – trying to call first Vladimir Putin, who refused to talk to him, and then lower-rank officials.

Finding himself without support, his small force facing annihilation and his family threatened, Prigozhin sought an intermediary and found one in Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus.

With Putin hovering in the background, a deal was struck. Prigozhin and the 8,000 men he brought with him, would be going into exile in Belarus. Treason charges were dropped. The remaining Wagner troops, somewhere around 12,000, were offered contracts with the Russian army, or they could go home. Many of them, according to reports, are taking the deal and signing up.

To launch his operation, Prigozhin took a number of steps over the past six or more months. Among these were constant, and provably false, accusations that he was not getting enough ammunition to fight in Bakhmut. Along with that, Prigozhin charged that the army leadership was corrupt, that they refused to defend his flanks during the Bakhmut operation and that they were losing massively in the Ukraine war. None of these accusations was true.

In the past few weeks, the Russian army leadership demanded that Wagner be brought under their control and they required each and every member, Prigozhin most of all, to sign a contract with the Russian command and thus submit to Russian army orders.

Prigozhin refused. He then fabricated a couple of incidents, claiming that his forces were attacked from the rear by the Russian army. He published two fake videos that made the rounds of social media, along with a one-man diatribe against the rotten army leadership.

And unconfirmed reports making the rounds on Twitter, Telegraph and Substacks say there was more to it than that: Prigozhin had been in touch with Ukrainian military intelligence (known as the HUR MO), at least since last January. Some sources say that he also flew to Africa, where Wagner forces are operational, to hold a meeting with Ukrainian intelligence officials.

Similarly there are reports that he also was talking to a number of special force units inside Russia, asking them to join him.

People forget that the Wagner Group is a product of Russian military intelligence, the GRU. While Prigozhin himself has no military background, the other co-founder, Dmitry Utkin, was a GRU Spetsnaz special operator.

Spetsnaz units have been around at least since 1949, perhaps before. They carry out clandestine operations, usually behind enemy lines. They are armed with the latest gear and have been suspected of being capable of planting small nuclear weapons in the backyards of Russia’s enemies.

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