Wagner Rebellion

It's the Olive Color Revolution of course, likely paid for with the $6.2 billion that recently surfaced in the Pentagon.

You might think Prigozhin would be less appetizing to the west than even Putin.  He wanted Putin to fight the war in Ukraine harder at every turn.  He founded a group to combat disinformation disparaging of Russia years ago.  But then, a few months ago, he suddenly changed his tune, calling the Special Military Operation fundamentally wrong using western talking points.  About that time, if not long before, Putin started paying attention.  The ongoing plan was to integrate Wagner troops into the regular Russian Military, making Prigozhin unimportant going forwards.  But just before that could happen, this...

It often seems the west believes that which can easily be bought, can keep being bought, though that very strategy has failed spectacularly many times before (say, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein).

One thing is for sure, the US has hands on everything it can reach.

And it would have been better to never touch anything.

It didn't take much reading on Twitter for me to reach these conclusions.  And then I discovered the usual set of people I follow had been saying similar things, going back 14 hours or more.

Prigozhin is a restauranteur.  He is an oligarch but not a populist senator as Julius Caesar was.  It is not clear Prigozhin has any popular support at all, while Putins popularity has remained above 80%.

Actually, my first thought was not merely a bribe but blackmail had caused Prigozhin to flip.  He must no longer care about his own life, but someone else's.

Update:  Negotiations were concluded during the time I was writing this.

Now what we seem to have was not a Revolt but a Walk Out, and Management made some concessions.

Yet again, and in complete contrast to the misinformation laced false picture of Putin in the West, Putin's actions saved lives.  He acted with reason and compassion and not ego.