“If you live in a graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation.
Putin has cut the head off the snake, and it will have little, if any, impact on BRICS. Having removed all the heads of mutiny, it should be pretty clear now that the Russian Federation does not need Wagner to win the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. Wagner may have got the Russian Federation back into Donetsk and Donbas but they are no longer needed.
By pronouncing Yevgeny Prigozhin dead Putin had appeased the families of Russian airmen shot down by Wagner during the mutiny in Rostov. But it does a whole lot more than that.
Arms dealer and soldier-of-fortune, Yevgeny Prigozhin, emerged as the architect of a ‘rebellion’ against Putin, at least according to Western media. Prigozhin was a criminal who flew ‘around prisons in his helicopter and offer people salvation for fighting for him at the front (in Ukraine), and then led these battalions of prisoners to their almost certain death. (according to Guardian reporter, Shaun Walker, on Fresh Air).’ Prigozhin worked for the Russians in Syria and was said to be Putin’s caterer in Moscow.
There is a lot of confusion in the West. Some very foolish statements are being made. Namely Prigozhin and his cronies should have driven Wagner all the way to Moscow. This is absurd. Almost as foolish as Zelensky pretending that he can drive the Russians out of Crimea.
The Crimea was never his to take back. And now the famine in the south will grow greater because the grain cannot be shipped out of Odessa.
Instead of suing for peace Zelensky is raising a third army to fight the Russians. This war was insane from the outset but to recruit and trained and sometimes disabled people to fight the Russian army is suicide.
If the Federation can get rid of Prigozhin, they could’ve got rid of Zelensky long ago. So why haven’t they? Z’s nonsense has been an asset to invasion.
There was a time when all the refugees have been in the Middle East and Afghanistan however that is fast disappearing given the number of people fleeing this conflict and those in Sudan, Niger, Mali, the Congo. With that, as the Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians will tell you, comes famine, disease, even death, and with all that the breakdown of family and society.
Biden should pull back from the brink; but he won’t, because it’s not American lives that are being lost.
Who in the west have ever listened to the Palestinians who have fought so hard against American imperialism and Israeli apartheid?
Ian Curr
26 August 2023
For people who have been following the disaster that the US defence of Ukraine has become we include the views of Seymour Hersh. – Ed., 8 Sept 2023.
“Over the past two late summer weeks we’ve looked back at past American military disasters, so time now to bring you up to date on the continuing madness in Ukraine.
Let’s start with the fallout from the death last month of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. The mercenary made a fortune renting out his forces as guns for hire, largely in Central Africa, and the group took enormous losses in brutal and successful house-to-house combat earlier this year in the city of Bakhmut against an equally courageous Ukraine army. Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged in late June that the Kremlin had paid Prigozhin’s army, many recruited from the country’s prisons, nearly $1 billion dollars between May of 2022 and May of 2023. I have reported in previous columns that the rebellion Prigozhin launched in June was far from the threat to Putin’s standing that the Western media consistently reported it to be. It was instead a historically Russian way of sidelining an often troublesome mercenary leader.
Prigozhin and his reduced Wagner force were left in limbo after the aborted revolt, and many Wagner members were absorbed into the Russian military. Putin arranged for Prigozhin and what was left of his mercenary force to be driven into exile in Belarus.
But Prigozhin did not stop there. By early August there were reports of border tensions as the remnant of the Wagner Group made a series of intrusions into the airspace of Poland, and troublesome threats at the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. For Putin, triggering complaints from NATO countries was an unforgivable breach. “That was it,” a knowledgeable US intelligence official told me.”