You can be nasty, cunning, ruthless, and also not all that bright, and thrive in a system like Putin's Russia.
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Europe under extreme duress
- Thread starter Randy Daytona
- Start date
True. I’m starting to wonder if this wasn’t all a provocation by Putin to trick Prigozhin into doing something stupid, so they could dismantle Wagner. Things seem to be playing that way now.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what Prigozhin’s intended end game was.
I didn't say he was an idiot, I just don't think he had a very well thought out plan as evidenced everything we know about the 'rebellion' or whatever the hell you want to call it.
This is a lot more true than a lot of folks seem to realize. Loyalty to Putin has been the number one qualifier to be successful in government, business, military and often just staying alive in modern Russia with skill and capability being an afterthought. I think that has been made glaringly obvious by Russia's performance in Ukraine.
From his reaction to this crisis and how bad it has made him look, I very seriously doubt it.
I'm not entirely sure he knew what it was, either. The whole fiasco had a weird air of impulsiveness.
In other news, the disloyalty purge has apparently started. General Sergei Surovikin, head of the Aerospace Forces, was arrested today. He's been known to be very snuggly with Wagner, and was the one who publicly called for the mutiny to be called off, though ISW says that may have been "under duress," which I suppose is wonk-speak for "FSB officers had a gun to his wife's head" or something similar. Gerasimov is being relieved as Ukraine theater commander, though for the time being he'll stay as head of the general staff.
Or surface warfare!
Buffoonery is generally a much more likely bet in life than someone playing 4D chess.
Random8145
Registered User
As Flash said, given how this made Putin look and also that there didn't seem to be much to actually stop Wagner, plus that Putin was calling Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, etc....for help, I doubt this was some grand strategic move by him.
Reminds me of in the 1980s when Coca-Cola's sales were down, so they stopped selling regular Coke and came out with "New Coke" (I think it was called that). People panicked and started stockpiling regular Coca-Cola and begging Coca-Cola to go back. So they brought back regular Coca-Cola and sales went way up.
An executive from another company said to one of the Coca-Cola execs, "You planned this..." to which the Coke exec replied, "We're not that smart and we're not that stupid."
All good points, and you can generally expect any politician to take advantage of a crisis.
The drink of choice when showing off SCI documents to uncleared peeps
Random8145
Registered User
There was a map I once saw showing countries if their geographic size was proportional to their GDP. It was hilarious because Russia was like the size of Japan and Japan the size of Russia.
GroundPounder
Well-Known Member
A 3rd rate country, that posseses first rate nuclear weapons.
I think the lesson that countries learn from this is to never give up nukes if you have them, and work diligently to obtain them if you don't.
That's because John McCain was right when he called them "a gas station masquerading as a country."