Get ready for the flood of kompromat
As Vladimir Putin sits thinking in his bomb-proof office, he may come to regret the fact that the entire world is sure that he ordered the death of the mutinous mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Kremlin is a Camorra, a mafia style parliament, running a gangster operation to fill Putin’s pockets and those of his oligarchs and elites. But as the Japanese found in Burma in 1944, if you prosecute a war with terror you will likely come unstuck against a well led, motivated and moral organisation like General ‘Bill’ Slim’s ‘Forgotten Army’.
Putin may in fact have signed his own death warrant. His fingerprints may not have been on the firing button when Prigozhin’s jet was brought down, and may not have been on the Polonium or Novichok which killed some of his other opponents, but his DNA is all over the orders. He now has two very powerful groups to worry about – quite apart from the International Criminal Court, which no doubt has so much evidence that if he ever gets to the Hague he will never leave.
Firstly, Putin must worry about his oligarchs who have now been holed up in their dachas in Moscow for over 18 months, unable to use their superyachts or villas in the Mediterranean. As their leader is further vilified around the globe over this latest murder, the oligarchs may come to see that their only chance to break out of Russia, now so diminished economically and socially, is to dispose of Putin.
Secondly, the Wagner Group might have lost their ‘cowboy’ leader and his deputy, but they remain a large force of thugs and murderers. Prigozhin was no military commander, but the Wagner Group is the most successful military outfit that Russia has managed to put into the field, no matter that they are paid mercenaries, many of them recruited out of Russian jails. To control such a rabble, you need some very hard ‘lieutenants’ running the show and these men will now be considering the future in Belarus and Africa. How ironic it would be if somebody showered them with riches to go and create mayhem within Russia. My experience of mercenaries is that they are not too picky about whose money they take.
archive link: https://archive.is/mMry3
So, who is going to pay now that he's dead?
I imagine these families will be happier and happier each day that goes by without having any information about their loved ones.
But if Prigozhin was paying their fees and keeping them in check with his control structure how could they have been available to change their masters?
I see your reply to the article as you see the article itself: full of speculations and assumptions but the main difference between the OP post and yours is that you are a nobody giving his opinion on the internet while the author of OP post was assistant director intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for the HQ Land Command.
Given the status I'm more inclined to listen to his speculations rather than yours, respectfully
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You seem to forget that, following the bombing caused by a massive presence of phone signals in a single spot, Russia has been much more careful in letting its trooper use their cellphones. Beside that I imagine a family not having any news from his relatives at the front would be anxious for their loved ones and would start asking questions, even if it meant facing criminal charges. Ukraine can identify a portion of the bodies from the battlefield I imagine, and they would be able to reach the families of an even small percentage I reckon.
I've thought about it and I really can't see who can pay Wagner's operators salaries, let alone arming them according to their standards (much better than the Russian army ones, can we agree on that?).
As far as I know Russia pays its soldiers 300-400€ a month and Wagner mercenaries are paid circa 2k (those who are not serving instead of being in a cell). Prigozhin was capable of providing for Wagner through his affairs in Africa and through the money he got from the Kremlin, will Putin be able to substitute such an income? What will happen if not? I've got my answers but they are just hypotheticals, who will live will see.
He certainly knows Wagner better than you since he probably met them on the battlefield.
No problems, it's a pleasure to have a conversation about these thematics since there is always to learn about any subject. In this sense, who is Sergei Shoigu? What I know about him is that he is a Putin sycophant only good as a yes man and coming from a political career scarcely linked to any military activity. Am I missing any information about the man?
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