Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Back in Ukraine

 

I don't regard Sushko, the Ukrainian racedriver turned advocate, as a reliable source of information— just because it's propaganda for an admirable cause doesn't mean it's not propaganda—but there, nevertheless, was Yevgeny Prigozhin, screaming at the Russian military in the most appalling language with a threat to pull his private army troops of the "Wagner Group" or "Wagner Orchestra" (honest to God, Оркестр Вагнера) out of the parts of Bakhmut it occupies, on May 10, the day after Russia celebrates the 78th anniversary of the German surrender, because his men aren't being supplied with adequate ammunition and are dying in excessive numbers; the suggestion is that the official Russian forces have changed their priorities from holding Bakhmut to coping with the coming Ukrainian spring offensive. 

I stumbled across something else that had not been noted so much outside the more specialized reports (which I don't usually follow myself): a joint statement of May 6 from Prigozhin and the head of Russia's Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, that Kadyrov's semi-private army, known as "Akhmat" after the first name of Ramzan's assassinated father, which has had troops somewhere nearby in the occupied Donetsk region since sometime in April, would be replacing the Wagnerites in Bakhmut, and now Prigozhin was saying he might not leave after all, at least if promises he claims to have extracted from the Defense Ministry are kept. Still, the thing I'm thinking about is that terrible, swollen face and strangled barking voice (and in another video the dead bodies of the soldiers he's presumably recruited out of prisons and over whom he's now at least pretending to grieve).

I know it's absolutely improbable, but I can't shake the thought that so many irregular forces commanded from outside the Defense Ministry, unable to achieve their assigned objectives in Ukraine, and increasingly at odds with the Kremlin officials whose incompetence is getting them killed, are not a healthy phenomenon back in the motherland. Prigozhin has up till now been pretty careful about attacking Putin himself, but is that certain to last?

I'm really imagining a situation like that of China in the late 1920s, a warlord state, and the potential for real civil war, not necessarily ideological, but rather driven by the presence of too many armies, all struggling to feed themselves off the lands they occupied. Or even Russia during the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century, torn among armies of the Polish-Lithuanian confederation, Swedish mercenaries backing one new tsar or another (the throne changed hands six times between 1598 and 1613), Crimean Tatars capturing civilians to sell as slaves, and forces loyal to one court faction or another.

Putin's May 9 form took place, but in a remarkably dispirited form, as Mark Sumner reports at Kos:

In 2021 the Victory Day parade was marked by a flyover of Russian fighter jets and bombers, the march of the Immortal Regiment (a highly popular event in which relatives of those who fought in World War II process through the city carrying photos of deceased warriors), and 197 armored vehicles including tanks. In 2022, a bit more than two months after Putin launched his illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the number of armored vehicles in the parade was down to 131. That was a notable difference, but it was nothing like the decline seen this year.

In 2023, there was no flyover. The Immortal Regiment did not march. And the rolling stock was down to just 51 vehicles. Meanwhile, dozens of cities across Russia—not just those bordering Ukraine, but as far away as Siberia—called off their parades entirely. Far from signaling victory, this seemed like a day in which Russia sent a visible signal that its military force is spent.

And at the same time, it seems as if Russians really did begin abandoning the town of Bakhmut they'd been fighting so hard to retain, at such terrible costs, the "Wagner Orchestra" too, and are evacuating the huge nuclear plant at Zaporizhzhia as well, increasing the chance of a deadly nuclear accident, but otherwise making things easier for the Ukrainian counter-offensive, which is coming very soon now the spring mud (rasputitsa) is drying up.  

Wait a minute, Gazprom has its own private army too?

This is enthralling, even when you know how it's going to turn out:

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