It's not the fat lady singing, but the Orchestra is on the move

First Kadyrov's fighters already in Rostov pic.twitter.com/FYqbCbR5ye

— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) June 24, 2023

Six weeks ago or so I wrote, with the strongest sense that what I was writing was completely insane,

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.

Now we seem to have gotten there, with Yevgeny Prigozhin and 25,000 ex-convicts having left Ukraine, and, without a shot fired, apparently occupied the southwestern city of Rostov na Donu, Rostov-on-the-Don, which is the military post from which Russian forces have mostly run and supplied the Ukraine war. After (first) denouncing the defense minister for starting the war on a fake pretext to aggrandize himself

Prigozhin claimed that the assault on Ukraine was launched so that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu could become a marshal and receive military accolades. The rank of marshal is the highest in the Russian military, with only one former minister of defense having received the title so far.

Contrary to Moscow's claims, Prigozhin also said the war wasn't needed to "demilitarize or denazify Ukraine."

and (second) accusing Shoigu of ordering a rocket attack from Rostov against the Wagner position and killing "a huge number of our comrades" (the Defense Ministry has denied this). Claiming the war was unnecessary because Ukraine didn't require "denazification" was a direct attack on Putin, though it didn't name him—that's Putin's argument.

Shoigu left Rostov ("like a coward," says Prigozhin), and Prigozhin announced a "march for justice" on Moscow (1200 kilometers away). It looks as if he's thought better of this and is now demanding that Shoigu and top general Valery Gerasimov come to Rostov to meet with him.

Meanwhile,

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has released a statement, calling for Prigozhin’s “vile betrayal” and revolt to be crushed. Kadyrov has also sent Chechen soldiers to fight against the Wagner Group, saying that they will do everything to preserve the unity of Russia and protect its state.

and those troops have already begun reaching Rostov as well.

Putin took a very long time to make his own public statement; when he did, in a five-minute speech denouncing Prigozhin as a traitor, it was with a very curious analogy:

Russia totally would have won World War I if not for those Reds. (Uh no.)

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2023

These are all very bad men, as dishonest as they are cruel and violent, and you shouldn't make a practice of believing anything they say, but what got me going on this subject back in early May was the impression that Prigozhin's anger with the Defense Ministry, at least, was really unfeigned in that first video where he appeared with the Wagner corpses, pointing at them as he snarled at the camera. It's like, he has no hesitation to send his cannon fodder troops to their death, but he'll kill anybody else who tries to do it, and the ineptitude and corruption of the regular Russian command are indeed killing them, as they save the generals' asses. I'm guessing that rocket attack really took place and this is how he lost control of himself.

What happens next I really can't say. One source was noting that while most of the military figures, and that fool Dmitry Medvedev, had made their backing for the government clear, two important political people, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, had not, and that's taken as a sign that popular support for Putin could be wavering, as well it might, though it's also hard to imagine anybody daring to confront him, or the FSB protecting him, let alone succeeding in taking him down. 

If the Wagner Orchestra can stay safely in Rostov, I can't see why it would want to go anywhere else. There's plenty of food, and plenty of military hardware. What effect would that have on the war effort in Ukraine? The Russian troops are already having a very hard time there, under the famous Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is turning out to be a lot like World War I trench warfare, with the Ukrainians having superior weapons, pushing the Russians back in tiny increments, from line to line. Will the Russian supply chains get broken without Rostov? (Supplying them through Crimea will also be a terrible problem until they're able to repair the bombed Kerch railway bridge.) Will they be weakened by the loss of the Wagnerian fighters? Some sources doubt that this will have any effect at all on the conduct of the war, but I find that hard to believe too.

It could also lead to worse Russian terrorism, as the nightly city bombs become less effective against the improved Ukrainian defenses, which I don't want to dwell on (I'm thinking of the threat of an attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, that Zelenskyy has been warning of in the last few days).  

But it's a seriously unstable situation, and the unpredictability is what I want to emphasize.

Update: Prigozhin says he went on the March for Justice after all, but halted 200 km from Moscow after negotiating some kind of deal with president Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, and is now

turning our columns around and going back in the other direction toward our field camps, in accordance with the plan

What plan was that? The deal is said to include security guarantees for the Wagner troops and a promise to "resolve the issues of Shoigu and Gerasimov," which sounds like a signal victory for Prigozhin, and therefore dubious. Moscow, however, is under martial law:

Martial Law is underway in Moscow as parks, museums, and shopping malls are closed until further notice.
● As per Putin decree. He had had hoped to avoid such a drastic measure during his "special military operation" pic.twitter.com/ispmRZsOeR

— Jason Corcoran (@jason_corcoran) June 24, 2023

And... the Kremlin has dropped the criminal case against Prigozhin. Who will, however, "go to Belarus". Really? For a holiday? For what? Is this like an idiom for when your dog dies? ("Mom, where's Freckles?" "Oh, honey, Freckles went away. He went to Belarus.") Is the Wagner Orchestra over in Ukraine?