Russia Totally Fine, Just Got Super F*cked Up Saturday Night And Needs Extra Day To Recover

За здоровье!

We suppose the bottom line is that there is not going to be a coup in Russia this week, and the mutiny is over. (Theoretically. Allegedly.) Vladimir Putin's former lunch lady Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who also runs the Wagner mercenary group that was advancing toward Moscow this weekend until it suddenly wasn't, has been ordered to to Belarus, which is run by Putin's best puppet Alexander Lukashenko, AKA "Europe's Last Dictator." Reportedly he was the mastermind genius who genius masterminded the deal that diffused the situation. Reportedly. ( Bullshit. )

Charges have been dropped. ( Maybe. ) The Wagner fighters are going to be absorbed into the Russian military. (Guess we'll see!)

We assume Prigozhin is staying away from Belarusian windows.

Now everything in Russia is normal again. The prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, says now is a time for unifying behind Vladimir Putin. The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, said all the counter-terrorism measures in his city are canceled. Happy Xmas, war is over, etc.

You know, except that war Russia started for no reason against Ukraine. Which is probably going just swimmingly, considering this weekend's events. Please say in the newspaper that the war on devil Ukraine is going well!

"The political system is showing fragilities, and the military power is cracking," European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters in Luxembourg as he arrived for a meeting with ministers from across the 27-member bloc.

What really happened to settle things down so quickly is unclear. Wagner mercenaries stopped marching to Moscow on Saturday, and left the city of Rostov. Prigozhin stopped demanding heads on spikes of Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and the top dude in the army.

Shoigu is fine, we are sure. The government put out a video of him on an airplane, which means he's definitely fine. Prigozhin is fine. Reuters said he was smiling as he got into an SUV and left Rostov. Putin is fine, off somewhere, being Putin. Stronger than ever. Ford Tough or however you say in Russia. Nothing to see here.

Oh also everybody gets a day off in Russia today! Because sometimes when you get that fucked up on Saturday night, you need an extra day to recover. "Saturday was a very emotional and tense day," said Russia's ministry of digital affairs.

But we're sure everything is fine.

NATO said the events showed the scale of the Kremlin's strategic mistake in waging war on Ukraine and that the Western defence alliance would not be intimidated into ending its support for Ukraine. [...]

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested the turmoil could take months to play out.

"We've seen more cracks emerge in the Russian facade," Blinken told NBC's "Meet the Press" programme on Sunday.

Reuters has more on what led to all this, and what it means for Russia's war on Ukraine, which is again going perfectly. The Washington Post is asking whether this truce thingie will hold. Is Putin about to start firing motherfuckers, which is partly precisely what Prigozhin wants? Is Prigozhin going to stay in Belarus? Will he have to eat polonium cupcakes all by himself? Is it really all over just like that? And also too, what the fuck was this? 

 WaPo quotes a senior European diplomat, who asks, "Why did it calm down so quickly, and how come Putin's puppet Lukashenko got all the credit?"

Nobody knows. There are reports that threats to the families of Wagner leaders from Russian intelligence might have caused Prigozhin to stand down, and/or that maybe he didn't have the number of soldiers on his side that he originally thought, but nobody knows.

Here's a guy:

“I can’t see this peace lasting,” [said member of British Parliament Bob Seely, who's been investigating the Wagner Group], “because either Prigozhin is unstable and will continue to attack and seek to finish Putin off, or Putin will silence him in some way — financially, politically or physically.”

And here are some more words from Blinken, on just the sheer "oh my goodness"-ness of all this:

“Think about it this way: 16 months ago, Russian forces were on the doorstep of Kyiv in Ukraine, believing they would take the capital in a matter of days and erase the country from the map as an independent country. Now, what we’ve seen is Russia having to defend Moscow, its capital, against mercenaries of [Putin’s] own making,” Blinken said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

It is amazing the lengths that man will go to, to distract us all from Hunter Biden. Not gonna work this time, buddy!

So now we wait, both to see what happens next and to learn just how much horseshit the official narratives really are. And we keep helping Ukraine kick Putin's ass. WaPo says politicians on both sides of the aisle seemed pretty united in saying this has made America's commitments to Ukraine even stronger.

And since there is so much we don't know, we go to historian and Russia expert Timothy Snyder, who always knows what to say in times like these, how to frame these situations into something useful and digestible. He's got 10 preliminary conclusions we can take from what just happened. None of it's good for Putin, but look here, read number five:

When backed into a corner, Putin saves himself. In the West, we worry about Putin's feelings. What might he do if he feels threatened? Might he do something terrible to us? Putin encourages this line of thinking with constant bluster about "escalation" and the like. On Saturday Putin gave another speech full of threats, this time directed against Prigozhin and Wagner. Then he got into a plane and flew away to another city. And then he made a deal with Prigozhin. And then all legal charges against Prigozhin were dropped. And then Putin's propagandists explained that all of this was perfectly normal.

So long as Putin is in power, this is what he will do. He will threaten and hope that those threats will change the behaviour of his enemies. When that fails, he will change the story. His regime rests on propaganda, and in the end the spectacle generated by the military is there to serve the propaganda. Even when that spectacle is as humiliating as can be possibly be imagined, as it was on Saturday when Russian rebels marched on Moscow and Putin fled, his response will be to try to change the subject.

It is worth emphasizing that on Saturday the threat to him personally and to his regime was real. Both the risk and the humiliation were incomparably greater than anything that could happen in Ukraine. Compared to power in Russia, land in Ukraine is unimportant. After what we have just seen, no one should be arguing that Putin might be backed into a corner in Ukraine and take some terrible decision. He cannot be backed into a corner in Ukraine. He can only be backed into a corner in Russia. And now we know what he does when that happens: record a speech and run away.

Might want to bookmark that one for safekeeping, next time some asslicking Republican sycophant for the Kremlin starts whining about how our support for Ukraine is going to force poor Putin to start World War III.

[ Reuters / Washington Post / Snyder ]

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