Putin’s Wagner Moment and the Need for a New International Relations Paradigm – Part I
A thick fog of befuddlement descended on the world as a band of around 4,000 mercenaries marched on the capital of the world’s most heavily armed nuclear state, Russia, threatening to oust its Minister of Defence. The world’s second most powerful military force appeared unwilling to stop the private militia from advancing, while the country’s president delivered stern warnings about how the traitors’ heads would roll…as soon as someone could figure out how to stop them. The dictator of a neighbouring satellite state, ranked 60th out of 145 countries in military firepower strength, stepped in to save the day and broker a deal in which no heads rolled and the Russian government dropped all charges against the private militias and their commanders.
Rolo Slavskiy’s explanation for why Putin always looks unflappable and icily in control is simple but worth considering. It may be that he is simply incapable of facial expression. The attempted mutiny in the last weekend of June may have revealed that Putin’s greatest asset is his poker face and not his skill at playing poker. And, as we shall see in Part II, that’s not something the Putinistas in the Great Freeset movement want to hear.
Did the poker-faced Putin know all along that Prigozhin, the leader of the mutiny, was holding a busted flush? Or does Putin really have no clothes after all? Putinista-in-chief Pepe Escobar would have us believe that Putin is wiser than Buddha and more indomitable than Hercules. Is Mr Escobar a brilliant geopolitical analyst or a flamboyant court jester on the Kremlin payroll?
To answer these questions, I’ll start by summarising the key perspectives of Rolo Slavskiy, whose analysis came to my attention through the Corbett Report. Slavskiy describes himself as pro-Russian and yet pours cold water on the notion that Putin and Russia are in control of their Special Military Operation (SMO). He intuitively strikes me as someone who seems interested in the truth for its own sake and who may know a thing or two about how things work in the Kremlin. I think we should pay some attention to what he’s saying.
Then in Part II we’ll take a look at some of the pronouncements of analysts with a different slant to see how they stand up to the white hot flames of Slavskiy’s fury over Kremlin corruption and ineptitude. And then of course, as ever, we’ll try to decipher the real meaning of Putin’s Wagner moment and indeed the whole Ukraine war. This will involve imagining a new international relations paradigm.
Who is Rolo Slavskiy?
Rolo Slavskiy is a pseudonym. His explanation for wanting to remain anonymous is that he is connected to people living in Russia, and revealing his identity might jeopardise their safety. He was born in Kyiv, grew up in the US and then went to live in Russia. He worked in state media in Russia, was involved in grassroots politics there and has contacts in Russian media, as well as with people who have fought in Donbas. He claims that he has an impeccable track record in predicting events, and James Corbett concurs that those claims are borne out by his writing.
What is the Wagner Group?
Founded in around 2014 by Dmitry Utkin, a Russian military intelligence officer, the Wagner Group is a Private Military Company (PMC) — the official term in Russia for mercenaries, many of whom are recruited from the prison system, being granted amnesty in exchange for entering the human meat grinder of war. The Wagner Group served as one of Russia’s main combat units in its Syrian campaign. Utkin himself is alleged to be a Nazi sympathiser and chose the name ‘Wagner’ owing to the German composer’s adoption by Hitler as a German national cultural icon during the Third Reich.
This minor detail isn’t acknowledged by Slavskiy, at least not in the Corbett podcast of 26th June. If true, it raises questions about the sincerity of Russia’s stated mission to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. Do you recall the prisoner exchange in September 2022 in which Russia handed over 108 neo-Nazi Azov fighters in exchange for the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Medvedchuk? Not exactly a win for “de-Nazification”. As noble as that goal is, I don’t believe it’s high up on Russia’s list of priorities despite the rhetoric. When that rhetoric was put to the test, Russia decided that it cared more about its oligarchs than it does about “de-Nazification”.
Russia’s Chief of Staff has spoken about the need to use PMCs “for delicate missions abroad”. While illegal under Russian law, they are intimately tied to Russian military operations, thus permitting below-the-radar military operations and plausible deniability.
Prigozhin is (or perhaps was) politically ambitious, and is believed to be Wagner’s financier. His role within Wagner Group is analogous to that of a CEO – PR and political liaison – whereas Utkin is the commander in charge of military strategy.
Prigozhin’s beef with Putin
Slavskiy is adamant that the antagonism between Putin and Prigozhin is real. Contrary to the 5-D chess fantasies of the Putinista commentariat in the West, the failed Wagner mutiny was not a staged false flag to entrap Nato and Ukraine into doing something counter to their interests.
Slavskiy alleges that Russia’s SMO is failing. Spectacularly. It started failing almost from day one, and to understand the latest debacle involving a bunch of well-trained mercenaries marching on Moscow, one needs to engage in a serious political analysis as opposed to the hobbyist’s obsession with tank turrets. A commentator recently touted Simplicius as a vital Ukraine war analyst, but within a week I had unsubscribed because I was at risk of chewing my arm off at the elbow in a desperate bid to stay awake amid the War-and Peace length descriptions of tank performance, terrain maps and technical details that only an idiot savant could absorb without screaming in pain. But I digress.
The reality, according to Slavskiy, is that the Kremlin was hoping to replicate a military intervention undertaken a month earlier to prop up Kazakh President Tokayev, who was on the verge of being toppled in a Nato-friendly Orange revolution. The Kazakh uprising was successfully quelled with Russian military assistance, and the Kremlin’s objective with the Ukrainian SMO was to deploy a similar operation to remove the Pro-West Zelensky regime in Kyiv.
Recall that within a week of the commencement of the SMO, a 40-mile convoy of Russian tanks, armoured vehicles, and towed artillery was within 30 kilometres of Kyiv. Why it ‘stalled’ there and wasn’t more comprehensively dealt with by Ukrainian forces is not clear, but by the end of March Reuters quoted a Pentagon source saying of the convoy: “I don't even know if it still exists at this point... They never really accomplished their mission.” And just like that, the world’s second largest military decided that it didn’t need to take the capital of its much weaker enemy after all.
Again, the 5-D chess masters excelled themselves with mental acrobatics, praising the Russian army for some sort of brilliant military feint, the reasons for which were never fully understood or explained.
Slavskiy alleges that a secret peace deal was signed but torn up by Kyiv as soon as Russian tanks retreated. This forced Russia to redeploy its troops to Donbas, marking the beginning of the end of the SMO and the beginning of the ‘not-war’, which is Slavskiy’s sardonic reference mocking the ban on Russian media from referring to the conflict as a ‘war’. Russia wasn’t seeking an all-out war, and that might explain its failure to convert its obvious military advantage into an early victory. Remember all the predictions by the Scott Ritters of the war commentariat about how Russia was going to rout Ukraine in weeks? And as the weeks turned to months, the final Russian sledgehammer was always about to fall but never did.
Slavskiy paints a dismal picture of Russian military ineptitude fostered by General Shoigu’s (Russian Minister of Defence) corrupt leadership. The strategic decision to place more reliance on mercenary groups like Wagner is one causal factor in the Wagner mutiny. The drawn-out battle for Bakhmut inflamed existing hostility between Prigozhin and Shoigu. Owing to a combination of infighting, rivalry and corruption, the Wagner Group found itself in the absurd situation in which its ammunition rations were severely restricted. All the while Prigozhin’s political ambitions were being reported far and wide, as was his undisguised contempt for Shoigu.
The stand-off between Prigozhin and Shoigu in May saw Prigozhin claiming that the Russian military was actually deliberately trying to strangle the Wagner Group because they had become too powerful. Ineptitude is one thing, but it’s hard to fathom a scenario in which the Russian military would cut off its nose to spite its face and risk losing a war because of a power struggle between senior military commanders and a PMC. And yet that, according to Slavskiy, is what took place in the lead-up to the mutiny.
Despite the withholding of supplies, the commanders of the Wagner Group were told that failing to capture Bakhmut would be regarded as treasonous. Bakhmut was successfully taken but the atmosphere was now ripe for recrimination. Slavskiy alleges that Prigozhin’s bitterness over the treatment of Wagner prompted a decision by Prigozhin to pull his Wagner unit out of Bakhmut. Slavskiy also alleges that the Ministry of Defence was directed to prevent this. Wagner troops were ambushed by a Russian army unit which was easily overcome.
The next act in Slavskiy’s recounting of this Russian revenge play opens with embarrassing incursions by Ukrainian troops into the Russian area of Belgorod in late May. Prigozhin visited the area and decided it was ripe for political exploitation. Posing as the defender of Belgorod, he ordered units of the Wagner Group into the city as part of a PR stunt to expose the Defence Ministry’s failure to protect its citizens. This move was met with an order by the Russian Defence minister for all PMCs to be placed under the control of the Ministry of Defence. Prigozhin vigorously rejected this power grab by Shoigu.
This is the moment at which Prigozhin began planning to strike a blow against Shoigu and the Ministry of Defence. Rallying support among commanders within his own Wagner Group as well as other PMCs was a relatively easy task given the scale of Shoigu’s unpopularity. Shoigu’s rise to power predates even that of Putin, and Slavskiy alleges that he is probably the most corrupt politician in the Kremlin.
Prigozhin then directed Wagner to move on Rostov-on-Don, a city of more than a million people. With that city under his control, he announced his plan to advance on Moscow to remove Shoigu. There are also reports that Ministry of Defence soldiers were unwilling to halt Wagner’s mission but also unable to owing to the army’s deployment in Ukraine. The bitter irony of the situation was that Prigozhin was now mounting his own SMO to remove Shoigu as the Minister of Defence. The gamble was that, as it became more apparent that Russia’s own military was unwilling or unable to halt the advance of the Wagner PMC, Shoigu would be so weakened that he would be forced out of his position in a palace coup. Of course, such a move has serious implications for Putin’s own authority.
As if things weren’t already surreal enough, with apparently no grown-ups in the Kremlin able to de-escalate the crisis, Lukashenko, the dictator in charge of Russia’s neighbouring client satellite state Belarus, stepped in to broker a deal. In other words, just when it looked as though Putin couldn’t get any weaker, Lukashenko performs his job for him by restoring order in Moscow and, as part of the deal, acquires a highly effective mercenary group, as the Wagnerites are exiled to Belarus.
Russian false flag or Putin with his pants down?
Slavskiy highlights Putin’s failure in all of this. His role is to mediate oligarchic spats to prevent them from escalating into precisely the sort of fiasco that unfolded in the last week of June. He failed, and has to be seen to be weaker for it. Not only that, but he opted to retain Shoigu, who has proved to be a liability, thus reinforcing the ossification of the Kremlin’s corrupt political system.
Was this apparent farce an ingenious false flag hatched by Putin and Prigozhin to wrong-foot Nato/Ukraine? If so, what were its tactical objectives and how have they been met? Until someone offers convincing answers to these questions, the Wagner mutiny has to be seen as a snapshot of Putin with his pants down. The punters who have placed large bets on Russia easily winning this war are doing mental gymnastics to explain that what looks an awful lot like a Russian own goal isn’t actually a Russian own goal.
In Part II, we’ll explore the comically tragic interpretations of the Great Freeset Putinistas and try to decipher potential meanings of the Ukraine war under a new international relations paradigm.
Hi not sure I want to read this article, a first, heard stuff by Roll and don't trust him on anything. Surprised you've embraced an anonymous.