The Prighozen Plane Crash
Aug. 27th, 2023 12:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneSome more info and additional ruminations. Many of said ruminations are from synthesizing several articles that I've read from good sources and applying other things that I've studied over the years, so no URLs.
Supposedly his death has been confirmed by DNA analysis and formally announced by Putin. He was known to also use body doubles and has previously had his death announced.
It's going to be interesting times for Russia's military. Prighozin's second in command and his CFO were also on the plane, and obviously are now dead. So Wagner has been somewhat decapitated. So you have a few thousand men running around with military hardware who are no longer being paid at the moment, some in battle zones in Africa (I think all of the ones in Ukraine have been pulled out). They're pretty much maintaining the peace of a dictator in several places in Africa. Things could become pretty turbulent on that continent with the mercenaries in a bit of disarray.
Putin seems to think they'll just accept being folded into the Russian army and become a detached unit. I can't see that working well. They were being treated as ugly stepchildren in Ukraine, why should they think they'd be treated any different now in the regular army? They also demonstrated they are better fighters than the troops the Russian army are using in Ukraine, so do they have a lot to fear if Putin starts threatening them? Now, Putin still has a large air force (minus a supersonic bomber or two destroyed by drones recently, which Wagner does not, that is definitely a threat. But they also have small unit mobility, which can definitely cause problems for Putin.
Putin, meanwhile, has caused problems on his own. Anyone among his kleptocratic billionaire cadre have known that if you're disloyal to him personally, your life is hanging by a thread and he's wielding scissors. This is going to further dilute information flowing to Putin - they're all going to become yes-men bobbleheads. They know know he won't hesitate to murder his inner circle. Prighozin made a classic mistake that anyone with a military or serious political/historical knowledge should have learned the lesson of: if you strike a king, you must kill him. You can't carry usurpation half-way. It's a zero-sum game: you win, or you're going to die. Perhaps Prighozin didn't think he was attacking Putin, that's what he claimed - he said he wanted to remove the head of the military because he wasn't adequately supporting and supplying his men in Ukraine. But he rolled military units on Moscow and captured an army command center. There's no way Putin could not see that except as a coup attempt, and there's only one answer in Putin's response box for that.
I believe this is called The Dictator's Trap, where the longer they are in power, the poorer quality the information they receive. Mao had this problem with the Great Famine. No one wanted to report that the harvests were failing, so they reported bumper crops up the chain and he never knew in advance that a problem was at hand. Then people started dying en mass.
So now Putin is going to be getting even worse information than before. He's got a mercenary army that is now headless that I don't think he's ever going to be able to control. Wagner was a one-removed dirty deeds doer for Russia, if Putin somehow does take them in to the Russian military, they'll no longer have the once-removed deniability that they aren't directly working for Putin/Russia. What little world/political prestige Russia had before Prighozen's death would diminish a lot more.
When I first posted about Prighozen's death, I mentioned missiles and a Russian military air defense unit. I based that on early reports, and those are now apparently dismissed as inaccurate. People reported hearing two loud bangs, then seeing the aircraft struggle to maintain altitude, so it would appear that somehow bombs were secreted aboard his plane. And the plane was a Wagner business jet, as identified by the tail number. I saw a video of the plane diving into its crash, it was trailing black smoke. I also saw a transponder segment that showed the pilot struggling to maintain altitude. It lost a thousand feet of altitude over a few second, the pilot tried to pull it up and succeeded briefly, then it lost that thousand feet again, then went into the final vertical dive. Sounds to me like a possible loss of elevator control, that's pure speculation on my part.
The existence of the video of the plane's final dive is interesting in and of itself. Either it just happened to be that someone heard the two bangs high overhead and started recording video immediately and caught the plane's descent, or someone was expecting the event. Considering Occam's Razor and that this is Russia and you just can't get independent accurate information out of there, flip a coin as to which one is what happened.
Oh, and Ukraine has denied any involvement in the crash.
I think it's a net win for Ukraine as I don't think there will be any further Wagner involvement in Ukraine. Native Russian forces are a lot less effective than they were. Whether Russian forces will continue using prisoners for human wave fodder when the regular Russian forces are also pretty demoralized, we'll see if it starts happening again.
Interesting times. As I said before, this was the inevitable result of Prighozin's march on Moscow. And the next people who try to take down Putin now know to use truly overwhelming force to do it if they want to live.
Supposedly his death has been confirmed by DNA analysis and formally announced by Putin. He was known to also use body doubles and has previously had his death announced.
It's going to be interesting times for Russia's military. Prighozin's second in command and his CFO were also on the plane, and obviously are now dead. So Wagner has been somewhat decapitated. So you have a few thousand men running around with military hardware who are no longer being paid at the moment, some in battle zones in Africa (I think all of the ones in Ukraine have been pulled out). They're pretty much maintaining the peace of a dictator in several places in Africa. Things could become pretty turbulent on that continent with the mercenaries in a bit of disarray.
Putin seems to think they'll just accept being folded into the Russian army and become a detached unit. I can't see that working well. They were being treated as ugly stepchildren in Ukraine, why should they think they'd be treated any different now in the regular army? They also demonstrated they are better fighters than the troops the Russian army are using in Ukraine, so do they have a lot to fear if Putin starts threatening them? Now, Putin still has a large air force (minus a supersonic bomber or two destroyed by drones recently, which Wagner does not, that is definitely a threat. But they also have small unit mobility, which can definitely cause problems for Putin.
Putin, meanwhile, has caused problems on his own. Anyone among his kleptocratic billionaire cadre have known that if you're disloyal to him personally, your life is hanging by a thread and he's wielding scissors. This is going to further dilute information flowing to Putin - they're all going to become yes-men bobbleheads. They know know he won't hesitate to murder his inner circle. Prighozin made a classic mistake that anyone with a military or serious political/historical knowledge should have learned the lesson of: if you strike a king, you must kill him. You can't carry usurpation half-way. It's a zero-sum game: you win, or you're going to die. Perhaps Prighozin didn't think he was attacking Putin, that's what he claimed - he said he wanted to remove the head of the military because he wasn't adequately supporting and supplying his men in Ukraine. But he rolled military units on Moscow and captured an army command center. There's no way Putin could not see that except as a coup attempt, and there's only one answer in Putin's response box for that.
I believe this is called The Dictator's Trap, where the longer they are in power, the poorer quality the information they receive. Mao had this problem with the Great Famine. No one wanted to report that the harvests were failing, so they reported bumper crops up the chain and he never knew in advance that a problem was at hand. Then people started dying en mass.
So now Putin is going to be getting even worse information than before. He's got a mercenary army that is now headless that I don't think he's ever going to be able to control. Wagner was a one-removed dirty deeds doer for Russia, if Putin somehow does take them in to the Russian military, they'll no longer have the once-removed deniability that they aren't directly working for Putin/Russia. What little world/political prestige Russia had before Prighozen's death would diminish a lot more.
When I first posted about Prighozen's death, I mentioned missiles and a Russian military air defense unit. I based that on early reports, and those are now apparently dismissed as inaccurate. People reported hearing two loud bangs, then seeing the aircraft struggle to maintain altitude, so it would appear that somehow bombs were secreted aboard his plane. And the plane was a Wagner business jet, as identified by the tail number. I saw a video of the plane diving into its crash, it was trailing black smoke. I also saw a transponder segment that showed the pilot struggling to maintain altitude. It lost a thousand feet of altitude over a few second, the pilot tried to pull it up and succeeded briefly, then it lost that thousand feet again, then went into the final vertical dive. Sounds to me like a possible loss of elevator control, that's pure speculation on my part.
The existence of the video of the plane's final dive is interesting in and of itself. Either it just happened to be that someone heard the two bangs high overhead and started recording video immediately and caught the plane's descent, or someone was expecting the event. Considering Occam's Razor and that this is Russia and you just can't get independent accurate information out of there, flip a coin as to which one is what happened.
Oh, and Ukraine has denied any involvement in the crash.
I think it's a net win for Ukraine as I don't think there will be any further Wagner involvement in Ukraine. Native Russian forces are a lot less effective than they were. Whether Russian forces will continue using prisoners for human wave fodder when the regular Russian forces are also pretty demoralized, we'll see if it starts happening again.
Interesting times. As I said before, this was the inevitable result of Prighozin's march on Moscow. And the next people who try to take down Putin now know to use truly overwhelming force to do it if they want to live.
