Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The Eastern Orthodox Church is pretty much hand in hand with Putin et al, and they're now, through media, telling people that soldiers who suffered fatal wounds are being resurrected on the battlefield in hopes that this will spur enlistment.

Estimates are that Russia has suffered between 300,000 to 450,000 soldiers lost in battle in Ukraine.

I'm really hoping the Russian people are smarter than this.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/panicked-russia-is-now-telling-reluctant-soldiers-they-will-be-resurrected

Some 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.

Poor, poor Vlady.

It seems like a good 20% of Wagner's forces have left Belarus unexpectedly, heading either to Africa or "on vacation" as they don't make as much money sitting on their hands in Belarus as they do when they're fighting.

Maybe Zelensky should make a call to Putin's Caterer for some "take-out"....

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1804692/vladimir-putin-wagner-group-fighters-belarus-ukraine-war


Now, there's an interesting twist on this. The leader of Belarus, Lukashenko, is a little pissed at Putin because Putin won't pay for the mercenaries to stay in Belarus. Lukashenko doesn't want to be footing the bill, so apparently he's bussing them back into Russia! This apparently started a couple of weeks ago.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1800413/wagner-fighters-kicked-out-of-belarus-lukashenko-putin-russia


Meanwhile, Poland has mostly sealed its border with Belarus. THIS is another area where Putin should be very concerned: if Wagner forces take it into their head to attack Poland, that's an attack on NATO and trips a very nasty response. Other countries around Belarus have moved troops closer to their border as they just don't trust Putin or Lukashenko. Can't say that I blame them.

While on the surface it's over, there's going to be lots going on for some time.

I vaguely heard about Russia wanting to get all its 'contractor' military units under the unified Russian command, i.e. absorb them into the regular army. This included Wagner. Which would essentially cause the organization to cease to exist. Bad news for them.

Several things are happening right now. First and foremost, Prighozin has called off the advance on Moscow, and is leaving Russia! He's going to Belarus, after having spent most of the day in talks with Lukashenko. Now, will he be safe there? Belarus has effectively been a transit point for most of the Russian military invading Ukraine. While I would expect Yevgeny to have a small armed guard, I don't think he's going to be allowed to keep a large armed guard. I believe he'll be vulnerable to assassination, especially in a country like Belarus. Whether he gets poisoned with a nerve agent or he throws himself out a high window, we shall see.

Prighozin's men have left Rostov, completely pulled out. I wonder if they absconded with any goodies from the military yards? Supposedly they were informed that Chechen fighters were coming to kick them out. Personally, I would have loved to have seen that fight. The Chechens are nasty, but honestly I don't know how good they are: as vaunted as they are, they suffered pretty high casualties in Ukraine. They're highly rated for committing atrocities on civilians, pretty much following Russian policy.

Russia also has some serious highway maintenance to do - they pulled out heavy earth-moving equipment and badly damaged the highway that lead to Moscow to make it harder for the Wagner forces to make their final push, which didn't happen.

Putin allegedly fled Moscow, according to tracking of the transponder on his private aircraft. Personally, I doubt he left, or if he did, that he left in that fashion. He also has seven armored and armed trains that he frequently uses to move around the country, they're almost indistinguishable from normal trains. He's been using those almost exclusively since the invasion began. I expect the plane was a decoy because he knows Wagner has aircraft and anti-air weapons. Putin was probably not far from his underground train platform, but I doubt he left Moscow, certainly not as early as his plane was reported leaving.

Wagner soldiers are being told that they can sign contracts with the Russian military. The big question, of course, is how many will do this. I doubt they're going to be too keen on fighting in the human wave style that the Russians have been practicing, and if they refuse to take orders, will it be the former Wagner soldiers shooting the Russian commanders - i.e. mutiny - or vice-versa?

There's also the issue of Wagner's operations in other countries. They have a large number of soldiers throughout Africa causing trouble on behalf of despots and despot-wannabees. Will this be a more or less formal declaration that Russia is involved in war in these countries? That's the convenient thing about mercenary armies, the Rodina can keep its hands apparently clean and say they are not involved. Well, things are going to get a bit more complicated. I think another likely scenario is some of the larger and better units just take their weapons, leave, and start up their own mercenary companies. Excuse me, Private Military Contractors.

Meanwhile, as I said previously, this is an excellent opportunity for the Ukrainian armed forces to press hard on the Russians and hopefully take back territory. They have just suffered both a loss of manpower and equipment with the Wagner forces leaving, and chaos/disruption with not only their leaving, but there will probably be a morale problem with some of those same forces coming back and being integrated into existing units.

IMO, if Prighozin stays in Belarus, he won't see the end of the year. One way or another he'll be dead. His best hope for survival is to get to an American embassy or military base and defect to the USA. And the Russians have apparently assassinated political enemies in the continental USA before, but I think that's his best odds.

Again, the regularly-updating BBC news feed on the situation:
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-66006142

Guess what! They're developing severe radiation sickness and related problems!

This obviously comes as no surprise to a lot of people. Russet and I were discussing it. Chernobyl popped its top - literally! - THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO! People under 30, meaning most of the people in the invading Russian Army and probably their direct commanders, weren't alive back then! And with Russian news suppression, it's probably not well-known among them. I can understand them not taking it seriously, whereas a 50 y/o might actually remember it happening and know that digging there is bad juju.

This is yet another major thing to be laid at the feet of Putin and his lackies. A lot of these people are going to die in pretty horrible ways, and it didn't need to happen.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/red-forest-chernobyl-radiation-sickness-b2330067.html

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/04/30/2153204/russian-forces-suffer-radiation-sickness-after-digging-trenches-and-fishing-in-chernobyl

What a story! The factory wants to expand production of ammo for Ukraine as they are consuming massive amounts of it. Except there's one problem. TikTok is building data centers around the world so countries can have their data hosted within their border.

Data centers require HUGE amounts of energy.

And there's none left for the factory to expand and increase production. Energy in Norway is allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, and TikTok got allocated before the factory did. And it will take some time for more energy to become available.

You just can't make shit like this up.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/28/energy-hungry-tiktok-data-centre-ukraine-ammunition-production-nammo-norway

Another big one.

Speaking of big: Russia's biggest mortar visits Ukraine - briefly, Russia sells government property in Berlin without knowing it, Mariupol falls, don't we all tape GPS receivers to our fighter jets?

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This is a long one, I should have split it but had a busy week.

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It hasn't been a slow news week, more like a week slow in the news that I wanted to write about. Just not enough for two postings, plus I needed to expand on some of the items.

More on the Moskva, more anti-air missile tanks, balloons, sheer stupidity, and other stuff
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I'm going to try to post these twice a week, Monday and Thursday, so they don't get too long.

BoJo gets banned, the significance of the loss of the Moskva, José Andrés gets bombed, and a steak house in Kentucky?!

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