I Did Not Have February 1917 on My 2023 Bingo Card...

History May Be ON ÞE MOVE Þis Morning...

To paraphrase Trotsky, “you may not be interested in rebellion, but rebellion is interested in you”. Shades of the Visconti Dukes of Milan hiring the Sforzas to run a more effective military force than the rest of their army:

Max Seddon in Riga 54 MINUTES AGO: ‘He went nuts’: how Putin’s caterer served a dish of high treason: ‘Covert warfare, corruption and poor governance have stoked the greatest threat to Russian president’s rule…. After Wagner paramilitaries took control of at least one Russian city on Saturday and began a “march of justice” on Moscow, the blowback from nine years of war in Ukraine threatened the very foundations of Putin’s state—with a problem of his own making…. Putin appeared shocked by his former caterer Prigozhin’s “treason” during a stern five-minute address to the nation…. [In] 2014… Prigozhin set up Wagner as a way for Russia to disguise its involvement in a slow-burning war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The group helped keep eastern Ukraine under Russian proxy control and, as its mission expanded, gave Russia plausible deniability for sorties as far away as Syria and Mozambique…. Prigozhin, who has known Putin since the future president visited his restaurant in St Petersburg in the 1990s, criticised the army in blistering terms, which led many in Moscow to suspect he had Putin’s approval….

Wagner’s forces were largely drawn from convicts after Putin personally signed tens of thousands of pardons. Moreover, as one of the few members of Russia’s elite not privately appalled by the war, Prigozhin’s belligerence helped him emerge as a hardline political figure. He urged Putin to adopt a state of “total war” modelled on North Korea, revelled in a murder Wagner militiamen appeared to commit with a sledgehammer and sent a replica of the weapon to a senior lawmaker so he could pose with it. His rise horrified many of Moscow’s elites, who feared he would be used to beat them into backing the war effort or simply seize their assets with Putin’s support. That dependence appears to have lulled Putin into a false sense of security. It convinced him that he could allow Wagner to undermine the defence ministry while keeping it under control…. An important trigger for Prigozhin’s uprising appears to have been Putin’s decision to back the defence ministry’s attempts to bring Wagner to heel…

As Paul Poast writes:

Paul Poast: ‘I have no idea WHAT exactly is happening in Russia. But WHY it is happening is pretty clear: it's what you can expect when a war goes badly. What exactly is Wagner doing?… A coup?… insurrection?… mutiny?… hardline bargaining tactic (by Prigozhin)?…