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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Wagner Channels already announced another March of Justice™ in case YP ate shit.
Ended their message with "you better hope he's alive..."
Edit: Three separate sources confirmed Prigozhin and Utkin dead. Not only Wagnerites but also ultranationalists are calling for blood.
🍿
The Guardian reports Wagner allied media are reporting the plane was shot down by Russian air defenses.
My understanding is that they had their heavy weapons taken away and were moved out of Russia, maybe specifically to guard against this scenario. And some people signed contracts with the Ministry of Defense. I don't think that there's much of an intact independent Wagner organization in Russia right now.
If you were Wagner, would you have kept some guns for later? I would have
So, if you've got the population involved, I could believe that you could do an uprising with small arms, sure.
But this isn't "the Russian public is pissed to the point of fighting", but "some people in Wagner are pissed". Wagner's got military-trained people, but they aren't that big.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group
Largest number there was 50K, and I don't think that they're anywhere near that big any more, because they don't have convicts on short-term contracts any more. I think I remember seeing something like 5k in Belarus. Some Wagner people are in Africa or elsewhere. My impression is that the Kremlin wanted them out of Russia as an independent organization -- the people there had to sign on with the military, and I assume that they probably dispersed those. So, a lot of that isn't an internal threat.
I think that they weren't likely to pull off the first march if it came to a serious fight, and that was before a significant portion of the organization was dismantled, and people who agreed with them, like Surovikin, were removed. What was notable then was that a lot of the people in the public, local Russian military, didn't really care, weren't aiming to resist, and they had some level of support from the public, so maybe they could have just rolled into Moscow in some sort of a coup situation and supported that. But if their patrons are gone, I assume that that cannot happen either.
My guess is that if Putin is at risk, it's more because now he's more-dependent now on the military, and maybe someone in the military could perform a coup. He doesn't have Wagner as an independent force to play off against them. Lots of countries have leaders that have been deposed by the military if military leaders think that they can get a better deal with the leader gone.
I don't expect another uprising. I just think that prigoshin told himself: putin won't dare kill me, because then XYZ will happen.
XYZ might also just be a revenge murder, perhaps Putin, perhaps one of his mistresses, whatever...
I would expect him to have some contingencies. He must have believed that none would dare mess with him.