Wagner Group soldiers are well-trained to identify those attired in NATO clothing.
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Dmitry Rogozin may be in some trouble in Russia
- Thread starter JournalBot
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Getting captured by Ukraine sounds like the safest option for him.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Well their generals seem to have pretty swelled heads so their is likely an antecedent for those sizes.
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Agreed with all of that, except he was such a fuckup at Roscosmos that if I were in Putin's shoes, I'm not sure I'd want Dmitri's "contribution". Unless his "contribution" is to be a high-level Russian who got killed and must be avenged.
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Agreed, those preferring to avoid Twitter for reasons, might want to check the Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@russianmediamonitor/videos
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He fell from grace, and hard. He failed as the head of Russian military rocket development (It seems to me his tenure oversaw the clusterfuck of the nuclear-powered missile), after which he was assigned to Roscosmos because they had almost nothing new to develop and all he had to do was make sure that program ran smoothly.
That didn't work out so well for him, either.
Fundamentally, I think he IS an abject fool. He's not a politician. He's a mid-level mob boss, who wants to work up the ranks to get closer to the real power brokers, and thinks PR (which in this case is Russian political ass kissing) is the way to do that. These stunts he's doing isn't to impress the average Russian. They're tying to show that he still has something "important" to contribute to the regime.
If he was any lower in the pecking order, he'd probably have been disappeared, because he's a fucking embarrassment to the Russian government.
So this is all show, and no substance.
I expect that this photo was just more "hey, look at me! I'm helping!" bullshit propaganda and that Rogozin has stayed far away from the actual fighting areas where a stunt like that could get himself killed by his own people, or, given how well Russia is doing in Eastern Ukraine, captured or killed by the Ukrainians.
I just wonder how long the Russian patience for his antics will last and, mid-level mob boss or no, be invited to try on some concrete shoes (or be served a cup of novichok tea) just to shut him up, since he seems incapable of staying put, contrite and silent long enough to let the irritation he's caused the Russian leadership to heal up a bit.
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It's an attempt to shift all the blame for those failures onto Rogozin himself. Serves the dual purpose of shielding anyone else to blame for the failures, as well as giving Prigozhin more bile to spew so his audience can get mad along with him.
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We do know the community has trolls who have the editorial and critical thinking skills of a bruised and squishy banana, though.
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IIRC, all those descriptions were worthless, and only you could see them. There was never anything others see but the up/down voting.
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That's clearly a photoshop! Here, I found the original, unedited version:Reposting this image to brighten everyone's morning:
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Prigozhin is clearly setting himself up to be a big player once Putin is out of the picture. When Putin finally kicks it, Russian succession should certainly be an interesting process.
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Certainly a civil war will be interesting, as various factions attempt to out-potato all the others. Whose rickety, crappy equipment operated by incompetents will be less potato than the challengers?
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Neither. That's patriotic hero stuff right there, offing someone who has been so damaging to Russia for years.
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Given their performance in Ukraine and Syria, I wonder if that's the only thing they're "well-trained" in.
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Under suicide, obviously. As in "the victim shot himself in the back of the head, five times".
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Just as long as Kadyrov ends up hanging upside down in the center of Grozny to be used as a pinata by every Chechen with a stick.
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Never mind the Western origins of all that tacticool gear he's cosplaying in, what's really impressive is the mismatched ammo he's carrying. He's got MP5 (9mm) and FN SCAR (looks like the 7.62x51 version) magazines on that vest. What a noob load out, everyone knows shotty snipes is the way to go on the Donbas map pack.
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"The suicide weapon was found seventy-eight meters away in a refuse pile, cleverly concealed to mislead investigators."
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TASS: "After shooting himself in the back of his head, repeatedly, the suicide victim then fell out of his basement window, seventeen times, before finally succumbing to sustained injuries".
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Authorities have been unable to determine how or why he then proceeded to run over himself with his car.
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"And proceeded to hit himself with a sledgehammer five times after rigor had set in"
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Was that after or before "went to murder several of his close associates in different parts of the town"? I always mix up the order it happened in – man, writing for TASS is hard...
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They can't afford novichok or concrete these days. Now inconvenient people just get to briefly inspect the outside of a high story window, or a few dozen steps in rapid succession.
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Easiest disposal method these days is to put them on guard duty at a munitions depot in southern Kherson.
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That only became the easiest method once Chornobaivka became unavailable for continued disposal of Russian assets last month.
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The more stories I read about Russian leadership in-fighting, one-up-manship and craven appeal to physical violence, the more they sound like Orks. Bluster, wonton disregard for the live’s of their own people, and manic power grabs. It is rather uncanny.
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Extremely untrue, and so typical of the misinformation on Russia; Prigozhin isn't called "Putin's Chef" because he's close now, or because he cooks up things for Putin, but because it's mocking the fact that he first came into the Kremlin's orbit by running restuarants in St Petersburg 20 odd years ago.
And the Wagner Group isn't new to Ukraine but has been fighting in the Donbass from the start, traceably back to 2014 for certain. They were also used, like Blackwater in Iraq, and Chinese PMCs in Africa, as extra and deniable force in Syria by Russia previously... however Wagner's role in Ukraine is decreasing, as Russia tries to organise more efficiently their integrated armed forces to cope with poor performance so far in an all out war; professional armed forces that as a whole are deeply hostile to Wagner's thugs and criminals recruited straight from jail, thugs that have nothing greater to offer than manpower.
Which Prigozhin's enemies are quite happy to see get chewed up; the idea that his criticism is new is ill informed; he's widely hated within the wider Kremlin, and has virtually no allies. Listen to an actual expert explain his deeply unsupported position with the Russian elite. I find it especially sad that Ars Technica tries to repeat this claim, because I've linked to this exact podcast to discuss Russian criminality, and North Korean forgeries before.
Secondly, there's no such thing as "carte blanche" to act outside of Putin's rule either in Ukraine and definitely not Russia itself.
The actual "chef" of the illegal war against Ukraine is General Sergei Surovikin. And Russia's chain of command specifically has the Wagner Group under Surovikin. In practice, Prigozhin can say no to requests from the General Staff, but any attempt to do so leads to Wagner mercenaries strangely not getting support from the professional forces; such as when the US in Syria asked if Russia wanted to claim the people attacking them, and Russia said "Nope. Do what you want with them" and stood back and let them get slaughtered. The idea that Prigozhin is not just a major player, but has carte blanche to do what he likes in an active warzone is ridiculous.
Actual Russian strategy for the winter campaign is terror attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure... another wave, with missiles Russia was supposed to have run out of started two hours ago or so in fact... but the Wagner Group of course has no airforce, and thus no real involvement in the shape of the campaign which will not involve much troop movements on either side; Prigozhin is reduced to throwing troops pointlessly at small Ukrainian villages in a desperate attempt to continue to justify his military involvement.
Those much discussed "suicide drones" used against power stations? They're coming from Iran, not Wagner. Which requires sanction busting economic co-operation... none of which Prigozhin has any fingers in either. Wagner does have business assets, including the catering contracts for the Russian army (that chef joke again), but it's not involved with Gazprom or any of the major players that have the sort of clout that allows buying their way around Russia's justified international isolation. Very few nations are queuing up to sell sanction busting high tech weaponry in exchange for second hand Russian K-Rations.
Which is also why Rogozin is desperately flailing around for relevance too; without Roscosmos behind him, he doesn't have a valuable power base, and is no longer useful to Putin. Indeed he proved he wasn't to be trusted with that still valuable industry, which is why he was moved out by Putin. Are people seriously going to try and claim that Prigozhin is untouchable where as Rogozin, in effective control of Russia's entire space program was not?
Meanwhile in Russia itself, it's frankly laughable to think Prigozhin can dictate to either the G(R)U or the FSB what he's allowed to do. I'm not even going to bother sourcing that claim, because to anyone with any real experience of Russia, it should be axiomatic of the frankly laughable understanding of Russian civil society often on display at Ars Technica. Who could forget the mass support here for claiming Putin would invade Belarusia next, when Belarus is Russia's closest ally in the war?
Let's get this completely out of the way; what is happening in Ukraine is despicable, entirely the fault of the Russian elite and Putin in particular, and pointing out that Russia isn't quite the basket case people want to believe isn't justifying anything that is being done right now, which is an immoral crime whether Prigozhin has his grubby fingers involved in it or not. But the sheer level of ignorance and willingness to believe anything if it fits with the wider political narrative of certain reporters and posters here is honestly shocking... especially as, when all of this is over, we're going to have to reintegrate all of the decent Russians who do exist, as well as deal with the Kleptocracy that likely still will too, back into the international system.
If nothing else, Private Military Corporations will still be around. Blackwater is now Constellis. China has PSCs as well as PMCs. Dr Galeotti again on the challenges of what comes after the war.
And this kind of infantile, jingoistic, frankly verging on racist simplicity is going to make securing peace even harder. We should have learned this after the Treaty of Versailles. We did briefly learn it with the Marshall Plan. Germany and Japan were brought back from far worse crimes by more nuanced thinking and selfless support. We failed to learn it again in 1991, when the kind of libertarian nonsense so often seen in these articles led to the IMF plan to help Russia's kleptocrats loot the country dry... and Russians today remember. It's part of the explanation for the rise of the "Strong Man" Putin in fact.
When Putin is gone, are we going to refuse to learn and still treat it all like a simplistic James Bond storyline again?
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Presumably because the author includes English translations and any other sources would be in Russian?
That at least 2 other people also can't figure that out is... something.
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No offence, but the man is a pig. Check some of his statements after the war started. In a normal World he would be prosecuted for War crimes. He's lucky if he gets out alive out of this, anyway.
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The idea that the Marshall Plan was some altruistic project to "rehabilitate" Germany and Japan postwar is laughable. The American public would have happily allowed their former enemies to starve to death in the rubble of their bombed out cities. Luckily for them, the Soviet Union was the new boogeyman, and Japan and Germany had to be put back together to act as bulwarks against Soviet expansion. The fact that this worked out well for all parties is serendipitous, at best.
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There's also a huge emphasis on posturing. For example, the Chechen Tiktok brigades, who are known far and wide for the fierceness they proclaim to have in various short Internet videos. The fact that these are filmed far, far from the danger they claim to be in the midst of, is not important. It's not important that everyone knows the Kadryovites are merely barking, it only matters that they bark louder than all the other dogs.
It is a weird weird thing. In a society where reality is buried deep in bullshit, appearances are the next best thing. Who the hell knows if you're capable of following through on a threat, but you make the threat anyway, in order to get the idea out there that you can. Nobody can call you on it.
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VividVerism
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
"Tsar's Wolves"
Well, it's good to see they're not even pretending, anymore.
"Rogozin, at least publicly, has yet to respond to the criticisms."
As a disgraced former official on Putin's bad side, considering Prigozhin's reputation, I don't blame him. I wouldn't have responded to the criticisms in his position, either.
Well, it's good to see they're not even pretending, anymore.
"Rogozin, at least publicly, has yet to respond to the criticisms."
As a disgraced former official on Putin's bad side, considering Prigozhin's reputation, I don't blame him. I wouldn't have responded to the criticisms in his position, either.
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