Wagner boss Prigozhin killed in plane crash in Russia
Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin killed in plane crash in Russia, with nine other people on board also dead
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Wait, am I reading this right that the plane was shot down by russian air defence? If this is backed up at all by anything like a russian source, then this will just further enforce option that russia can not be trusted to do anything it says and that putin is weak and threatened (both are true but I thought the kremlin would at least try to say/show otherwise).
How does russia keep messing up this bad? I am constantly shocked and awed.
I don't understand the logic here. When the putsch occured and then ignomously fizzled out, I saw Putin as weak for letting Pringles walk out with a (relative) slap on the wrist. Taking Prigo out of the picture was overdue. Obviously, anyone would feel threatened by an semi-autonomous mercenary army, so removing its leadership and breaking it up is just a rational course of action that probably should have been done sooner from that POV
Putin absolutely couldn't let Prigozhin walk, nobody could have. It's not just about the semi-autonomous mercenary army, if a government lets someone get away with an attempted coup d'état they'd effectively encourage others to give it their best shot as well because there was no effective punishment. Assassination is, well, a very Russian approach to the issue, but every government on this planet would have taken some form of action.
You are absolutely right. The US would have an armed coup leader strung up so fast. Maybe not assassination style, but there would most definitely be a quick trial and execution. If the US government couldn't catch the person, I imagine that assassination would be on the table.
I can't tell if this has turned into satire yet or if it needs one more reply to get there
It is the method used that has me baffled, if this happened as reported then they did not even try for any sort of plausible deniability.
I'm not really surprised. They got more and more open about their assassination attempts for years. They're not meant to covertly get rid of enemies, they're very public warnings to other dissidents. It's rule by fear.
Russian assassination are pretty clear. Anyone with half a brain can put the pieces together, but there is just enough plausible deniability that there cannot be direct retaliation legally or politically. It is a clear threat but just barely veiled enough to avoid legitimate retaliatory action via legal or international responses.
Do you think if Putin goes on the record during his next q&a saying "little Ehrmantrotsky here just got what he deserved lol" that there's any chance the RU 'legal' system is coming after him?? Shit I don't know how to post pics here yet but really
If they took him out before the deal was made sure, this soon after just shows weakness and a lack of credibility. They did the equivalent to getting into a bar fight, talking it out instead and then in front of every one sucker punching the other guy.
you know you don't have to forcibly try to interpret every event as a sign of Russian weakness
Truly. The mental gymnastics are impressive sometimes.
They were losing a war to a bunch of tractors and their flagship was sunk by a country without a navy.
It's not Russian weakness, it's Russian stupidity.
Didn’t realize those billions in aid were for tractors.
They stopped Russia with tractors.
Now they're pushing them back with real gear.
Jokerfication: when you kind of pity someone for being this propagandized, but laugh at them because it's pretty funny
Yes... I am the propagandized one.
Not the rural poor being marched off to die for half the price of a lada they'll never receive for an oligarch's pride.
All I can say is: Please, PLEASE! Make sure they keep marching.
You claim they started with tractors. This is utter nonsense; the AFU started the war as a legitimate military, especially after it took the decade following the Minsk agreements to arm up in anticipation of this war.
You also claim they are pushing Russia back despite the front not moving appreciably in the past year, even during the latest vaunted counteroffensive.
Remember, libs dont know anything about the context pre-war. It was all Putins desire to conquer ukraine.
You claim they started with tractors. This is utter nonsense; the AFU started the war as a legitimate military, especially after it took the decade following the Minsk agreements to arm up in anticipation of this war.
Russia used to call itself the 2nd strongest military on Earth.
Now they're clearly the 2nd strongest military in Ukraine. And they're sliding down.
You might not understand this, but they literally only survived because everyone was terrified of them, 'Crazy Ivan' who snaps and does something stupid.
That illusion SHATTERED with the failure to take Kyiv, it shattered and Europe's fear turned to rage, rage at being intimidated for decades by a clearly broken joke of a power.
Until last year Russia wasn't worth our interest, there was nothing there of value or threat, it was a far away, annoying country but it was someone else's problem.
Now, Europe wants to watch them burn for fun.
If they hadn't invaded Ukraine they would have been able to hold this illusion for decades more while the oligarchs continued to rob the country to deposit into British banks, but now, Russia is a threat that needs to be dealt with.
Fortunately, it's not much of a threat, and this shouldn't take too long, the only reason it's taking this long right now is because we can only help indirectly through Ukraine.
But Russia is stupid, hopefully they'll do something Russian and pick a fight with the rest of NATO, because that's just what they do.
'ukraine is totally winning' he continues to say as 33% of ukraine remains occupied by russia
pushin em back 15 miles is good for you?
Do you know how many people pointlessly died for nothing?
were? so you admit that Russia is winning?
besides, this is not what this thread is about, go cope to someone who cares
No, they were losing to tractors, and Moskva was sunk without a navy.
Now they're getting real gear and training to play.
The only thing Russia ever wins are Darwin awards. Fucking being proud of almost hurting a country a fraction of your size right next door, like the US being proud of conquering Ottawa.
Say hi to those F-16s for me.
Say hi to those F-16s for me
We're literally dumping decades old hardware on them just so we can keep justify buying more F-35s.
I agree.
And I'm fine with this.
We built those to fight evil Russians, they should get their chance.
We built those to fight evil Russians
We built those to fight evil Russians
At what point do you realize that you have transformed into the jingoistic goobers who were cheerleading the Iraq War during the W. years?
ah, there's the fascist lurking within every liberal. you should follow your leader
“Evil Russians.” Jesus Christ. As if the West did not rehabilitate European fascists immediately after WW2 and end up on the side of imperialism in every conflict around the world for the rest of the century and beyond. Many of which they themselves instigated. Get a fucking grip.
Say hi to those F-16s for me
I'm sure they'll be just as effective as the Leopards, the ghost of kieyiev will destroy the entire Russian army
They don't need a ghost of Kyiv, they know the ultimate weakness of all Russians:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/13hcf63/ukrainians_allegedly_dropped_bottles_of_vodka_at/
You guys are going to suffer, and I would feel bad if you hadn't started this whole nightmare.
the lib cannot comprehend people outside of Russia disagreeing with their world viewyou guys
Fucking being proud of almost hurting a country a fraction of your size right next door, like the US being proud of conquering Ottawa.
Look up the US attack on Grenada
The US could never conquer Ottowa
No, because unlike Russia, Canadians have balls.
The enemy is both strong and weak at the same time. Russians are simultaneously cowardly, repulsive and primitive (and evil, according to you), while also being barely held at bay because their innate savage brutality lets them ignore casualties, but like in an evil way, not the good heroic way we ignore casulaties when we drive our tanks headfirst into minefields. Gotcha.
Losing multiple cities to a tiny domestic invading force of mercenaries after completely losing control of said force due to lack of command discipline, and finally only being able to force them to disband by threatening the families of the mercenaries involved isn’t exactly a sign of strength, though, is it? It’s not exactly what we’d expect of a professional modern military.
It would be like if Erik Prince took his Blackwater army and started marching on Washington, capturing towns along the way, and the US army was helpless to stop them until the American government threatened to hunt down and kill the family members of Blackwater mercenaries.
That would be considered unusual, and not really a sign of political or military strength.
If Erik Prince marched Blackwater through some American cities and -- instead of sending the U.S. military to start a hot war on its own soil -- American leadership pressured Prince and Blackwater to go home, would you be calling the president weak for not turning Virginia into a battlefield?
would you be calling the president weak for not turning Virginia into a battlefield?
I would think American leadership completely dysfunctional if they allowed that situation to occur. If they did not have enough command authority to trust that the US military wouldn’t confront Prince with immediate and overwhelming force when ordered, the US would be a laughingstock. The scenario is borderline unimaginable in a developed country with anything resembling a modern political infrastructure.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Russia. I was originally trained as a Sovietologist, when that was still a thing you could be an -ologist of. I could talk for hours about strategic weapons systems and Russian prep for NBC warfare and what the politics in the Kremlin were like under the troika approach and why the fascistic tendencies of Putin in rejecting Russian political history in favor of personal enrichment and plundering the nation have irrevocably broken Russian politics.
But that’s for another day. Putin responded the way dictators in developing nations do, not like someone who actually has command and control over their modern military forces. I mean, it’s a Russian tradition to threaten the families of people who publicly disagree with leadership. In the US, the forces brought to bear against Blackwater’s attempted putsch would have been so overwhelming that his own men would have arrested him. But as much as I hate Blackwater and think Prince should probably be in prison for war crimes, their cadre was recruited from a different class of people than Wagner.
the US military wouldn’t confront Prince with immediate and overwhelming force
You realize that's the worst-case scenario of the incident we're talking about, right? A sane leader would want to avoid starting a pitched battle in their backyard at all costs, and that's entirely independent of speculation about control over the military.
The scenario is borderline unimaginable in a developed country with anything resembling a modern political infrastructure.
We had a half-assed putsch of our own not even three years ago.
A sane leader would want to avoid starting a pitched battle…
A competent government would have prevented it from occurring. The IS government is hardly a model of efficiency, and that goes double for the military. However, it doesn’t happen here because it’s not something that’s organizationally enabled. Blackwater would be slaughtered in hours, for instance. I absolutely hate Blackwater, I think Prince is a fascist just like Prigo who would absolutely pull a Wagner if he thought he could. He knows he’s better off using bribes to gain power and wealth.
And I wouldn’t call J6 a putsch if we’re using that term in context to describe a military invasion by heavily armed forces gone rogue. But even if we do, the point we are discussing is that it is characteristic of a crap-tier government to be unable to put it down. Trump left the US government almost unable to put down a riot that he invoked and that consisted of a few thousand angry but mostly unarmed rednecks. Again, it was on a different scale, but once a more competent government was in place we saw a thousand arrests, not a threat to kill the families of the J6 rioters. It was a planned violent coup, but the plan was absolute shit because the planners are absolute idiots.
You are right, I don't have to.
It's more like taking it outside then shooting them and their buddies in the face. Message sent
then this will just further enforce option that russia can not be trusted to do anything it says and that putin is weak and threatened
If they let him live, they're weak. If they kill him, they're weak.
During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime's atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn't go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
The USSR is not the russian federation and the later is an oligarchy. Why do you think such cold war arguments (that over simplify) have some sort of play in this conflict?
I also noticed you skated right on by the "can not be trusted" part of my quoted text.
Do you think I'm talking about the USSR, or about how American propaganda cultivates the mentality of "they are wrong no matter what they do"?
Your entire argument was about the soviet union and its cold war relationship with the US. I have had it up to my nipples here on how fixated you all are on the US, I am not from the US, I don't like the US, I am sick of somehow having to explain to people who apparently think the US is evil but simultaneously think the world revolves around it.
WE GET IT YOU ARE AMERICAN AND YOU ARE DIFFERENT BUT LIKE MOST AMERICANS CAN NOT STAND WHEN SOMETHING IS NOT ABOUT YOU.
The quote is from "inventing reality by michael parenti". the cold war is an EXAMPLE, the authors POINT is that media will interpret literally ANY EVENT in a bad way to make enemies look morally inferior and bad.
Are socialist states immune from this fallacy?
But I am not media, the post I made is my honest take, and in this case the media stating this news is wagner and the russian state. How does this wall of text help me understand the apparent flaw in my statement?
They are suggesting that you have learned to reason backwards from certain conclusions.
Nah connect the dots by yourself, you cant be this unironically oblivious.
I can and very much am. Please put some effort into this.
Do you know what an example is? What about an analogy?
Why do you ask? I think you replied to the wrong post
If this is backed up at all by anything like a russian source
The Guardian is reporting this:
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, but Prigozhin’s longstanding feud with the military and the armed uprising he led in June would give ample motive to the Russian state for revenge. Media channels linked to Wagner quickly suggested that a Russian air defence missile had shot down the plane.
Yes, I am hoping we get more info from anyone else then Wagner group soon.
The capitol riot was a threat to our precious democracy! / prigozhin’s coup attempt shows how weak putler is!
Tbf both were a sign of a troubled state but the Wagner mutiny was waaaaaaaaayyy more serious than Jan 6.
What? I am lost. Are you making some sort of US connection here?
The implication is that both events were ineffective at achieving anything meaningful, other than tasing one’s balls to death and getting shot by an anti aircraft missile
Sorry, how are ether events ineffective or not meaningful? You are still talking about one and we are all here talking about the other.
One side uses its legal system to deal with an institutional threat, while the other performatively offers an olive branch and then stabs them on the back. Not quite the same. One side smells a lot like a mafia
The USA has always been a fascist country (just ask Native Americans and descendants of slaves). If you think slapping a few leaders on the wrist is going to stop fascism here, I would invite you to have a look at the history of Weimar Germany.
This is true, but I was answering to a comment implying an equivalence between the indictment of the traitors in the US and a the extrajudicial plane crash in Russia. If instead of getting a slap on the wrist they were being thrown out of windows at someone's whim, I would not feel more reassured about the state of the US.
Russia decapitation their own PMC org that tried to coup them does not mean they cannot be negotiated with
No but the agreement being broken that was created though Belarus does.
Minsk I and II
Sorry I do want to talk about the other broken treaties but I think you replied to the wrong comment.
I think the implied argument is that if Putin is untrustworthy and if you're implying that means that he can't be trusted to comply with agreements made with Ukraine, then we need to look at historic agreements between Russia and Ukraine. Two recent agreements between them include Minsk I and II. Ukraine, not Russia, violated both.
Oh I was not under that impression, both in my memory russia violated.
Both sides might have violated the first Minsk agreement. As to who violated it first? My understanding was that Ukraine did. Eventually it broke down. As for the second, it depends whether you consider an omission as bad as an action. Ukraine violated Minsk II by ignoring it, which led to the SMO: https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/frustrated-refusals-give-russia-security-guarantees-implement-minsk-2-putin-recognizes-pseudo. Interestingly, France and Germany were part of these talks and officials have stated that they only ever intended to delay a war to better arm Ukraine; i.e. the NATO/Ukrainian side never intended to honour the agreement from the beginning.
What did Ukraine do to violate the agreement? From all I can read there is not much short of re arming with nukes that Ukraine could even do to break the agreement (Minsk I). And what do you mean ignoring the second one?
The Minsk II thing is in the link:
More than anything else, it was the refusal of Ukraine to implement the provisions of Minsk 2 – especially the provision that would give the predominantly Russian-speaking regions a special constitutional status – that caused Russia to threaten military action against Ukraine. Time after time in recent weeks, Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov made it clear in meetings and press conferences that the key to resolving the situation in and around Ukraine was the full implementation of Minsk 2, and many hoped the Normandy format meeting of representatives of the leaders of the four countries in Berlin on Feb. 10, two weeks after they had met in Paris for eight hours, would produce enough progress toward the full implementation of Minsk 2 to ward off the threat of a Russian invasion.
Yeah that is the russian statement but reading the agreement leaves me thinking that is not 100% on the level. They seem to think they where not an involved party in the agreement and did not have abide by it. Here is a translation of the agreement, if you have a better version let me know.
https://horlogedelinconscient.fr/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Minsk-2-Full-text-UNIAN.pdf
I feel like Lukashenko will probably understand
Oh I am sure he is just fine with it, but it does not really give any confidence to anyone entering into any agreement with russia with a 3rd nation brokering (say a ceasefire).
This take perfectly embodies how libs only care about aesthetics.
These large perfectly monolithic groups of scary people that you don't like.
I am lost and this is a reply to my own statement. May I ask you to expand on what a "lib" is, how I erred to be labelled as one, and finally how it is you think I care about aesthetics?
Can't speak for anyone else but I may be able to answer this.
A lib is a liberal, someone who is pro-capital, not an anti-capitalist (very little overlap with how liberal tends to be defined in ordinary language in the US). Optics, relating to how people see the event, is idealism not materialism. Liberalism is idealist, unlike Marxism, which is materialist.
The dig at liberalism and aesthetics is likely a critique of the implication that what this looks like has much to do with the material reality. That's an aesthetic argument. It doesn't matter what this looks like because the optics don't affect the material relations. Someone who elevates the optics at the expense of the material relations is making an idealist, likely a liberal argument.
Hence the comment embodying an aesthetic argument of the kind that liberals often make.
Ok, thank you, but what in my comment was at the expense of the material relations?
You're welcome. I'm glad you're taking this in the spirit in which it's intended. When Marxists criticise idealism, the target is the liberal world outlook, not the individual.
By implication, really. Focusing on what people think of Russia's/Putin's trustworthiness rather than on it's record or the factors that would keep it honest, so to speak. It's Ukraine that violated Minsk, apparently prompted by France, Germany, and 'NATO'. Looking at the optics, that seems a little more duplicitous than assassinating someone who attempted a coup (if this was an assassination and if what happened before can be called a coup).
Would I trust a single person, e.g. Putin to uphold an international agreement? It doesn't matter. It's not a one-man show. War is expensive and the longer it goes on for the more expensive it becomes, in support as well as the cost of arms, soldiers, etc.
Nobody has to trust Putin. An agreement would be maintained because material factors require it to be maintained. What westerners think it's by-the-by. (I'm assuming you're not Russian as you were asking about Russian sources—I'm not asking you to confirm or deny as I don't want you to dox yourself; I'm just trying to give an answer that makes sense from the available evidence.)
Tank(ie) you for the detailed explanation!
Time for some self-reflection.
Please guide me on this, other wise these are just vague statements that make us both look silly.
You're pissing in the wind trying to get anything from a Tankie unfortunately.
Jumps in, stirs shit, refuses to elaborate, leaves.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1694397010680361239?s=20
Wings generally don't just fall off without some kind of help.