Putin’s Chef Cooks His Own Goose

By
Malcolm Evans
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50
1793

According to Al Jazeera, the astonishing decision by Yevgeny Prigozhin, commander of the Russian mercenary army, The Wagner Group, to withdraw forces from the Ukraine frontline and advance them on Moscow was in retaliation to Kremlin moves to rein in his power.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, reported to be a convicted criminal who, upon release from prison, in the 1990s, reinvented himself as a chef and caterer who went on to cater events in the Kremlin, which earned him the nickname “Putin’s Chef.” Fast forward and Prigozhin emerges as, somehow, having established the 50,000 strong Wagner private army, a sort of “Russian foreign legion”, many of whom, like the legion, are former convicts offered clemency in return for enlisting.

With his Wagner Group, having established its credentials in helping defeat US attempts to topple Syria’s elected government and then in opposing Ukraine’s US-sponsored forces in the Donbass, its leader, the former Kremlin chef now appears to have “cooked his own goose.” 

Making himself a rebellious irritant, as Patton was to Eisenhower and as MacArthur was to Truman, only this against Russia’s military hierarchy and, by extension, so also against President Putin himself, this was never going to end well for Yevgeny Prigozhin.

And so it has proved; In a deal brokered by Belarus, the rebellious Russian mercenary commander has, in return for being allowed to move to sanctuary in neighbouring Belarus, abruptly reversed the order to march on Moscow. Nor will the troops who joined his mutiny be prosecuted, a Kremlin spokesman has announced, and Wagner Group fighters who did not take part in the mutiny will be offered contracts by the defence ministry.

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President Putin called the rebellion a “betrayal” and “treason”. But, in allowing Prigozhin and his forces to go free, the Kremlin said Putin’s “highest goal” was “to avoid bloodshed and internal confrontation with unpredictable results”.

But of course, and “predictably” there will be “results” and with the very survival of the Russian Federation on the line, they may not be pretty either.

 

Russia-Ukraine updates: Wagner boss orders troops to pull back | Russia-Ukraine war News | Al Jazeera



50 COMMENTS

  1. ‘Ukraine’s US sponsored forces’ how ridiculous Malcolm Evans. You make it sound like Russian propaganda. Can’t you actually be objective for once! It is not only the US supporting Ukraine. It is a coalition of 50 countries including New Zealand!

    • Ovod: the citizens of the Donbass have never done anything to this country, yet our government is giving aid to the regime which has been persecuting them since 2014.

      The Russian military operation didn’t come out of thin air. Take the time to acquaint yourself with what’s been going on there.

      • “…..the citizens of the Donbass have never done anything to this country, yet our government is giving aid to the regime which has been persecuting them since 2014. D’ESTERRE

        What an ignorant statement.

        The ones persecuting the citizens of the Donbas since 2014 are the Russian imperialist invaders and their proxy mercenary forces.

        Disappearances of civilian activists and leaders were a feature of the pro-Putin Yanukovych regime. Since 2014, the policy of disappearing civil society activists and leaders was continued during Russia’s “Dirty War” in the Donbas by the Russian backed separatists and mercenary forces, and since February 24, 2022 by the Russian state forces directly.

        https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/amid-the-dirty-war-in-ukraine-hundreds-have-disappeared/

        June 26, 2014

        Amid the ‘Dirty War’ in Ukraine, Hundreds Have Disappeared – and a Few Volunteers Search for Them
        By Irena Chalupa

        Exerpt:

        Kateryna Serhatskova, a 26-year-old Russian reporter for the Ukrainian news website Ukrainska Pravda, is becoming one of the main documenters of the “dirty war” for control of the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine…..

        ….In the town of Horlivka, 26 miles northeast of Donetsk, rebels hold about 100 local residents, according to Viktor Maystrenko, a Russian journalist who has done research for the Open Dialog Foundation, a Warsaw-based pro-democracy and human rights group. Maystrenko is one of the volunteers working to free rebel-held captives and recently obtained the release of three of them. Horlivka has been a center of violence and intimidation, including the rebels’ abduction, killing and mutilation in April of Volodymyr Rybak, a city council member who had tried to remove the rebels’ flag from the city offices and replace it with the Ukrainian national flag.
        Abductions and disappearances have been used by the forces and allies of the former president, Viktor Yanukovych, almost since the beginning of the mass protests last fall that led to his ouster in February. At one point, more than 660 people went missing amid the Kyiv protests,…..

        I think it is notable that the reporter detailing these atrocities is Russian,

        I challenge you D’Estere of providing a similar detailed account with the names and faces of the people and places in the Donbas where civilians were persecuted.

        You won’t because you can’t. It’s total bullshit, pro-war lies and propaganda.
        One of the perpetrators of these atrocities, Yegeny Prigozhin, has just admitted this fact .

        • OSCE report 16th March 2023.
          There Pat fixed it for you.

          The data that has been accumulated since the first report by the Foundation for
          Democracy Studies provides ground to conclude that torture and inhumane treatment
          inflicted by the Security Forces of Ukraine (SBU), by the Ukrainian armed forces, the
          National Guard and other formations within the Interior Ministry of Ukraine have not
          only continued but are gaining in scale and are becoming systematic.
          The prisoners were electrocuted, beaten cruelly and for multiple days in a row with
          different objects (iron bars, baseball bats, sticks, rifle butts, bayonet knives, rubber
          batons). Techniques widely used by the Ukrainian armed forces and security forces
          include waterboarding, strangling with a ‘Banderist garrotte’ and other types of
          strangling. In some cases prisoners, for the purposes of intimidation, were sent to
          minefields and run over with military vehicles, which led to their death. Other torture
          methods used by the Ukrainian armed forces and security forces include bone-
          crashing, stabbing and cutting with a knife, branding with red-hot objects, shooting
          different body parts with small arms. The prisoners taken captive by the Ukrainian
          armed forces and security forces are kept for days at freezing temperatures, with no
          access to food or medical assistance, and are often forced to take psychotropic
          substances that cause agony. An absolute majority of prisoners are put through mock
          firing squads and suffer death and rape threats to their families.

          https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/b/2/540581.pdf

          With video Testimony, ALL FROM A WESTERN SOURCE.

    • Ir’s been widely reported, in pretty much every media outlet, that the US has spent billions of dollars on the war in Ukraine so the phrase “US sponsored forces” is entirely factually accurate.

      The level of paranoia that has occurred around this war is starting to rival the Red Scare in the US in the 50s and 60s. Something we spent our lives laughing about is now repeating itself and I’m stunned how easily people are falling for it.

      Doesn’t anyone remember the lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction that led to the invasion of Iraq?

      I’m just astonised.

  2. Prigozhin had sounded unhinged for some weeks. Did staying on the front lines give him shell-shock? Or had he even been bought off? How else to explain such a silly, rash decision?

  4. Russia invades itself.

    An aggressive imperialist land grab rationalised with outrageous lies with no basis in fact or relation to reality couldn’t hold, and almost guarantees such an outcome. .

    • Yeah those outrageous lies about the Azov battalion being Nazis as reported by BBC, CNN, TIME,Vice. You just can’t trust mainstream media today.

  5. I’m not going to speculate on internal Russian politics as I know little and care less. What I have perceived is that whatever the outcome the war will be prosecuted and concluded on Russia’s terms. Reports from the front show no change, Russian arms hold the initiative.

  6. “Putin’s Chef Cooks His Own Goose” MALCOLM EVANS

    …. for… wait for it…. telling the truth.

    https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/world/2023/06/russia-ukraine-war-based-on-lies-wagner-mercenary-chief-says.html

    “There was nothing out of the ordinary happening on February 24… the Defence Ministry is trying to deceive society and the President and tell us a story about how there was crazy aggression from Ukraine, and that they were planning to attack us with the whole of NATO,” Prigozhin said, calling the official version “a beautiful story”.

    “….The war wasn’t needed to demilitarise or denazify Ukraine.”

    Sitting on a chair with a giant black Wagner flag behind him, Prigozhin said the war had also been needed to enrich the ruling elite who, he said, was not satisfied with the commercial potential of part of Ukraine’s Donbas region Moscow seized control of in 2014 via a proxy separatist force.

    “The task was to divide material assets [in Ukraine],” he said. “There was massive theft in the Donbas, but they wanted more.”

    No doubt some pro-war diehards will still keep flogging the Kremlin’s false narratives, in their continuing effort to justify Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine, denying all the atrocities committed committed to achieve this imperialist aim

  7. Belarus has come up twice in recent days – firstly with Russian nukes and now with the Wagner head (and maybe some of his troops and/or military hardware).

    I’m not sure what to make of this – are they related or just co-incidental? If it’s a planned move, then is it defensive to stop an attack on Belarus or an offensive move to set up another front in the war, perhaps Kyiv even. I’m sure many armchair generals will “know” the answer (spoiler alert – they don’t) but I’ll just wait to see how this plays out.

  8. We are at war with Wagner Group

    Oops! We are not at war with Wagner Group

    George Orwell on the nature of totalitarian states’ propaganda. Where Big Brother can say one day we are at war with this enemy and the next day say we are not at war with this enemy.

    O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.
    ‘There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?’
    ‘Yes.’

    And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred, and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment — he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps — of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O’Brien’s had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth,

    I guess this is how it must be for the Russian media propagandists and their Western lickspittles. Truly believing one thing one day and then struggling to try and believe the exact opposite thing the next day

    Shades of Big Brother

    https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/russian-state-tv-anchors-aghast-191309608.html

    Exerpts:

    ….Solovyov seemed caught between a rock and a hard place, having to justify Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to let Prigozhin and Wagner walk free, despite having advocated for the death penalty for less grievous offenses.
    During the first post-mutiny broadcast of Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, propagandists focused on praising Putin’s infinite wisdom for ending the revolt in a speedy manner…..
    ….“On this day, we found out a lot about our own country. We turned out to be much wiser than anyone might have thought… Yesterday, our leadership demonstrated strength and wisdom. Most importantly, it demonstrated strength without a bloodlust.”

    But State Duma member Andrey Gurulyov, retired deputy Commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army of the Southern Military District, was too flabbergasted about Prigozhin’s exploits to go along with the propaganda narrative. After letting out a long, exasperated sigh, Gurulyov said: “I am firmly convinced that during wartime, traitors have to be destroyed! Today, no matter who says what, whatever fairy tales they are telling, a bullet to the forehead is the sole salvation for Prigozhin and [Dmitry] Utkin…..

    ….Lieutenant-General Evgeny Buzhinsky added: “For me, what happened yesterday was completely surreal.” Like Gurulyov, he was bothered by the promise of impunity. Referring to reports that Wagner fighters shot down several military helicopters and a plane, Buzhinsky stressed: “Someone has to be held accountable for the deaths of pilots who have perished.”

  9. A this point a thinking man might conclude, if anybody had an interest in Mr. Prigozhin meeting with an untimely and nasty death, for the great “evil-Putin evil-Russia” propaganda opportunity it provides, it would the US/NATO/NAZI-Ukraine triumvirate that’s losing this war,

  10. I was in a bar with a marine and a retired NZDF member and the Kiwi soilder was explaining Rugby union to the marine. Some people you look into there eyes and when you look into the eyes of a U.S marine you can tell they know how to fuck shit up but when the marine looked into the Kiwi soldiers eyes there was that recognition like oh fuck this guy really knows how to fuck shit up.

  12. Is it just me, or has no one noticed that Belarus just let an entire mercenary army across their border like it wouldn’t have the potential to become a coup de etat problem later?

  13. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in Russia that we’re not seeing. It is now apparent that at least one Army General was backing him and has subsequently been ‘disappeared’.

    One wonders how many others were behind this. In essence this war is bad for business if you’re a Russian oligarch; and that’s all the oligarchs care about – the cashflow.

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