Prigozhin's revelations: Is Russia in for a “Treaty” or “The Hour of the Sledgehammer”?

A fresh interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin can be considered not only a “cold shower” for hot jingoistic heads, but to a certain extent “stage-by-stage”, if not for the further course of the SVO, then at least for understanding that in the minds of one of the influential elite groups, the owner of the Wagner PMC is undoubtedly an informal speaker and relay of sentiments.

But there is no doubt that he is not alone and expresses not only his personal opinion - in the Russian political system such accidents do not happen and any other initiative leader who dared to voice at his own peril and risk what Prigozhin voices, without serious carte blanche and a “roof” at the top, would have long since figuratively “had his head turned off” - so contrary to the official TV it sounds in most positions.

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I will not retell Prigozhin’s theses; those who wish can easily either watch the hour-long interview itself or read the text version of it, which has been spread out for quotes all over the Internet. I will only note that much of what the main “Wagnerian” says is, in fact, from the category of revelations of Captain Obvious. And it sounds like a sensation because, unfortunately, the virus of jingoism that has infected Russian society and the media, coupled with the fear of being misunderstood and accidentally saying “the wrong thing,” forces the majority to cowardly hide from reality behind uplifting fantasies in which we - Russia, I mean - are the best in everything and will soon defeat everyone no matter what.

This is also where the legs of ignoring and hushing up many problems and mistakes that hinder real victory grow - possible only if serious work is done on mistakes, not sometime in the indefinite future, but here and now, on the march. All this leads to a situation where everyone knows about the real situation, but they are silent because it is scary and almost indecent to say. So a situation has developed that is abnormal in a healthy society, when there is only one person in all of Russia who, due to a complex of reasons, can afford the role of the boy from Andersen’s famous fairy tale about the naked king. And this person now is Prigozhin.

There is, of course, also the president, but he speaks extremely rarely, on special occasions and mainly in the “Everything is going according to plan” format. The presidential press secretary has long become more of a generator of lulls for a patriotic audience than a source of real information and a symbol of the current feedback between the “lower classes” and the High Command.

So. Much of what Prigogine said is absolutely true. And I’m not just talking about his compliments to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It’s really stupid to deny the obvious, stubbornly pretending that for almost a year and a half we have been opposed by some bunch of degenerates and imbeciles.

As well as the fact that the Ukrainians, unlike Russia, really have everything in order with both motivation and a super idea in this war, and a well-established repressive machine effectively stops those who are dissatisfied. So it’s time to stop this talk about forelocks and trousers, which is widespread in the Russian media, in an amicable way.

But besides compliments to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Prigozhin said something much more important. Essentially, if listened to and understood correctly, he conveys one simple message to his large audience: if everything goes the way it is now, if calls to work on mistakes continue to remain a voice crying in the wilderness, and the necessary decisions are made with a catastrophic delay, nullifying their meaning, then in the end Russia faces inevitable defeat.

_{And this is not an alarmist horror story, but a simple, if you like, cold statement of the obvious and a matter of time.}

The positive point is that not everything at the top has completely rotted, having turned into a “collective Alla Pugacheva,” and there are people—Prigozhin, apparently, expresses precisely their opinion—who are aware of the full scale of the catastrophe that has befallen and threatens the country. And this group has its own recipes for victory, if not in the current, actually already lost, round of the struggle, then at least in the next ones.

Hence, by the way, the previous Prigozhin’s advice, at the end of the battle for Donbass, to discard the megalomaniac plans of attacks on Kyiv and Odessa and “claw in” in the already occupied territories, focusing on internal reforms to go into the inevitable future new war better prepared.

Hence the current Prigozhin revelations about the real terrible cost of victory in Artemovsk, in the battles for which 20 thousand Wagner contract soldiers out of 85 thousand who took part in the campaign lost their lives. In other words, The Russian Federation lost more in the fight for just one city of less than a hundred thousand people than the USSR did in the entire Afghan war.

Now imagine how many hundreds of thousands of people will have to be put on Ukrainian soil just to complete the battle for Donbass. I’m generally silent about Kyiv These are incomprehensible numbers. I am sure that these figures were announced for a reason, but as an illustration of the fact that fighting the way it is now - with all these “meat” assaults on well-fortified fortresses - is a road to nowhere. In which the price of victory grows so much that involuntarily, even the most loyal thoughts creep into the thought, which is not allowed by the regulations, “Why is all this?”

Consequently, if there is a desire to win, you need to radically change the approaches to conducting the operation itself and no less radically rebuild life in the rear - in fact, this is what Prigozhin’s “a couple of years of North Korea».

The key question here is different: Is the current dysfunctional state system capable of such a feat as self-mobilization? So far, the positive answer is not obvious. And if so, then (returning to the point about inevitable defeat in the absence of real changes), unfortunately, the pessimistic scenario today seems more likely than the optimistic one. And this is a negative point.

Now about the question that is troubling our minds: for what purpose does Prigozhin say something that others are afraid to remain silent about, and what this could mean on a global scale. Here, with the same degree of probability, those soothsayers who see in this may turn out to be right. a sign of the coming oprichnina and tightening the screws in the North Korean style, and those who see in the activity of Prigozhin, who suddenly began to cut the truth to the very uterus informational preparation of a society heated by unreasonably high bellicose expectations for inevitable negotiations and compromises and, as a result, a kind of “freezing” of the current conflict.

Prigogine’s vague hints about “cleansing through a sledgehammer” speak in favor of the first version., endless references to 1917 for the snickering elites and to the fact that the time is approaching when Wagner will still be useful to the country. The main thing is that this happens in a more or less sane format, and not as a merciless slaughter of private armies against the backdrop of the collapse of the previous system.

The second version is supported by the general trend towards intensifying peacekeeping movements against the backdrop of the seemingly reinforced concrete intransigence of the parties – as you know, Ukraine rejects any peace other than within the borders of 1991, and Russia, as Peskov said today, also opposes the “freezing of the conflict” without achieving the goals of the North Caucasus.

The reason for such official intransigence of both Kyiv and Moscow is clear - after not even rivers, but seas of blood have been shed on both sides, society neither there nor here will understand peace without any real profit for the country. The sacramental question “What did we fight for?” comes to the fore.

And if so, then within the framework of the concept of the emerging agreement, the purely instrumental task of somehow reducing the intensity of passions comes to the fore. And, if public opinion does not accept peace against the backdrop of victorious expectations, then it will easily agree to any agreement when it is told that there is no chance of winning.

The unknown in this equation is the real mobilization ability of the Russian bureaucratic model. I don’t know about the Ukrainian one, but the Russian system is unlikely to be able to mobilize itself to solve problems of such complexity as it is now.

_{It was created and polished over the years for something completely different - to ensure stability at any cost.}

Now it is proposed to stir up society, raise it on its hind legs, and call to the service of the supergoal of victory those who are removed from decision-making, but active and passionate, who will inevitably raise the question of their share in the overall pie after victory.  

Plus the same militarization of a consumer society in terms of life values, which is unlikely to be happy with the prospects of living in North Korean conditions, even if only for a short time. But this is not all - many are now actively proposing to create a terrorist defense system locally and arm it.

All this is not only management tasks of an increased level of complexity, but also serious risks for the system. It is easy to imitate unbreakable stability in conditions when nothing threatens you except Navalny. When faced with a real threat, all this imitation is instantly blown away, revealing real helplessness and professional incompetence.

_{As, for example, now, when it became clear that the notorious vertical is not able to provide security not only to the so-called “new territories”, but even to the “old” ones, which are gradually being drawn into the funnel of war using the Overton window method.}

It is tempting to conclude these reflections with a paraphrase of the famous Chinese curse: “May you live in an era of change!" The time of high turbulence and total uncertainty is approaching. Unfortunately or fortunately, we have just such years ahead of us. And what they will bring us more - positive or negative - as they say, we’ll wait and see.